Be honest. How many times have you skipped a good habit because your brain whispered, “Not today”? You weren’t lazy. You were simply cooked. That exact moment is where most people lose consistency. I did too, until I stopped relying on motivation and built a Bad Day Excellence plan.
Here is the scene. It’s been a whirlwind week. I am running on too much caffeine and not enough sleep. School season is starting, which means new schedules, new logistics, and a thousand tiny decisions before sunrise. I normally wake up at 4:15 am. It did not happen gracefully. I smacked the alarm, said “two minutes,” and woke up twenty minutes later in a mild panic. Classic timewarp. My brain wanted comfort. My goals wanted progress.
So I used the plan.
Step one: bathroom. Not glamorous. Just move. I keep my workout clothes in there, which makes the next decision stupid-easy. Clothes on. No thinking required. Then the cold face dunk. Thirty seconds in the sink. It has fancy medical benefits, sure, but honestly I just do what my optometrist tells me and it wakes me up fast. Downstairs for water. Foam roller out. Ten slow passes. Stretch. By then my mind finally stops arguing and clicks into Let’s Go mode.
That is the whole point. Systems save energy. If you only act when you feel like it, you plateau. Motivation can get you through a good week. It fails on your first bad one.
Your Bad Day Excellence plan is a tiny, automatic starter that you can do even when your head feels like wet cardboard. Build it now. Here is how.
Pick a habit you want to keep: reading, working out, writing, budgeting, parenting routines. List the ways life goes sideways: sleepless night, sick kid, deadline pileup, brain fog. Now write the smallest action you can do in each scenario. Make it so small it feels silly.
Examples:
- Work: write one messy sentence instead of the full email. Just the ugly first line.
- Parenting: read one page with your kid. One page still counts.
- Health: put on workout shoes. If that leads to one push-up, great. If not, the shoes still win.
- Money: log in and glance at your accounts. No full budget audit. Just look.
Do the tiny action. Then reward it. I keep a jar of Jolly Ranchers on my desk. When executive function bails on me, I do one messy thing and take a candy. Sugar is not the hero here. The loop is. Cue, tiny action, small reward. Repeat that enough times and your brain starts craving the starter step.
Here is the mindset shift that makes it stick. You are not chasing perfect days. You are counting reps on bad ones. Every time you execute your tiny action, say it out loud: “That counts.” It sounds corny. It works. Your brain needs the audible win.
Control what you can. Your alarm, your staging, your first sip of water, your one sentence, your one page. Let go of the rest. The news will be loud. The economy will do what it wants. People will have feelings. You still get to roll out a mat, put on shoes, open a book, and build a life out of tiny wins.
Today might be a bad day. Good. Perfect for excellence.