You ever go on a diet? I’ve been on lots and lots of them, and they all go kind of the same way.

I wake up Monday morning, full of enthusiasm to start the new diet.  I have that all-important first meal of the day, something with lots of fiber and all that.  I eat fruit.  At lunch, I have a salad.  I don’t snack.  At dinner, some lean chicken or fish and some steamed vegetables. I go to bed proud of myself.

Tuesday, same thing.  Fruit, salad, lean meats, steamed vegetables. I go to bed fired up about putting together two great days in a row.

Then comes Wednesday.  I get a late start, so I skip breakfast.  At 10AM, starving, I grab an egg sandwich with cheese, and some hash browns, which are most definitely NOT on this new diet of mine.  Come lunchtime, an odd thing happens: I decide that I’ve already “blown the day” with that bad breakfast, and so I figure that I might as well take the rest of the day off and start again on Thursday.  So I have a pizza.  Not a slice of pizza.  A WHOLE PIZZA.  And then at dinner, I go completely off the rails with whatever taste of heaven I’ve been denying yourself all week: steak, cream sauces, whatever.

Now it’s Thursday.  The weekend is looming, I know I’m going to want to go out to dinner or drink or do something that’s not on the diet.  And, after all, I’ve already “blown the week”!  Soooooo……..more pizza, burgers, whatever I can stuff down my big fat pie-hole.

Bottom line: Wednesday is the enemy of all diets.

Okay, so maybe it’s not ALWAYS Wednesday. Maybe it’s Thursday.  Maybe it’s the weekend.  The idea is that anyone who has ever gone on a diet, or started some sort of self-improvement program, has at some point had a bad day. You were all full of energy and enthusiasm for making the change in your diet, or work routine, or personal habits, and got “on a roll.”  Then you had a bad day that killed your momentum.  For some reason, in your mind, you decided that you had to be PERFECT.  And if you weren’t perfect, you just threw out the whole program and resolved to start again at some point when you could be perfect.

Stop doing that.  If you want to make a change in your life, then you have to accept that it’s going to take time. You’re going to have good days, and you’re going to have bad days.  The key is to have more good than bad, and to recognize that every day is a new opportunity to start a new streak.

Stop trying to be perfect.  Try to have more good days than bad days, especially if the bad day is just another Wednesday.

This post is part of a series of what I call the “36-1/2 Rules for Client-Oriented Real Estate Agents,” a collection of short takes on the CORE concept that I’ve developed over the years of discussing and teaching the system.  We’ll count up to the 36th rule over the next few months, and then the 1/2 rule.  You can get the full list of rules by clicking on the “36-1/2 Rules for CORE Agents” category on the blog – scroll from the bottom if you want to read them in order.