Self Sabotage is the name of the game when humans get too close to reaching the goals they’ve long desired.
It’s not something we do on purpose but it typically has deep roots in our subconscious mind and often we can’t even see that we’re causing ourselves to move backwards.
Without getting too deep into the mindset side of things today, know that we all have events that have happened earlier in our lives that have created what we call “limiting beliefs” which tend to hold us back from our greatest potential.
Our minds make up a version of reality that simply isn’t true but feels true to us and that keeps from moving forward.
So without further ado, here are 3 big mistakes people make when trying to “get healthy & fit” and simple solutions to overcome them-
- Believing they have to succeed on their own.
For some reason this has been ingrained in most people’s brains from day one. I’m not really sure where it started but once it’s been adopted as a belief, it’s certainly hard to move away from.
The truth is that for those who hold true to this belief, it’s 100 times harder to find success because as humans, we need connection, accountability and encouragement.
When we travel the path alone, we don’t have those things which makes it incredibly difficult to find the success we’re looking for.
Most people who believe in this path also believe that their will power will be what carries them through. Even those with the strongest of willpower eventually find that they need some extra support.
The big fix for this mistake is to find a support and accountability partner to confide and check in with through your journey. This could be a friend or family member or a professional like your trainer or health coach.
- Believing they have to go all in on day one to find success.
When people begin caring about their health and fitness it’s like a switch flips overnight.
They go from living life as they please to feeling like they have to change everything today or it won’t happen.
Maybe it comes from having experiences of trial and failure in the past that drives this mindset but from experience I can tell you that it is rarely a path for success.
There are few things in this world that we feel the same about. In almost every other area we understand the need for dipping our toe in rather than hoping to swim as we jump but for some reason fitness and nutrition feel different to most people.
The big fix for this mistake is outwardly simple but can feel mentally troublesome. In order to create success that lasts (for more than a few days) we must break big tasks, goals, etc. into small pieces in order to make it manageable.
In other words, when we begin focusing on our health & fitness, we must begin with small habits that can be built into our lifestyle according to our level of desire. This might be something like getting in 3 workouts a week rather than starting with every day or eating from home for 3 more meals each week rather than eating out as much.
This is a simple approach that has worked for hundreds of thousands of people but can feel troublesome due to our mind’s desire to “get it done now”.
When we focus only on getting things done “now”, our minds can’t keep up with the changes. Life feels much harder than it should (and much less enjoyable) and it leads us down the path to quitting before we’ve even truly gotten started.
If we can separate from our previous limiting belief of how it must happen in order to make room for new and truer beliefs then we will more than likely find that success comes much easier than we’ve experienced before.
- Believing that our results are either positive or negative.
Ah, black and white- it’s so clean and crisp, it takes away the guesswork but off paper, black and white just doesn’t exist.
In life there are many shades of many colors happening all around us at all times and this is especially true of our goals in the areas of health and fitness.
Too often we look at our efforts under the lenses of success or failure and we quite regularly forget to account for our many victories that led us to the successes we did achieve.
Perhaps it’s happened to you that you’ve begun something new expecting great things and when it didn’t happen within the time frame your mind set in place (which is usually a very short one) you decided your efforts were not worth the struggle and that it wasn’t going to work.
The big fix to this mistake is to first understand that what your mind would like to see happen and what your body does and how long it takes to do it are two very different things.
We have to begin with the small habits we discussed above and from there understand that we can’t “muscle” our way to the results we want but rather continue to perform the combination of healthier habits consistently over time to reach our ultimate goals.
If we begin to imagine that each small success we have (ie. drinking our water for the day, getting a workout in, eating well or just having a positive attitude about what we’re doing) is a step in the right direction and that all of our steps will eventually add up to great things then we have to believe that each one of those steps is in truth a victory of its own that deserves to be recognized and even celebrated.
As you can see, we seem to have a knack for making things more difficult just because we “believe” they must be.
There are many ways to succeed in health, fitness and in life but first we must make a few small changes to how we think about the pieces we are ready to work on.
Being better isn’t about perfection and never has been. It’s only about making small changes and then sticking to them. Too big and you won’t keep going, but there’s no such thing as too small because each of the small ones will layer together to get bigger…much like a snowball.
Need a little extra inspiration? Check out our blog post on “The Snowball Effect“
