One of the worst things I have ever done to myself is telling myself that I will do something when I feel like it.

It was more frequent a few years ago when I was covering crime in South Carolina.

The main thing that I did wrong was what food I ate.

Covering crime in the metro area of Augusta, Georgia and Aiken, South Carolina is enough to drive anyone insane.

I stress ate like there was no tomorrow, and it quickly piled on to where I was a whopping 60 pounds heavier by the end of my time at that job.

I knew the entire time that I needed to change, but the excuse, “I just don’t feel like it today” kept being my go-to excuse as to why I had not changed any of my habits.

Fast forward to a lay off from that job, and all I had left was a minimum wage clothing apparel job, and the weight that I had gained.

I had no money for anything other than bills, and just a little extra.

After a while, I decided that enough was enough.

I joined a gym and dedicated all of my time to fix what I had messed up.

During the first few weeks that I started, I found a speaker online, Mel Robbins, who is now one of my all-time favorite people.

Robbins is a serial entrepreneur and is one of the most arguably one of the most booked speakers in the world.

She is the CEO and co-founder of The Confidence Project, which is a media and digital learning company working with Fortune 500 brands.

In 2017, she broke self-publishing records with her international best-seller “The 5 Second Rule.”

This is when I discovered her.

She was speaking on this YouTube series “Impact Theory” where she talked about her own struggles. Her struggles were a situation that seemed hopeless: unemployed, rough marriage, financial problems and countless other things.

“You are never going to feel like it,” she said. “Motivation is garbage. You only feel motivated to do things that are easy. Why is it so hard to do the little things that would improve my life?”

She continued saying that our minds are designed to stop us from doing anything that might be difficult.

I had never approached motivation this way. I never thought that one decision in the right direction would change my life.

All the days where I didn’t want to go workout or I didn’t want to go home and cook healthy food instead of going through a drive-thru window could have been avoided with just starting with one good decision.

Since then, I still make bad choices whether in my health or in relationships with others or at work, at anything really.

However, those are rarer than before ever since I changed my mindset that I would never feel like making the better and more difficult choices in my life, so why not make the right and difficult decisions anyway?

All it takes is one right decision, and I hope that more of those are continued to be made by all of us.

Will Whaley is the editor at The Selma Times-Journal. He can be reached at will.whaley@selmatimesjournal.com.