You're Never Starting Over

 

You’re Never Starting Over

When we hit a set-back, it can feel like we have failed and have to go back to the drawing board. While it feels like you are going all the way back to the beginning, you are really never starting over. Even if you feel like a bigger plan has failed or you have to try a new approach, that doesn’t mean you are back at square one.

The best part about progress is that, even if results come and go in different increments, our skills, knowledge and experience are cumulative. Even if I’m only down a few pounds and feeling like I’m stuck today, I have been working on this plan or plans like it for my entire adult life.

As I talked this week with a client running into a major roadblock, I remind them: It pays to remember that you have been here before. Not only have you run into days as difficult as this, but you have also overcome them. You already have the experience of this frustration. You already have the tools to advance through this.

This is an important message for me to remember as I have battled injuries, sickness, busy schedules and any other setback that we all have to deal with. It is important to remember that by itself: We all have to deal with these things. This is life.

What we DO NOT have to deal with is: Negative self-talk or beating ourselves up for not being perfect. No one is perfect. No one has the perfect schedule, the perfect routine or the perfect mindset all day every day. We have ups, downs and everything in between. Welcome to real life.

This reminds me of the “begin again” concept: even if we are starting today as a new day, we are giving our selves a fresh start. Beginning again, is very different from starting over. Beginning again is more about forgetting the down day we had yesterday than it is about starting new. It is more about not letting yesterday ruin today, or tomorrow, than it is about bouncing back. This may sound like semantics, but it makes a difference.

It also reminds me of the importance of support. When you are beating yourself up, you need someone to come to your defense. You need someone to help you see the situation differently. Maybe that’s providing supportive words. Maybe it’s just being there for accountability. Or, maybe it’s being there to ask different questions.

The more support you have, the easier it is to look at today as a new day. Again, it’s not about starting over. You are not starting over. You are simply doing today, what you have been working toward on many other days. You are already off and running. Just take the next step today. You will thank yourself tomorrow.

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Momentum

  Sometimes we can get stuck because we aren’t already doing something. It is hard to start things. If something is new, it is difficult to start it and even more difficult to be doing it regularly right away. I’ve talked about not being afraid to start something. I’ve talked about not being afraid to be bad at something. Anything you do for the first time, you will not be an expert. Period. That’s just how it works. But something else that can keep us from taking that first step, or trying to take another step after we’ve been off for a while. It’s momentum. We’ve heard the law of physics: an object in motion stays in motion. That is literally true. It can also help us get going. More importantly, it can help us not beat ourselves up about it. You can tell yourself that you want to be doing something. It can be any habit. More water, less screen time, more movement. Whatever it is, there is our desired place and there is where we are now. Even if that gap is small, it ca...
Read more

Listen to your body.

  Your body has a way of telling you something is off. Whatever it is, we really should listen. The best way I’ve heard it put as: "Powering through what’s draining you won’t make you stronger." We’ve always been told to push through, or "no pain, no gain", all the cliches, but think about life and all the situations where something just didn’t fit. I can think of many experiences like that myself. No matter how hard you are on yourself, it isn’t going to work. And that’s ok. We just have to do it differently. Or do something else.   I am thinking about that a lot today. I am thinking about what it means when something isn’t working. When something is harder than it should be. As I step into my new role…well it’s not new, but I had to listen to my body telling me to come back to this. I really feel like I’m coming back to myself. No matter what path we are on, we need to listen. We need to be able to look at ourselves and our goals. We need to be able to name wh...
Read more

Do you know what you want?

  Do you know what you want? I’m not used to deciding what I want. I’m an easy-going, go with the flow type of person, so if you put something in front of me and ask me if I can do it, the answer is yes. If you ask me if I will do it, I will. If you ask me if I enjoyed it after the fact, I will likely have done it with a smile and so yes, it wasn’t too bad. But if you ask me beforehand, what do I want to do. I often don’t know what I want to do. I’m working on that. My wife asked me the other day, what do you want to do. On a good day that is met with a question mark. But on a bad day, that can be met with genuine anxiety. I can handle a lot. I know I can do a lot of hard things. I have had some difficult tasks put in front of me and I take pride in my ability to get it done. But I have realized that just because I can do something, even well, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s what I want to do, or even what I should do. In school, in our careers, many of us have been doing thi...
Read more