Baking bread is one of my favorite creative endeavors. Kneading dough is therapeutic. And the smell of bread baking in the oven is heavenly. Only, when I first began learning how to make bread, it wasn’t great. In fact, I wouldn’t use the words “therapeutic” or “heavenly” to describe my experience.
Honestly, using the words “melt down,” would be more accurate.
At least, if we’re talking about the day I tried to make Challah bread to bring to a friend’s house for Easter. Yes, I had ignored the cardinal rule—never try a new recipe on anyone other than your family—but that isn’t all I ignored. What I had yet to learn was that there were cardinal rules to baking bread as well. For one,
Temperature can’t be ignored.
If you want your yeast to act a certain way, and for your dough to come together—the water you add to it, has to be the right temperature. Yeast likes a warm and cozy environment. So if your water is too cold it won’t wake up and do what you want it to do. That is, it won’t turn flour and water into dough.
Failure isn’t failure, if you don’t fully know what you’re doing to begin with. The same is true with creating balance in your life through building routines.
That Challah making day, as I watched my flour, yeast, eggs, and water become a goopy mess in the bowl of my stand mixer, I thought I had failed miserably. Only the truth was, I still had so much to learn. Failure isn’t failure, if you don’t fully know what you’re doing to begin with. The same is true with creating balance in your life through building routines.
Just as there are cardinal rules to baking bread, there are cardinal rules to building routines. And there is one rule in particular, I don’t feel we talk about enough. The secret to building lasting routines in our lives is to:
Give ourselves grace when we don’t follow through.
Often, when we try to implement new routines in our lives, we do what I did in deciding to make Challah bread for my friend’s Easter gathering: we take on too much too soon. We tell ourselves we can exercise every day this week, and cut sugar from our diet too.
But when our body is crashing by lunch on Tuesday, we have a cookie. Then we sleep through our alarm on Wednesday and miss our work out. Finally, we tell ourselves we failed. We might as well give up now, and our new routines go out the window.
Building routines this way, holds guilt and shame over our heads on a regular basis. Not only that, but it never works. All of us have outlandish expectations of what we should be doing in our lives (most of them based on our Instagram feed). And we believe that we aren’t doing them because of all the lies we carry around with us. We tell ourselves we are weak, lazy, too fat, etc. Or we tell ourselves we are too busy right now—but someday we will fit into a size six again.
Only these expectations and the lies we’ve attached to them, are the very things keeping us from moving toward a healthier future. If we would just give ourselves grace in the moments we don’t achieve the standards we set for ourselves. And if we would begin to set smaller, short term goals for our daily lives, we would start to see the changes we want so badly.
It’s embarrassing to admit, but when my Challah bread didn’t come together, I started to cry (I told you, melt down). Ever the amazing husband, Tony came into the kitchen. He helped me calm down, and then asked me questions to trouble shoot what went wrong. Then, I started again.
When you and I go to implement new routines, we need to be our own “Tony’s”—we need to be kind to ourselves. We need to show ourselves grace. Then, and only then, can we get back up and create a routine that actually fits our current life. A routine that will bring us joy, rather than one that fills us with shame.
What has your journey to creating healthy routines looked like?
What expectations or lies have tripped you up?
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Photo by Ksenia Chernaya from Pexels
