A Mental Checklist for your Journey to Better Health
Your mind is an extremely powerful vessel. If you can imagine it, you can make it happen. You should be picturing yourself one year from now having consistently made little changes and consistently stuck by the changes when you made them. You might be eating and training in a completely different way than you are today but that’s because you’ll have learned and adopted so much that you’ll be applying it and building on previous results.
Overcoming yourself is one of the most difficult aspects of leading a health and fitness lifestyle. You are constantly attacked by your own self-doubt, insecurities and reminded of your past failures. Your own mind is working against you. Once you realise and accept that you’re going to have to consciously decide and act to stop these thought patterns you start on the path to success, whatever your goals maybe.
I didn’t have a roadmap outlined when I started but thinking back now, I realise that I did in fact have short-, medium- and long-term goals in my head that remained relatively constant. If I were to do it all again, I would mark out a roadmap to my success just like below to help keep me on track and remind me why I started when the doubts and insecurities start to set themselves upon me.
1. Establish a start point or a beginning, realise that you are at X, and you need to get to Y. Realise that you’re unhealthy or unfit or well below your capabilities and establish this as your start point. Be honest with yourself e.g. I’m fat. I’m lazy. I’m not healthy, I’m an addict, and I’m killing myself.
2. Develop your short-, medium- and long-term goals to focus on. Short term might be drinking a bottle of water each day for this week, medium term might be to research your local gyms; clubs or facilities and long term might be to in 12 months be X kg/lbs.
3. Solidify in your mind the goals you’ve outlined. Focus on why they need to happen, remind yourself why you’re doing this, it’s for you primarily but you can also do it for your loved ones. You don’t want to be the parent/friend/partner/spouse that through their own failings has become a burden to everyone else. Get it clear in your mind why you’re doing this and make it personal and make it powerful. You’ll use this to hold you up on occasion when you begin to doubt yourself.
4. Make yourself do it now, don’t wait on tomorrow and don’t wait on other people. Do it now for yourself and do today what your friends, family, peers or whomever won’t do today so that you have a better tomorrow. Two weeks, six weeks, 6 months, 1 year from now you’ll wish you’d started if you haven’t. Work hard today for the benefit of your tomorrow.
5. Constantly work on your mental strength, force yourself to do the things you’ve been putting off. Don’t let yourself slack. If it’s in work get what needs to be done completed don’t leave it last minute, the same goes for college or jobs around the house. If you need to get up earlier or stay up later to do something, then that’s just what you do. Don’t let yourself take the easy option instead force yourself to do things the right way and the hard way, you’ll increase your resilience, and you’ll build the discipline that will make you steadfast when adversity tests you.
6. Fail, mess up, get it wrong, and fall. If you’re not being challenged, you’re not going to grow and get better, failure is part of the solution, the more you fail the more you know. It’s not about getting it right every time it’s about doing it anyway every time. That’s how you break your bad habits and forges new ones and how you learn and get better and how you build confidence and capabilities.
7. Build your knowledge, skills, and aptitudes in relation to you. What I mean by this that you work on improving your awareness of what works and what won’t work for you. Starting with health and fitness e.g., nutrition and exercise and spreading to other aspects of your life e.g., relationships, jobs, dependencies everything. When you take an approach as is outlined in this book to your health and fitness it’ll have impacts on other facets of your life, you’ll have learned that hard work and dedication over time reap results and that mantra can be applied to many different areas.
8. Be aggressive and direct when it comes to achieving your goals from the perspective of learning and development; constantly strive to make yourself better. From a micro level e.g., if I steam this meat will it be better for me than what I currently do. From a macro level if I remove this toxic element of my life will I be happier? Critically and objectively review your goals and the factors influencing your success or failings. The more you review the more you improve, the more you improve the more you’ll achieve.
Finally, and something you shouldn’t lose sight of is that you need to still be you and remain true to yourself. Do what you think is right for yourself follow what your heart says and don’t be influenced by others or your peers. If the changes you need to make in your life mean you’ve to get up early and maybe wake someone up in the process well that’s their problem, this is just what you do.
If you truly set your heart on getting to a high level of fitness or losing excess weight or just improving your quality of life you need to pour your heart and soul into it to get the most. It cannot just be a task that you do when it suits; you need to make it a deeply personal and rewarding endeavour and that means you’re going to have to back yourself when you’re challenged. Constructive criticism is vastly different than someone either consciously or unconsciously trying to derail your new plans.
This isn’t a definitive checklist this is more like a spot check to make sure you’re not forgetting about something, and it’ll make you question your challenges, are they genuine challenges or could they easily be hurdled if you would just do the thing, you’re afraid to do like standing up for yourself.
You’re not going to live forever; you’re not guaranteed anything in life if you want this you’re going to have to go and get it.
Remember, chin up, chest out and handle it.
Yours,
Stephen