Master the Art of Showing Up

“Don't be daunted. Just do your job. Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that might be.”_Elizabeth Gilbert

The secret of self-confidence lies in showing up consistently to do what needs to be done in key areas of life.

And as it turns out, the most effective people among us are those who have mastered the art of showing up; they are the ones who show up every day. 

Based on the foregoing, I think we can agree that it is good thing to always strive to make ourselves show up better in important areas of our lives.

The author of the international best-selling book, ‘Atomic Habits,’ James Clear has an insight for us in this direction. 

In order to master the art of showing up, James Clear says we should only aim to be one percent better, every day. 

Yes, you read that right. We don’t need to try and be hundred percent better on any single day, but we need to try and be at least, one percent better, every single day.

Be wary of pushing yourself to the very limit of your capacity on any one day, which can, and almost invariably will lead to burnout, and failure to show up the very next day. 

It is far better to improve by a tiny percentage everyday than to make sporadic moves in progress every now and then.

To avoid the insidious danger of showing up only whenever we are motivated, we should learn to show up every time by making consistency the hallmark of our process.  

This means we need to make every session incredibly easy to do. 

So if for example there is a book you’ve been putting aside for months due to its volume, now change your mindset from wanting to read the whole book to just showing up to read at least a page per day. 

Do this today, tomorrow, and then the next day.

If you do this for 300 days in a row, not only will you end up finishing the book, you will have established the character-identity of someone who can show up every day for a non-urgent, important thing.

Though there is nothing quite remarkable about this slow progress, but what is remarkable about it is that it helps put a good behavior on autopilot in our lives. 

This strategy can help turn us into the type of person who not only shows up every day but also the type of person who shows up no matter what, especially when it is easier not to.

You see, optimization comes easy after standardization is already in place. Improvement in any area is easy for someone who already has the habit of showing up every day in that area.

Showing up is essential to anything worthwhile in life; showing up unremittingly is powerful indeed because when we truly master the art of showing up, we can get good at almost anything else. No wonder an American writer, Woody Allen believes that, “showing up is 80 percent of life.”