Today is a big day.

7 years ago today is the day I started my blog.

In the past week I celebrated the 7-year anniversary of my resolve to “stop snoozing on my life,” the day when I stopped hitting snooze on my alarm clock in the morning and started what became my Fitness First ritual.

This isn’t a coincidence, although I hadn’t remembered that they were so closely linked.

Where It Started

In the beginning, it wasn’t about going to the gym (or doing a workout); it was about breaking my habit of hitting snooze in the morning.

That habit of “snoozing” extended to many other areas of my life, because how we show up in one place is how we tend to show up in other places.

One of those places for me was my blog.

I had been wanting to start a blog since 2006, but kept getting hung up on things that, in retrospect, were clearly trivial issues. For example: WordPress or Typepad. So silly.

Within days of resolving to stop snoozing on my life, I sat down for an hour, created a WordPress site, and published my first blog post.

Although it would take a while before I started daily blogging, it was a start. In that hour I ended 7 years of snoozing on a dream

To be honest, I wouldn’t have remembered this on my own. Obviously I could have looked it up on my blog site. But I found it a different way: through my journal.

Unexpected Side Effects

As I celebrated my “no snooze” milestone last week, I looked back through my DayOne journal from seven years ago to see how everything unfolded.

This in itself is notable. My daily journaling practice began in tandem with Fitness First. I had used DayOne sporadically to that point. It felt like the most convenient place to log my morning and keep myself accountable. And I had already been using it to log my (inconsistent) workouts.

Without Fitness First, I wouldn’t have had seven years of journaling to look back on.

Dominoes: One Change Creates a Chain Reaction

One small change is like a domino that impacts all the other dominoes.

Without that first domino of stopping to hit snooze and putting my fitness first, there would likely be little journaling, this blog probably wouldn’t exist, and I wouldn’t be serving thousands of readers a year.

Over the past seven years I’ve noticed how the dominoes keep falling. A daily journaling practice, daily meditation practice, and eventually turning my occasional blogging to daily blogging.

Perhaps more meaningful to me is the domino effect that extends beyond the tangible.

In the space I’ve created for myself, I’ve learned how to work more effectively with my ADHD challenges, found silence within to listen to the voice of inner wisdom
and create space for my best work, and have done the often-messy work of cleaning up my life.

Instead of rushing to do something just for the sake of getting things done, I now create space to pause and see what needs to be done, and what’s mine to do.

Most crucially, I show up for myself first, filling up before I serve others.

Because I fill up myself first, I show up for others with more presence and generosity. I serve from a place of wholeness rather than from a desire to fill myself through service. I can rest in enoughness (at least more often than I could before).

And because I create space to ground myself in my body and get out of the fluctuations of my mind, I’m able to hold space for others and retain a sense of calm when the shit hits the fan, which this year seems to be happening a lot.

Remaining calm in chaos, finding my wholeness, standing in the value of my work to give myself what I need… those are pretty big dominoes.

All of this resulted from one small decision: to stop hitting snooze on my life and to show up for myself first.

Seven years later, the dominoes keep falling.

That’s certainly worth celebrating.