Making changes in life can be scary and putting in motion a plan to reach goals can feel intimidating. ‘What if I’m doing it wrong?’ ‘What if I fail?’. I believe the most sustainable way to achieve long-lasting results is to make manageable, incremental adjustments over time, and to embrace failure as part of the process.
Let me preface this by saying, no matter what your goal is – to lose weight, get stronger, to be less stressed, more active, to make more money – achieving your goals will take time.
If you’re anything like me, you have a ritual when starting down a new path:
- Find new thing.
- Spend a lot of time planning every aspect of starting new thing.
- Immediately give up if it can’t be done perfectly (this is where the self doubt really kicks in…)
That’s a terrible attitude to have. For a long time, I felt that if the thing I was doing was not perfect right from the start, then it was a waste of time. If my nutrition wasn’t perfect, weight loss took longer and real results seemed unattainable. If my gym split wasn’t perfect, it felt like wasted effort as I wasn’t creating noticeable change. It was only after a lot of frustration that I began to understand that every single step taken is important and starting small is the only way to start. It was through my failures that I began to find more consistent discipline, and it was through practice that I began to learn from my mistakes.
Counting calories is what I started with when I realized I was ready to lose weight. I tracked everything I ate, and I stayed in a consistent deficit. Soon after I started to notice weird fluctuations on the scale and it tuns out my sodium and carbohydrate intake were high, causing me to retain water, so I started paying more attention to my macros. When I added going to the gym, my goal at first was simply to burn calories, but I fell in love with weightlifting, so I changed my focus to protein intake to build muscles, which in turn helped me with my diet. I had to go through each step with what felt like failure, to better understand what my body was doing, and to feel out what was important to me.
You’ve probably heard people say, “The time will pass anyways” and that’s true, but that’s not the important part. If I’ve learned anything, its that it’s imperative to fall in love with the process, independent of the goals, because achieving goals is just a small part of the journey. Circumstances change, and goal posts shift. The path to your goals is going to be what you spend much of your life experiencing, so appreciating all the steps (even if it feels like going backwards), and making it something sustainable that you can find small wins in, is vital for success.
Written by Lindsay Smith
