Decide Commit Succeed

"Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go".- William Feather

Today's tag line comes from a well known fitness and DVD company (Beachbody.com) and really sums up long term success. Shelley has alluded to it in her blog earlier this week - decide what YOU want and really go for it. If you have your eyes on the prize you can endure the sacrifices you may make along the way for it. This doesn't apply to just body fat loss, it applies to all areas of life.

I'm really running with the above quote today. Essentially, I'm in "post comp mode" without having competed and although most of the time, I've been pretty 'even' with my nutrition, yesterday I allowed myself to get overtired and let the Inner Gollum in for a pity party. I felt like a complete failure for quite a long time - I could hear Gollum, after telling me it didn't matter and that I needed to live a little, rattling around in my brain telling my other good mate, the old Inner Critic, that I totally sucked because I failed and that it was so awful that I had done this to myself etc etc. The Inner Critic took me by surprise and had me questioning at one stage why I do what I do.

Being a fan of John Maxwell, I decided to "fail forward" - that is, get up, dust off straight away and begin to fight back against Gollum and the IC. I put Gollum in it's place by logging and preparing all of my meals for today and going straight to bed. I negated with the IC and told her that she was awfulizing about something that happens to the best of us. Something I used to believe was that by being a coach, by being an exercise physiologist, by "knowing" something about this field, that it would help me to become immune to failure where eating is concerned.

Being human, I can say this is not the case. I have to work at it all the time - as someone said once "life is managed, not cured" - I allowed tiredness and mental fatigue to open the door to patterns of destructive behaviour, which combined with other factors create the Food Beast which is alive in us all.

I hadn't planned on blogging about this at all, rather - go away, lick my wounds and go on as if failure never happens to me. But I'm blogging about it so that I can highlight to myself (and anyone else that may be interested), the value of what you can do after a "failure" to ensure your success in the future.

What this brought home to me is that I need to honour myself more with my own path (for a start, doing more with my own training/nutrition program) and avoid the path of too much work, not enough sleep and no time for myself. Failure has brought that into focus more and things are in motion so that the balance tips more in my favour.

I'm looking forward to this week, shuffling work to be in my favour, having some social time (lunch..yay!) and recharging with a sports massage.