What's stopping you from committing to your health?
Commitment: the word that strikes fear in the hearts of both men and women. Over the last couple of weeks, I have been writing about how to make progress and what’s keeping us from making it. In the final installment of this series, I am going to focus on commitment. At the end of the day, your ability to reach any goal in life is going to be determined by your level of commitment.
In life, we often view someone who overcomes great obstacles to achieve extraordinary results as special—as if they have something that the rest of us don’t have. I’m here to tell you it’s not true. That’s not to take anything away from what they have achieved, but I think it’s important to say we all have this in us. Everyone has the same 24 hours in a day; it’s what we do with those hours that make the difference. Extraordinary achievements come for unyielding commitment. Simply said, they don’t give up when things get uncomfortable, inconvenient, or tough, they dig in.
What I watch in today’s fitness is a lack of commitment to a different lifestyle. There is a lot of talk about getting in shape or losing weight, but when it comes to making the necessary lifestyle changes, there is no real commitment to making change. At the end of the day, it’s your lifestyle that has you where you are, and is ultimately what needs to change for you to get where you’re trying to go. When I started this workout thing, I was taught it was a way of life—not something you did for a minute. So all the things you had to do didn’t seem like such a big deal because you were already committed to a lifestyle. By the same token, it was understandable that if you weren’t all in, how hard it would be to do all the things it would take to be successful. I often hear people say, “I just need a kick start,” as if that’s going to fix years of a bad lifestyle. Then you say something to them about making a commitment to reaching their goals, and they are unwilling to commit. Makes me wonder how many other things in life they were unwilling to commit to, because I think your health is pretty important.
I think that so often we don’t see ourselves succeeding, we have no vision of what our outcome is going to be. Like anything in life, you need a goal that is written down so there can be some accountability for your outcome. If you know you need to lose 40 or 50 pounds, then that needs to be your written down goal. Then you can create a map to get to that goal, with the understanding that it won’t happen overnight and that there will be plateaus along the way. I heard a speaker once talking about teaching a child to walk. The question was: if after a week, if the child couldn’t walk, would you just give up on it, or would you understand that it would take time and eventually the child would get to walking and then move on to running? The main point is that you wouldn’t just give up because the child fell a lot in the beginning. Fitness is the same way—you just have to keep trying and not give up. Weeks may go by where you don’t see any progress at all, but that doesn’t mean that you’re not getting better. The day will come when you look down at the scale and it says what you want it to say, you just have to stay committed.
Over that time period you will have change your habits. Those new habits will become your new lifestyle. These new habits will continue to keep you going in the right direction, so even if you have a bad weekend or go on vacation it will be easy for you to get back on track.
Just remember: set your goal, write it down so you can be accountable for it, see yourself being successful and then commit. You will find that extraordinary results can be achieved, you just have to commit.
Please understand that I believe in you and your ability to succeed. I also understand how difficult it is to sift through all the noise that is out there. I get up every morning excited to be the guide through the noise for my clients. If you need a guide to help you attain your goal, please let me help you.
Bill