The Devil Cycle: How to Deal When You Get Off Track
February is almost over, and we’re reaching the time of year when we tend to look at the resolutions we made in January and think to ourselves, Why haven’t I gotten further? Or How did I fall off the wagon? If there’s one thing I’ve learned after over 16 years of being in business, it’s that you’re always going to get off track.
But what matters isn’t how you get off track – it’s how you respond to becoming aware that you’re off track from your goals, and then how quickly you can get back on track.
There’s a card in the tarot deck that describes this process super well. It’s called the devil card – it shows a devil with two human-like beings underneath it, chained to the devil.
Now, at first glance, looking at this card might seem scary to you or make you feel like you’re doing something wrong – but I actually love pulling the devil card because of what it means.
Pulling the devil card signals that it is time for you to detach yourself from old habits or old ways of being that are no longer serving you.
The devil card also comes with what I like to call the devil cycle – it has a lot to do with the narrative you construct in your head when you do something “wrong.”
Let’s say you decide that you’re going to write three newsletter articles over the next three hours, but – instead of writing those articles and getting ahead of the game – you look up three hours later and realize that you’ve been watching cat videos, eating chocolate, and browsing through emails.
Suddenly, you start to feel ashamed – you start to beat yourself up. You tell yourself stories like – I’m not good enough. I’m not productive. I’m always procrastinating. Why am I so bad at time management? I’m never going to be able to get this stuff done.
And as soon as you begin to lean into those stories, you find yourself quitting on some subconscious level. What that probably looks like is you taking yourself to the kitchen, making yourself a snack, turning on the TV, maybe going to lie on the couch.
But the important thing to notice is that now you’ve taken yourself out of the game of writing those newsletters. Maybe you don’t even get back to it until two or three days later, or maybe you don’t get to it at all.
This is what it looks like when the devil has won. The devil has convinced you that you are a failure. That, because you messed up, you can’t continue.
That is exactly what the devil wants you to think – and it’s what our brain wants to think. Our lizard brain wants us to stop. It wants us to stand on the sidelines, eat bonbons, close our laptops, and watch Netflix – because all of that feels so much safer than actually writing your newsletter articles.
Because if you wrote your newsletters, you might actually have to put them out there. And if you put them out there, people might say things about them. You might have to make decisions about what you’re going to write about. You might get rejected publicly.
So instead, you lean into the devil cycle.
If we are going to move forward as entrepreneurs and learn to accept that we will get off track and we will procrastinate for three hours and we will mess up – we need to learn that when the devil’s voice creeps into our head and tells us that we’re not good enough, we can say back, No, no, I’m not a bad person.
I’m human. And I’m allowed to make mistakes and I’m allowed to feel fear and I’m allowed to waste time and it’s OK. I’m not going to doubt myself and I’m not going to quit.
I’m going to keep going.
And when you do that, you keep the devil from winning. And that is so important at this time of year especially, because now is the time when we start to slip up on our New Year’s resolutions, when we start to experience the first disappointments of the year.
Now is the time when our plans start to crumble a little bit, and we realize that maybe everything we wanted isn’t going to happen as quickly as we thought it would. Maybe we wanted three people in our first program and we only got one. That is when the devil starts to creep in.
So for you and for me and for all of our fellow entrepreneurs – be aware of the devil this week. Notice it when it comes. And tell that devil that it is OK. That we can move forward from our mistakes.
It is in the gap of imperfection that we learn the most. We keep going.
