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.

Loving the Loser

Before I get to the meat and potatoes of today's post: Training - done - yeah! Eating: great, but feeling a bit peckish today..this will pass.. one of the trials and tribulations of competing..you can get hungry but it passes with the next good meal.

Today's post is all about celebrating imperfections and failure. Because if we didn't have failure, what incentive would we have to achieve anything? Failing and being less than perfect is really important for long term personal growth.

I don't have enough fingers, nor toes to count the number of times I've failed at one thing or another. I don't have enough fingers or toes to count the number of times I've failed at ONE thing only. The greatest measure of success I have is that I failed enough times to finally do something about it (losing and keeping my weight off is a great personal example). Once I realized that nothing changes if nothing changes I was able to set myself to the task of losing 35 kilos. I am still a work in progress as I continually learn about living lean and loving life. The biggest difference between those who succeed and those who fail again and again is the response to failure.

Beating yourself up for making a mistake never works. I am guilty as charged when it comes to this - taking a step back and finding perspective...hard work but priceless. Recently my Inner Gollum and had a field day with me - I overate due to an underlying emotional driving factor - looking from the outside it appeared that not only had I "failed" my training regime, I also "failed" for a moment with my eating. Following on from that (and from what most people do) I should be now labelling myself as a fat disgusting pig...WRONG. Winning from this experience means looking at what I was thinking before I took the first bite and evaluating or disputing its' validity. And once I've worked out what went wrong and what steps I can take in the futre to diminish the likelihood of reoccurrence, I can then take a big step into the light, say "NEXT!" and get on with it.

And that's EXACTLY what I did. Dave calls it "failing forward".

The END.