I’m excellent at starting projects. I’m excellent at creating lofty goals for myself and ambitious schedules that will help me reach them.

But, boy oh boy, sometimes I have serious issues following through to the very end. I’m not talking about the almost end. I mean the very end. The last mile. The last class. The last week. The last few seconds of an exercise. The last anything.

There are times when this is reasonable, like when I set an already somewhat ridiculous goal for myself and am ok with ending it before I thought I would. But I realized not long ago that I was in a pattern of not finishing the very last stretch of what I started.

I didn’t go to the last class of my first acting class. The teacher was verbally abusive and not my style, so I had an excuse. I didn’t go to the last acting class of my wonderful acting class after that one. I was out of town and always knew I’d miss it. I didn’t go to the make up option I had because I was overwhelmed with work. And I almost didn’t go to the last class of another acting class I took, my reasoning being simply “it would go late and I was a little busy.”

When I started having those thoughts, I checked myself. That wasn’t healthy. That wasn’t helpful. And that wouldn’t get me where I wanted to go.

It’s fine to have a personality (like mine) that’s great with getting things started and excellent at blueprinting the method to achieve goals. But consistently not finishing – that last little push – what you start slowly erodes trust. It’s not bad, necessarily (since bad is a judgment and a great excuse to berate yourself, which I am not all about). It just means that I have to watch it. I have to learn from that. I can still harness and embrace the things that I’m good at. But I need to just be aware of the patterns I’ve set up for myself.

Even in my intense yoga class (yes, this yoga again), there are plenty of times when I want to stop. I have every excuse running through my head as to why I can just go into child’s pose instead of finishing that set of mountain climbers. But I have to train myself to follow through and trust myself that I can do it. 

Inevitably, when I force myself to follow through on what the whiny voice inside of me wants to skip out on, I find that there’s immense value in it. At the very least, I’ve shown that I will finish what I start. If I still don’t like what I’m doing or have other issues with it, I can decide in the future that it may not best serve me to commit to doing something like that again.

But if I say I’m going to do it, I have to do it wholeheartedly. And that means following through finishing every little push.