It wasn’t like I jumped off a cliff…
…into that bowl of ice cream.
I drifted my way towards my heavier self.
A bigger belt notch here. A huffing and puffing trip up the stairs there. Wearing bigger and baggier clothes to feel more comfortable with myself. It was hard not to notice those things every day.
I would read all the latest magazines, blogs, and even got pulled into infomercials about the newest workouts and quick fixes. Tony and P90X got me fired up! I would invest the money and thought that would hold me accountable. Within weeks those dvds, workouts, and plans would be under the couch and I would be watching Netflix again.
Every time I found the motivation to take a giant step, execution and fear slapped me right back down the stairs of average.
The game seemed like it was impossible to come out on top!
3 Steps to Rigging the Game of Life (Go for the WIN!)
I came across an idea the other day that really resonated with me and I would have loved to have at the beginning of my health transformation: Rig the game so you can win.
Most of the time we have this grandiose vision of what we want our healthy self to look like. 50lbs lighter, six-pack abs, looking like one of the fitspo people you follow on Instagram. Those are Mt. Everest visions and goals. They are so daunting. How many times have you bought all the gear and prepped to climb the tallest peak in the world, but couldn’t make it out of your front door?
Let’s start with the hill that you walk over in your neighborhood first.
Let’s rig the game so you can win. What might this look like?
Step 1. Slash Your Goal in Half (Or LOWER!)
“My eyes were bigger than my stomach…” We have all said that about a meal or seven in our lifetimes. The same can be said about our Mt. Everest goals. We create goals so big because that is what we have been conditioned to do our whole life. We have been taught since grade school to:
THINK BIG! YOU CAN DO ANYTHING YOU PUT YOUR MIND TO!
While I agree with these statements in theory, they can also be very intimidating. If you fail to reach that goal you see for yourself, there can me loads of stress coming your way. The inadequate feelings will only push you farther and farther down the mountain and believe your success impossible. As with most situations in life, it is our expectations, our assumptions, rather than our real circumstances that lead to our biggest stresses.
Let’s say your goal is to run a marathon, but you have never run a mile in your life. You see that other people do it and it seems like it can be done. You walk and jog for a couple of days and run for a week or two. You decide to give it a try. 26.2 miles after never having run a mile. You wouldn’t make it 10 miles and your body would be crushed. The only time you would ever run again would be to catch you from tripping. We set those kind of goals for our health.
Lowered goals, lower expectations, are less intimidating and more achievable. It feels good to reach your goals and win. Progress makes people happy.
Step 2. Intense Focus on ONE Area of Your Health
If you are trying to start a strength training program, a new diet, sleeping better, meditation, cardio, and finding time to take part in your real life; you are going to fail and you will crumble terribly fast.
Along with the “THINK BIG” conditioning we have grown accustomed to, we have also been taught that we can do it all. It has been said many times that if you have more than one priority, you don’t have any. It wasn’t until the industrial revolution that the real word priority became plural. There was no such thing as priorities over a hundred years ago! We need to take that approach with our transformation.
Pick one area of your health.
ONE.
When I decided to make health my number one priority, my diet had to be my priority. It is the foundation of everything you do in life. If I had a good day of eating and I drank a lot of water, anything else I did to improve my health was extra credit. Make sure you dominate your one health priority for the particular season of health you are in. If you have that down, go to sleep, strength training, meditation, mobility, cardio or anything else that you may want to improve.
Choose what will make the biggest impact for you at this time and zero in on that one thing until it becomes a habit. Some say it takes 28 days, some say it takes 66 days, you know when it will become routine for you. Allow yourself the time and space it will take to make this one area a habit.
Step 3. Creating and Celebrating Your WIN Every Day
At the peak of IBM’s worldwide business domination, the technology and consulting corporation’s salespeople were known as being as incredibly effective. They smashed sales and killed quotas. How did they do this? Management kept their quotas extremely low. Why did they keep their quotas low? Because they didn’t want their people to be afraid to pick up the phone. They wanted to build sales momentum. People would very often overshoot their goals by a long shot.
Just as IBM did, so do sports teams. There might be an overarching theme or goal of winning a national championship, but if you think of that every day, you will not get there. You will be stunted by the huge scale of that goal. The only way to do that is to focus on this day and create wins for yourself in practice or that day’s game.
How can we transfer this principle to our health? Maybe you are intensely focusing on reshaping your diet, a win for that day would be that your lunch was real food that you ready. You don’t need to have every single meal prepped and planned, just that you made one meal full of whole foods. If you are on a fitness mission, your win could be that you made it to the gym. Not that you performed a PR max dead lift, just that you made it to the gym.
Creating and following through on small wins helps turn moments into momentum.
With your new found momentum, you will be able to achieve larger health goals in less time with less energy and effort.
Final Thoughts
Rigging the game so you can win is one the most important mental frameworks you can carry out when you are taking back your health. In a world that wants to sell you every new toy and health product that can “Get you fit quick!”, this mentality will allow you to stay focused and mindful.
Allowing yourself to continuously succeed through your small wins and reaching a lower goal makes you love the feeling and crave it more and more. You kick away performance anxiety and the overwhelming thoughts that you might not be good enough. You are more than good enough and you prove that to yourself every damn day!
That winning feeling is addicting and when you can trigger that with your health goals, success is not a matter of “if”, it’s a matter of “when”.
If healthy living were easy, what would it look like for you?
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. – Oscar Wilde
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Author Bio: Adam Arbour
Adam Arbour is a Division 1 softball coach living in the Deep South, USA. He has his B.S. in Physical Education, an M.A. in Human Performance and is fascinated about the psychology that goes into health and fitness. You can find his home base at http://ift.tt/1PcfWvK and say HI socially at http://twitter.com/adamarbour , http://ift.tt/1sH1KAv , and http://ift.tt/1Pcfs92
from Dai Manuel: The Moose is Loose http://ift.tt/1TRn6Ew
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