Hi, there. I’m Kris Stokes from Custom Fitness Personal Training Studio, where your health comes first. Today, we are talking about success. How would you love if success could become just a side effect of what you’re already doing? If you didn’t have to try so hard to succeed and you could just do the little things in life that just made that happen, wouldn’t that be amazing?
In my line of work, I’ve been working in the fitness industry now for 20 years as a professional. Before that, I was a part of the fitness industry just like you, growing up, being active. I was a dancer. I was active at least seven days of the week, and I say at least because it was at least once a day, if not three or four times a day, depending on how many practices I had or rehearsals or whatever it may be. Being active has always been a part of my life.
But once I came into the fitness industry, I started seeing this huge struggle. I grew up with it being a part of my life, but not everybody did. Maybe that’s you. Maybe you grew up where that just wasn’t a part that your family really pushed on you. Maybe it wasn’t something that they encouraged you to do. And maybe it wasn’t something that you really had an inward drive to do, and that’s okay. But the problem is that then we hit a certain age as a grownup, as we start our adulting period, all of a sudden we realize, “I have to go and start being active because everyone else is, because my health is poor, because I’ve put on too much weight that I don’t want to carry around.” There’s a million reasons, but we go about it all wrong.
We start looking for the answer to get us from point A to point B. Granted, in the long scheme, that is the goal, to move from point A to point B. But if that’s the only thing that we look at, that space could be an inch wide. That gap could be miles wide. We might not even be able to see point B yet. So we have to figure out, “What is it that we have to do in order to make success happen?” And then we have to understand that we may have to shift our idea of what success actually is. Now, again, I’m not saying that you’re not going to get to that point B, because point B is the ultimate success. It’s right where we want to be.
Let me give you a story. The other day, I met with a new client, who was coming in and telling me their backstory. They went through this story of how they had participated in a certain program, they had lost 35 pounds, and that was excellent. We celebrated together! It was great! That was over a year ago. When they stopped the program at the end of eight weeks, they were excited. They had lost more than they wanted to. They went in there wanting to lose 20, and they lost 35. But, as the months went on and life stepped in and they lived outside the bubble, things happened, and they ended up gaining back 30 of those 35 pounds.
Granted, they still came away with a five-pound weight loss, but that is not where I want my clients to be. That’s not what I want for my fitness family. I want my fitness family to find success and be able to keep it, to make this a lifestyle change so that they don’t have to keep coming back to square one over and over again and feeling defeated and feeling like a failure. On that one word, I just want to hit this note real quick that if you feel like a failure, you cannot be a failure if you keep trying. If you keep pushing forward and you keep trying something new to figure out what will work for you, you are never going to be a failure. You can only fail if you quit. That’s the only way. If you’ve stopped trying, by all means, start again, and you didn’t fail.
We want to make sure that our fitness family is taken care of, and that’s why I make these posts all the time is so that not only will it reach them, but it will reach you. Maybe you know some of our fitness family, maybe you don’t. But I definitely want you to understand that we work a little differently here in our non-gym atmosphere. We are a private studio. We get to do things our way. We’re not controlled by corporate. We are controlled by passion and love, and we want to help people.
When we’re talking about success, how do we make this into just a side effect? How do we make this “just happen”? Well, it’s all about the habits. I love this quote from James Clear. “You don’t rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your habits.” It is so true. Whenever people come in here, they have all of these lists of things that they’ve so-called “failed” at, but the truth is that they just haven’t found the right way to do it yet because they keep looking at the answer first instead of how to get to it. It’s just like a good math problem, especially if you grew up in my day and age where we had to follow a specific formula in order to get to the answer. If you tried to get to the answer before you went through the steps, you wouldn’t make it. You would feel like a failure. But it’s really just guessing.
It’s the same thing with fitness and health. If you’re not following the steps that need to be taken and following them consistently over time, it’s just not going to work. We want to make sure that you have all the steps necessary. How do we do this? We do it through habits.
Habits. If you look at that, it feels almost too simple! Some people feel like it’s just about good or bad habits, but really, it’s more about something I like to call atomic habits, like small, tiny, little atoms. They’re parts of larger systems, but each atom has to be present in order to make that larger system. So without that, it’s not going to work. They are powerful when they’re done together. Think about the atom bomb as an example of that. When we put enough atoms together, it makes a huge impact.
“What is stopping us from doing this,” is the big question. We’ve got to start focusing on the fact that, while we have this great outcome goal in mind, we want to reach that point B, that it’s every single small step that you take towards that that creates your success. So if you drank all your water today, that’s success. If you ate well, according to your nutrition plan, that’s success. If you exercised consistently this week, that’s success. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Monday or it’s Friday, whether it’s Sunday or Wednesday. As long as you’re doing your part, do your best, and be 1% better every day, you will find success. And it’s building those habits slowly over time.
All right, so there is one myth about habits that I like to debunk for people that came about a long time ago. It was years ago, but it makes me feel old whenever I say a long time ago. So it came about years ago whenever they were talking about the 21 days to a habit. Do you remember that? They were claiming that it took 21 days to build a habit. Well, they changed the words on that a little bit from what it should have been. It takes 21 days in order to start building a habit. So three weeks to begin the process of building a habit. It takes months to years to build a habit for true, actual real life.
But the thing is that in that process, while you’re building that habit, you just keep getting better. Now, you’re going to have setbacks, things that make you feel like you slid backwards. But in truth, you didn’t slide back to where you started from. This whole process is not one straight line but, rather, an ebb and flow. And when you ebb and flow, you’re going to have peaks and you’re going to have valleys. Times that you’re doing extraordinarily well that you just want to walk around and brag on yourself, and then times that you’re in the valley and you think, “It’s not as good as it could be.” But the truth is, that valley right here still isn’t at your starting point over here. You’re still better. You’ve still moved forward. You’ve still succeeded. You just may not have hit that final goal yet.
So I encourage you today to keep moving, keep trudging forward, keep taking those small steps. Only now, pay attention to how important those small steps are and how amazing you are that you are consistently pushing toward your goals, even if it’s not happening instantaneously. Because in these days, that is a virtue, if you can have the patience to work through this process and to find something that perhaps you’ve never been a part of before. If this wasn’t your lifestyle before, it’s not going to be an easy change. It’s going to feel burdensome. But if you can take the long haul and you can start to make one small change after another, I know that you can do it.
If you would like some help with that, that’s what my team and I do. We help our fitness family to take one step at a time and to celebrate their victories every step of the way. Feel free to give us a call. 806-322-3188. We’d love to help you out. I also want to tell you about our Clean and Lean challenge coming up. It’s all about building better habits, eating real food, exercising efficiently in a minimal amount of time, and making sure that you get the most efficient and effective program for where you’re trying to go. So if you would like to be a part of the Clean and Lean program or you’d like more information, feel free to give us a call, and we’ll be happy to get that over to you. Hope you have a great day.
