Let’s say you’ve set a goal of losing a stone over the next two months. But there’s a problem… You’ve got a trip to Italy and a big family get together; a notorious diet blowing black spot.
You take the trip, eat, drink and don’t exercise. You feel like you’ve undone all the hard work and effort you’ve put in over the past few weeks.
When you get back you go to the gym Monday morning and confess all to your trainer. You feel better because you get a chance to give your reasons why you didn’t make progress towards your goal this week. But deep down you know you let yourself down.
If only you lived life in a vacuum, without social situations you’d have the body of your dreams, right? But life probably wouldn’t the worth living. So what do you do? Banish all social occasions? Commit to a life of solitude? Never see family or friends again?
It’s okay to mess up and make poor choices that aren’t consistent with your goal. It’s part of the process. But the people who make progress towards their goals resist the urge to justify.
Instead they analyse and make a plan for next time. Rather than just brushing it off saying something along the lines of “ah well, it was a family get together, what can you do?”
My advice? Replace beating yourself up, or justifying what happened with a simple statement: ‘what I’ll do next time is…’.
Let me share a conversation with a Next Level Nutrition VIP client we’ll call Jo
Jo wants to lose the last few pounds of body fat. Kinda the icing on the cake – the final piece of her personal body transformation journey.
She has been working towards this goal for the last few months, but feels like she keeps getting stuck and is struggling to make progress.
Jo likes to spend time with friends, which often involves eating out for lunch and/or dinner. This normally wouldn’t be an issue, but Jo really struggles to make good decisions about what to have in the heat of the moment. So usually ends up defaulting to her favourite dish. Pizza.
While pizza is perfectly fine once in a while, or for someone who’s not looking to lose the last few lbs, for someone in Jo’s position it’s enough to keep her stuck in the same place for another week.
So what can she do?
The confessor in Jo comes in and wants to tell me all about how she was great through the week, but then went out for lunch at the weekend and blew it.
And that’s cool. The problem comes when Jo starts talking about all the reasons why she didn’t make progress. That’s the kind of talk that keeps her stuck.
It reinforces what happened and makes it more likely to happen again in the future… because it’s the only way, right?
Not true.
All it took was a simple coaching conversation to help Jo work through how to still enjoy eating out without compromising her health and fitness goals. It took no more than a couple of minutes, and sounded something like this:
Jo: I really struggled eating out for lunch last weekend. I ended up having pizza when I know that wasn’t the best thing I could’ve chosen.
Me: OK, let’s say you’re going out this weekend, what would you like to happen differently this time?
Jo: I’d love to be able to still go out and enjoy myself. I’d just like to make a better choice from the menu
Me: Tell me more about what a better choice might look like.
Jo: I’d love to choose a healthy salad, with mozzarella and maybe some prosciutto and a simple dressing. I’d be really pleased with that. I’d enjoy it and I know it’d be the right choice for my goal
Me: So what needs to happen for you to make that choice?
Jo: Well, firstly we need to go somewhere that serves the kind of salad that I’d actually enjoy. So I suppose I need to pick the restaurant and perhaps suggest we go there instead of the pizza place.
Now Jo has a plan of action to follow. A specific strategy for coping with the lunchtime situation. And a decision that she made in advance about what she’s going to have.
The weekend lunchtime is just one of many situations that has the potential to derail Jo’s efforts. The key for Jo has been working through these situations one at a time and putting a strategy in place to deal with them as they come up.
Overtime Jo has developed her own personal ‘playbook’ of what she’s going to do in any given situation, making sure that more often than not she’s making the choices that move her closer to her health and fat loss goals.
If you keep coming up against the same roadblocks that keep you stuck at your current weight I’d strongly recommend putting together your own success playbook.
It’s basically a quick checklist of what choices the person you’re wanting to become would make in each of those situations.
It breaks down like this:
There is a choice in every situation. If you stop at justifying what you did you’ll keep yourself stuck. If you acknowledge, analyse and plan what you’re going to do better next time I guarantee you’ll start seeing progress.
Identifying the sticky situations before they happen is huge! Creating a plan of what to do in each of those situations might be the single biggest thing you can do to fast track your results.
Working through these situations in your own head is hard. Head trash gets in the way and prevents you fully working things through. This is one reason working with a coach is so valuable. It takes the conversation outside of your head and turns a “I’d like to” into an “I’m going to”
Ready to make a change?
If you’ve been struggling to change your body for years, and haven’t seen the results you’d like it’s perhaps time to look at getting some help. The DF Accelerated Results Personal Training programme and included coaching is designed to help you get in the best shape of your life.
If you’re ready to finally end the struggle, register for a free consultation and let’s finally get you the body you want and deserve.
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