If you’ve ever made a change in your life, you’ve had to pick a day to get started with that change. If you are waiting for the perfect day to make that change, you are likely going to be waiting for a long time. No matter how well-planned your routine is, you will never have a perfect day to get started.
We’ve all heard (and maybe even said) “I’ll start on Monday.” Or “I’ll get started…someday.” Someday is not a great day to get started. In fact, someday rarely comes at all. As a Health Coach, I’ve worked with enough people and seen enough routines to know that Monday will be here every week. I also know that it probably won’t be the perfect day you’ve been waiting for.
As a nation, we have a problem. Many of us are sitting and waiting for the perfect day to get started. We need to start exercising. We need to watch what we eat. We need to quit smoking. We need to do many things, but we are not doing them.
There is something that we need to do first: get started. We need to do something, anything to get our health moving in the right direction. What is the best day to get started? Today is the best day to get started with any plan.
No matter what steps you are going to take, you need to take the first one. You have to take step one before you can take any other steps in the process. It is easy to say that you want to be healthy and think about all the things you would like to be doing. If you don’t get started, you can’t do any of it.
Let’s take a look at a former client that got off to a rough start on their routine:
Robin was excited to get in shape. She was going to join the gym and go every day. She had yet to join when we had our first conversation, but she sounded confident that it was going to happen. I asked her a few questions to get a better picture of when she was going to get started. Her answer was puzzling to me. “Someday very soon...in the next few weeks” she said. She had the whole plan mapped out, yet she didn’t have a realistic start-date.
The most telling detail of this situation was how long she had this “plan” in place. Robin had been thinking about getting started for nearly a year. She knew she wanted to join the gym. She knew she wanted to go every day after work. She knew all of this, but she was waiting for a perfect day to get started. Guess what: almost a year later her perfect day had not yet arrived.
Robin is not alone. She is only one of many people that have told me they were going to get started, but didn’t know when. It is easy to set a goal. It is easy to pick something you want to do. The moral of the story: it doesn’t matter what you want to do if you don’t get started.
You can have the best intentions and even have the best plan. If you don’t execute that plan, you get nothing. When it comes to health, we all know what we need to do. We can talk about it day in and day out, but if we don’t do it, our health will suffer.
Often the talking point is when we will get started. Just like Robin, many of us have an idea of what we want to do, but we have yet to get started. Many are waiting for the right day to get started. There is no perfect day to get started. If you keep waiting for a perfect day, you will be waiting forever. The only day that is perfect is today.
If you are trying to get started with a new routine, you just need to take the first step. Don’t worry about all the other steps or trying to do it all at once. The first step is the most important step. You have to take that before anything else. If you don’t take the first step, you can’t take any others. The best strategy to get that first step is to pick a day and take it. Today is the day.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Break It Down
Health is not just one thing. Health is many things. It takes a series of habits to ensure that you get moving and more importantly keep moving in the right direction. The list of habits can get quite long when it comes to living healthy.
This can be good news or bad news depending on how you look at the situation. The bad news is pretty obvious: there are many steps to be taken. The good news is that we don’t have to take all of these steps at once.
That is the solution. You have to break it down. When you are looking at a list of things that will help you live healthy, it is easy to look at the whole thing and feel like it can’t be done. That is why many people continue to live unhealthy lifestyles. They don’t think that they can do it, so they choose not to.
This is a shame considering the fact that we all want to be healthy. No one wants to feel terrible on a daily basis. No one wants to look in the mirror and see a “before picture”. We all want health and all the things that come along with it. So, how do we get it? The solution is simple: Break it down.
Getting Started
Many people struggle to take the first step because they are too busy worrying about all the steps that will follow it. When you are looking at a list of things, it is important to tackle one thing at a time. The entire list can be overwhelming. The best way to get started is to pick one thing and focus on that.
Example: Getting Started
Dee is a health coaching client that was trying to lose weight. She had tried various things in the past, but couldn’t seem to get the results she wanted. When we started working together, she wasn’t doing anything to get her the results she wanted. Why? Because she didn’t think she could do ALL of the things she needed to do. Because ALL of the things she needed to change didn’t seem realistic, she simply gave up and did NONE of the things that she needed to do.
The first step Dee and I took was to step back and look at the big picture. She described all the things she needed to do in order to start losing weight.
The list looked something like this:
Get new shoes
Join the gym
Start setting aside time to go to gym
Start going to grocery store every week
Make a list of food items to buy
Pack lunch every day
Bring gym bag to work daily
Set reminders to go to gym each day
Get up by 6 to make sure she is at work on time
to name a few…
Looking at this list, I could see why she was overwhelmed. There is a lot to accomplish here. They are all important, but they don’t all have to be done at once.
I asked her how long she had to make the changes she wanted to make. Her answer was a lifetime. She had no deadline. Because there was no deadline, the pressure didn’t need to be on to complete everything as fast as possible.
Once we discussed the various things that Dee had on her list, we eventually decided what step could be taken first. She had a few ideas, so there was a decision that had to be made. How did she make this decision? She thought about what she could start doing right away. What could she start doing with the least amount of hassle?
The first step was to put buying new shoes on her calendar. This was a step that seemed simple when it stood along, yet was just another thing adding to the stressful list that she created. She set the appointment and went to buy new shoes within a week of our conversation. That was the goal and she accomplished it.
Why couldn’t she do this before? It wasn’t that simple before. She had to break the list down in order to make any of the steps happen.
Keep It Going
Dee needed to get started. That was her biggest obstacle. She was putting so much pressure on herself to do everything, that she couldn’t do anything. She just needed to break it down. Clearly she needed help to do that. She needed help getting started, but once she took that first step, the rest followed. They followed one at a time. It was that easy for her. We broke Dee’s list down into single steps and she completed them once step at a time.
That is the first step, but it clearly isn’t the only step. Or is it? When you break it down, you only need to worry about one step at a time. Once Dee had her shoes, she could check that off the list. It was done and no longer occupied any of her mental energy.
Now she was free to focus on the next step. And that is how she continued. Focusing on one step at a time, Dee was able to keep checking one thing off the list. She kept setting a single goal and she kept reaching a single goal.
That was her process until she was finally doing exactly what she wanted to be doing. She became successful by breaking it down. Dee was struggling and didn’t think she was able to live healthy. She overcame that and was able to start making progress. Not only did she get started, but she was able to keep going. She didn’t have some miracle product or an iron will. She didn’t need any of these things. She just needed to break it down.
This can be good news or bad news depending on how you look at the situation. The bad news is pretty obvious: there are many steps to be taken. The good news is that we don’t have to take all of these steps at once.
That is the solution. You have to break it down. When you are looking at a list of things that will help you live healthy, it is easy to look at the whole thing and feel like it can’t be done. That is why many people continue to live unhealthy lifestyles. They don’t think that they can do it, so they choose not to.
This is a shame considering the fact that we all want to be healthy. No one wants to feel terrible on a daily basis. No one wants to look in the mirror and see a “before picture”. We all want health and all the things that come along with it. So, how do we get it? The solution is simple: Break it down.
Getting Started
Many people struggle to take the first step because they are too busy worrying about all the steps that will follow it. When you are looking at a list of things, it is important to tackle one thing at a time. The entire list can be overwhelming. The best way to get started is to pick one thing and focus on that.
Example: Getting Started
Dee is a health coaching client that was trying to lose weight. She had tried various things in the past, but couldn’t seem to get the results she wanted. When we started working together, she wasn’t doing anything to get her the results she wanted. Why? Because she didn’t think she could do ALL of the things she needed to do. Because ALL of the things she needed to change didn’t seem realistic, she simply gave up and did NONE of the things that she needed to do.
The first step Dee and I took was to step back and look at the big picture. She described all the things she needed to do in order to start losing weight.
The list looked something like this:
Get new shoes
Join the gym
Start setting aside time to go to gym
Start going to grocery store every week
Make a list of food items to buy
Pack lunch every day
Bring gym bag to work daily
Set reminders to go to gym each day
Get up by 6 to make sure she is at work on time
to name a few…
Looking at this list, I could see why she was overwhelmed. There is a lot to accomplish here. They are all important, but they don’t all have to be done at once.
I asked her how long she had to make the changes she wanted to make. Her answer was a lifetime. She had no deadline. Because there was no deadline, the pressure didn’t need to be on to complete everything as fast as possible.
Once we discussed the various things that Dee had on her list, we eventually decided what step could be taken first. She had a few ideas, so there was a decision that had to be made. How did she make this decision? She thought about what she could start doing right away. What could she start doing with the least amount of hassle?
The first step was to put buying new shoes on her calendar. This was a step that seemed simple when it stood along, yet was just another thing adding to the stressful list that she created. She set the appointment and went to buy new shoes within a week of our conversation. That was the goal and she accomplished it.
Why couldn’t she do this before? It wasn’t that simple before. She had to break the list down in order to make any of the steps happen.
Keep It Going
Dee needed to get started. That was her biggest obstacle. She was putting so much pressure on herself to do everything, that she couldn’t do anything. She just needed to break it down. Clearly she needed help to do that. She needed help getting started, but once she took that first step, the rest followed. They followed one at a time. It was that easy for her. We broke Dee’s list down into single steps and she completed them once step at a time.
That is the first step, but it clearly isn’t the only step. Or is it? When you break it down, you only need to worry about one step at a time. Once Dee had her shoes, she could check that off the list. It was done and no longer occupied any of her mental energy.
Now she was free to focus on the next step. And that is how she continued. Focusing on one step at a time, Dee was able to keep checking one thing off the list. She kept setting a single goal and she kept reaching a single goal.
That was her process until she was finally doing exactly what she wanted to be doing. She became successful by breaking it down. Dee was struggling and didn’t think she was able to live healthy. She overcame that and was able to start making progress. Not only did she get started, but she was able to keep going. She didn’t have some miracle product or an iron will. She didn’t need any of these things. She just needed to break it down.
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