Preparation is easier than being unprepared

As a Health Coach, I hear a lot about what makes it difficult to reach goals. I work with my clients to overcome these difficulties, but they always seem to come up. If there is a challenge, I’ve likely heard about it.

Sometimes there are challenges that are more challenging…for me to hear. One of the most challenging things for me to hear about is how difficult it is to prepare for things. I obviously hear it with health goals, but it has been something that we’ve all dealt with.

Preparation is important in many areas. You need to be ready for school, work, family events and even social gatherings. Clearly, the more serious the occasion the more preparation is required. Also the more responsibility you have for the occasion, the more preparation is required.

If responsibility and preparation are directly related, than preparation should be easy. Why should it be easy to prepare? It should be easy because the success of whatever you are doing depends on it. When you look at your list of priorities, what puts things at the top? Is it things that are easy? Do we place things that are simple and have no meaning at the top of your priorities list? No, we don’t.

Our priorities are decided by importance and impact on our lives. You get up and go to work every morning, not because it’s fun. Even if you have a great career or run your own business, you take care of the important details because it is making a difference in the lives of your clients, yourself and your family. Whether you took the job or started the business, your company depends on you to make an impact. Now your preparation and action plan make that impact.

The greater the impact, the greater the importance of preparation becomes. It doesn’t take much preparation to watch television. It doesn’t take much preparation to hit the drive thru.

This is where the concept of preparation meets health. I hear how difficult it is to prepare. I hear how much easier it is to watch television or go to the drive thru. The reason I don’t understand the difficulty is the amount of impact these areas have on our lives.

What we eat and how much activity we get has a very significant impact on our lives. The impact can be seen in many areas including the very basic area of how we feel. The better we eat and the more we move, the better we feel. I ask everyone what they want from a coaching perspective. The answer that I hear the most is: “I want to feel good.”

We all want to feel good. But by not preparing in the area of health, we are not acting as if we want to feel good. We know what we need to do in order to feel good and yet, we are not doing it.

In fact, by not preparing, we are actually making things more difficult. When we enter a meeting unprepared, is a nerve-racking experience. When we throw a party without preparing for it, it is a frustrating experience. Showing up for a test in school without preparing is nothing short of a nightmare that many of us have had. When we suffer the consequences of not preparing with our health it is much more serious.

Our health is our life. We’ve talked about it over and over and I will continue to stress how important health really is. I don’t understand the idea of looking at something that is as terrible as having heart issues, gaining weight, feeling tired all day (the list goes on) and deciding that those are all easier than setting a few goals.

Even if your only goal is to feel good, you can make it easier than all the health issues you face by letting your health go. Feeling good may be the most commonly desired result, but it’s not the only one. There are countless benefits to living healthy. Avoiding many problems is one of them.

Just as the meeting or party or test is more difficult without preparation, health is too. I have seen over and over again that without preparing we simply cannot live the lives we want to live. The key is to realize that while it may be easier to put it off, it is not easier to deal with the consequences.

Being unprepared is much more difficult than preparing. Preparation is a habit, so the more you do it the easier it gets. Remember, easy isn’t bad. In fact, that is what preparation does for you in your routine. You get better at it and it becomes automatic. Eventually, preparation is easier than being unprepared.