Healthy Mistakes

When people talk about health, they often talk about improvement or learning how to be better at certain things. There are few major components that we all think about that impact our health. The better you are at the major components, the healthier you are going to be.

It’s not terribly complicated. If you are good at eating healthy, you will be healthy. If you are good at exercising, you will be healthy. How do you get good at these things? You have to practice. It’s just like any other skill that you have learned. To become good at anything, you have to practice.

Practice makes perfect, right? Well, that is the theory. That is what we all strive for, but the idea of being perfect is more appealing than the actual pursuit of perfection. And the reality is, none of us will ever be perfect. Perfection is not something we can actually achieve in any area of life and health is no exception.

That is the problem with trying to be perfect. It won’t happen. Why do we think it will? I’m not sure why, but many of us do it, some more than often, but we have all been there. Especially in health, perfection almost seems possible. At least on paper, we all think that we should be able to do it.

The biggest problem in this pursuit is that we judge ourselves so harshly. When we make a small mistake, we treat it as if it were a catastrophic situation and it derails us completely. We are so hard on ourselves that we can’t recover and we continue to make other mistakes. Why do we do this? Did we think that we weren’t ever going to make a mistake? I’m not sure, but we all do it in one aspect or another. Health is an area that we tend to do it more than others.

What are mistakes?

Mistakes are nothing more than speed bumps. Mistakes are things that slow us down on our journey to health. That is a simple way of looking at it and it is a positive way of looking at it. That may be enough to make you feel like we are trying to be a cheerleader and tell you that health is easy and all you have to do is get over that “little speed bump” and you will be on your way to sure success.

Well, sure success doesn’t exist and I’m not here to tell you that anything is going to be easy. Health, of all things is never easy for anyone. It is not automatic and it won’t be a sure thing for you, me or anyone on this planet.
Now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk about what a mistake is. It’s simple, a mistake simply a missed try. A mistake is an attempt at something that didn’t go the way you wanted it to go. While we are at it, let’s talk about what a mistake is NOT. A mistake is not the end of your routine. A mistake is not the proof that you can’t do something.

What do we gain from mistakes?

If you are willing to look at mistakes in a way that will help you make progress, you will gain a lot from mistakes. Mistakes teach us. Mistakes show us that we did something wrong. When we make a mistake, we know that we have to do something differently next time. If we don’t make mistakes, how do we know how to improve upon anything? We don’t. That is why mistakes are critical to progress. When you make a mistake, you gain a perspective that you didn’t have before. You may not know a better way just yet, but you know what doesn’t work. Sometimes knowing what doesn’t work is the best thing we can learn. That way we won’t keep trying to do it.

Mistakes are healthy. Provided we learn from them and don’t let them derail us, we can learn from mistakes. If you don’t make any mistakes, you aren’t trying hard enough. When we challenge ourselves, we make mistakes. When we challenge ourselves, we also grow and get better. This is no coincidence. The mistakes are what teach us and help us learn better ways, which lead to growth and improvement.

If you want to live healthy, you have to be willing to make mistakes. You have to be willing to try a new routine. You have to be willing to try to put certain things into your day despite the fact that they will be challenging. You have to be willing to try and you have to be willing to fail. Mistakes are little. Failure is final. Failure, true failure, only occurs when you quit something. When you quit something, you may stop making mistakes, but you also stop growing and getting better.

When it comes to health, if you are not growing and getting better, your health isn’t either. You need to focus on your routine, break it down into small steps and execute those steps day in and day out. Each month, week and even each day, you will make mistakes. As you do try more and more ways to do healthy things, your routine gets healthier and so do you. Mistakes are part of health. As you continue to make health part of your life, you will continue to make mistakes. You will also get better and better at what you are doing, so when you think about it, you will eventually be making healthy mistakes.

Every Win Counts

When it comes to sports, wins are the most important thing. There is nothing more important than winning. It’s great to think about sportsmanship and lessons learned as the season goes on, but let’s be honest, winning is the only thing that matters. At the highest levels of sports, winning is the only thing on the minds of players and coaches because their performance is judged solely on the total of wins each year.

Health is all about wins too. In sports, you can clearly define wins and losses. At the end of the game, one team has more points than the other, so it is not difficult to know who wins and who loses. Health is a little different. At the end of the day, you don’t really have a scoreboard to tell you if you won or lost the day. You don’t have a scoreboard to look at during the day to see if you are winning or losing at any point either.

The lack of a score can make health more challenging. It is hard enough to live healthy. We all know it is a challenge to eat well and make time for exercise. The lack of awareness of results can make it even more challenging. There are a number of questions that come to mind for most people as they try to make health part of their lives. Some of those questions include:

How do I know if I am winning?
What should I do to win more?
What will I do if and when I win?

Let’s address these questions and make sure that winning is not only understood, but part of your routine going forward. The first question is easier to answer than you think it is. Winning is not as complicated as we make it out to be. Winning is simple when it comes to health. The best way to answer the question is to look at it a little closer.

How do I know if I am winning?

You know if you are winning or not. When you look in the mirror and when you get on the scale, you know if you are winning. When you think about your energy level during a typical day, you know if you are winning or not. When you look at your schedule and compare how much time you want to be spending on yourself and your health, you know quite clearly if you are winning and you know quite clearly if you are not winning.

What should I do to win more?

This question is even simpler. When you look at your routine, it is easy to see what you are doing and what you are not doing. Sure, there are challenges to doing what we want to do each day. There are challenges to eating what we should, moving like we should and making time for ourselves. Winning itself is not easy. What is easy? It is easy to read the scoreboard. I know we talked about not having a daily scoreboard to judge winning or losing, but we can easily tell in long-term results or lack there-of.

What will I do if and when I win?

This is an important question that most people aren’t asking themselves. Celebrating wins is one of the most important things we can do to insure more of them. Not only is it good motivation to get your moving toward your goals, but it is also a good reminder of the joy that you feel when you get that win. When you express that joy and truly live in the moment of success, you can keep yourself focused on the win and set yourself up to get the next one.

The problem with health and winning is that the games we play are so small and often we don’t even realize where one ends and another begins. That is where the lack of scoreboard comes in. It’s not that we can’t tell if we are winning or losing, it is more about the fact that each game may be a minute step that we overlook during a busy day. During the course of a busy day, we may have hundreds of possible wins…and loses that we may or may not even think about. At the end of the day, we do not have a scoreboard or scorecard to tell us what wins we got or even what games we played.

Again, this makes things more challenging because of the lack of clarity. One thing is clear when it comes to your health: every win counts. During your day, you have hundreds of opportunities to win. You may not have the perfect diet or the perfect exercise routine or even the perfect schedule. Guess what, you don’t need any of these things. All you need to do is focus on the little wins. Big wins are nothing more than little wins added together.

When you see a team win an important game, they don’t win it with one play. They win it with a series of plays in a game-plan that is executed throughout the game. When you see a team that has a successful season, they don’t win the championship in one game. They win over the course of the entire season. Every win they get throughout the year adds up to determine their positioning at the end of the year. They don’t simply arrive in the championship game to get one win and take home all the glory.

In sports and in health, wins don’t come easy, but they all count. Every game you play during a season is important. In health, every game you play is important as well. You may think of that mid-morning snack as an afterthought, but it could mean the difference between a healthy snack and another junk-food binge that leaves you feeling like you lost the day.

It is important to focus on the big things, but the small things are equally if not more important to living healthy. The more you can do on a day to day basis for your health, the more wins you will get. Everything you do counts toward a win or a loss. Everything you do is important. Every win is important. If you want to live healthy, you have to realize one thing: Every win counts.