There is one very common obstacle to seeing results that’s both obvious and surprisingly easy to miss.
And I know this one very well.
It tends to appear around weekends, holidays and particularly busy weeks.
It’s the difference between what we intended to do and what actually happened.
Perhaps you decided to take a supplement every day.
Go for a walk five times a week.
Do ten minutes of stretching every morning.
Or avoid a particular food for a month.
At the end of a few weeks, you think:
I’ve been doing this and it hasn’t really made any difference.
But have you?
Not because you’ve done anything wrong.
Life happens.
You were busy. You forgot. You went away for the weekend. You had a bad day. You thought you’d done it. Or perhaps you simply didn’t feel like doing it.
I’ve certainly been there myself.
And sometimes, when you look back, you discover that something you thought you’d done most days actually happened about 30% of the time.
That’s useful information.
Because now you’re not trying to make sense of the results you expected from what you intended to do.
You’re looking at what actually happened.
And there may be another interesting piece of information hiding here too.
Perhaps, despite your best intentions, you repeatedly struggle to stick with one particular piece of advice.
That’s worth noticing.
I discovered this when I was exploring relaxation. I was following a nervous system routine designed to help my body relax.
But most days, it just didn’t happen. There were excuses, resistance and doubts.
At the end of the month, when I compared what I’d intended to do with what had actually happened, I got curious about that resistance.
It turned out that, for my body to relax into the exercises, it needed an extra step — specific music.
At Make Self-Care Simple, the answer isn’t automatically to become stricter or chase more self-discipline.
It’s to get curious.
What did I actually do — and what can that tell me?
Sometimes the gap between what we planned and what actually happened explains more than we realise.
And sometimes that gap contains useful information of its own.
Either way, before deciding that the advice hasn’t worked, it can be worth looking at what actually happened — and what your body may have been telling you along the way.
If you’d like my help…
Start with the free Body Guidance Review. It will help you discover how your body tends to give you feedback — and revisit something you’ve already tried to see whether there was useful information you may have missed.