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“Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.”
-Thomas Jefferson
The fastest way to improve your life is to improve the way that you think about it. That’s especially true if you’re embarking on some kind of transformational journey—be it bodily or otherwise. With that in mind, we’re opening this guide with a chapter on developing a transformational mindset that will help see you through all the challenges of improving your training, your nutrition, your body, and your life. We’ve felt the shift of a transformational mindset and the positive impact it’s had on our lives, and we’ve seen what it has done for hundreds of clients. And we sincerely want it to help you.
This section has three parts. During the first part, we’ll talk goal setting and how to set goals that help motivate us towards progress and break them down into actionable steps. We move on to break the perfectionist mindset with a little section we call “perfect = failure.” Then, we finish with “The Slight Edge” principle, something that’s completely changed our lives for the better.
Okay, let’s get started!
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a great deal on where you want to get to.”
“I don’t much care where…”
“Then it doesn’t matter which you go.”
-From Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland
That’s the annoying thing about goals—without them we don’t have a marked destination. And without a marked destination, it’s hard to know whether or not what we are doing is going to be fruitful—or even makes sense. But so often we get caught going in a cycle in which we are exercising, giving it our best effort, but not able to measure progress because we don’t know what we’re actually trying to do. If you don’t much care where you get to, that’s fine, you just can’t be upset with the nowhere that you’ve gotten to when you get there.
Setting a goal gives us something that every human being needs—an aim. Our ultimate health—mental, physical, spiritual—depends on us feeling as though we are making progress towards something. Be that thing our highest ideal as a human being, saving a certain amount of money in a designated time frame, or setting a workout consistency goal and nailing it.
But setting a goal isn’t always easy, we’ll grant you that. Of course, there are times that we have something gnawing at us that we just have to accomplish, or we are challenged in a certain way and we feel the need to step up. Other times, however, it’s not as easy to just pick something and say, “I’d like to do this.” So, at BSP NOVA we use a little exercise called Heaven and Hell, or Goal vs. Anti-Goal, to help our clients start setting goals.
Picture your ideal training outcome. What does that look like and feel like? What have you done? How has it impacted your life? Why is it so important to you? Why has it changed your life for the better? How far into the future is this ideal? It can be a super long-term vision, or only a few months down the road. Take ten to fifteen minutes and write all that out.
Now, picture the opposite of all of that. What would that feel like? What would it look like? Why would your life have gotten worse and why. Take ten to fifteen minutes and write all that out.
You’ve just done our Heaven and Hell, Goal vs. Anti-goal exercise.
See, we all need aims, something to shoot for. But to make our forward movement even more powerful and palpable, we need something to avoid. And, if we can conjure up what our training “hell” or anti-goal actually looks like, name it, feel what it would feel like, then we can actually do a better job of avoiding going to it. Having these pictures clear in our mind gives us the ability to start planning our path towards one and away from the other.
Ok, so now you know where you’d like to go. Now, it’s time to plan how you’re going to take steps toward getting there. It starts with figuring out where to start.
Take out a pen and a piece of paper, or open up a document, or open up the notes on your phone, whatever you prefer using. Now, jot down the five most impactful things you think you could do right now that would take you closer toward you goal? Once you have them, examine that list and think hard—which three would be most impactful or best for you to start with now? Once you have it narrowed to three, consider which single thing would be most impactful for you or best to start with right now. That’s where you’ll begin.
The exercise you just completed is called Five-Three-First, and we learned it from one of our colleagues. It’s a simple act of thinking about where you’re at, what you need to do to start making progress toward your ideal, and then set mile markers along the way toward reaching your ideal.
The outcome of your Five-Three-First exercise could be the first action you’re going to start with to carry you forward toward your goal, or it could be the first mile marker that you’re going to hit. How you formulate it is up to you. If it’s the first thing you’re going to do, no sweat. Think about how that thing fits into your life right now, what is reasonable, and what plan for using that thing will best set you up for success. If it’s the first mile marker that you’re going to hit, the first sub-goal, then you have to consider what actions, with what reasonable frequency, are going to take you closer to that sub-goal.
Are you wondering what happens to the other four things that you didn’t pick right now? They aren’t going anywhere. Once you nail your first thing, you can go back to the list and re-calibrate the next move.
Understanding, and truly attaching to, our motives is fuel that powers us toward our aims—whether it’s the first step in our Five-Three-First or our ultimate heaven scenario. Some folks call it knowing “your why”, and it’s important stuff. When we tap into our true motivation for doing something, we gain momentum that gives us the resiliency to see the process through. In the words of Friedrich Nietzsche,
“He who has a why can bear almost any how.”
So, as you look at your Five-Three-First, your heaven scenario, and your first steps towards accomplishing each, think about why you’re doing them. You’re doing them so that…(it’s your turn to finish this sentence).
Okay, so you have our heaven and hell scenarios visualized, you’ve plotted out your Five-Three-First, and you’ve spent some time figuring out just why in the hell you’re doing all of this. Now, it’s time to figure out how you’ll know that your efforts are working, that they’re taking you toward your next step in the Five-Three-First, and ultimately toward your heaven scenario.
So, how will you know it’s working?
What will you track so that you know that you’re making forward progress? Will you be using more weight on an exercise? Will you be more consistent with a certain activity? What will you see in yourself? How will you feel? What will you be able to measure?
Believe it or not, feeling as though we are progressing is more powerfully motivating and beneficial to the parts of our brain that regulate positive emotion than actually achieving a goal is. The ball is in your court, think about your first step. How will you know it’s working?
“The pursuit of perfection often impedes improvement.”
-George Will
We like to get in our own way, it’s one of those weird things that humans do. There’s a part of us that’s hell bent on watching the world burn and keeping us from making progress. It’s weird, and no one has a total explanation for it. But that weirdness in there, and it often comes out as a need for perfect circumstances to be able to make progress. It comes out in statements like, “I’ve had a bad week so far, I’ll just start again next Monday.” Or, “My nutrition wasn’t very good today, there’s no point in training.” This is some evil, sabotaging part of ourselves leading us into a perfectionist mindset. But this perfectionist mindset usually equals failure because we don’t even get started.
“I’ll start on Monday.” How many times have we heard, and said, that in our lives? We like clean starts and we like to avoid discomfort, so, if on a Wednesday we give ourselves the four extra days before having to commit to action, we nail the clean start and the avoidance. Problem is, we get caught in these cycles of the “start Monday” mindset. When we start something new, we want to wait until the beginning of the week. If we have a small hiccup in our plan, we let ourselves go off the rails and decide that we’ll clean everything up again on Monday. This Monday becomes next Monday. Next Monday rolls into the following. Then we’ve placed ourself in a holding pattern and we haven’t made progress.
The famous Arthur Ash quote helps out a lot in this instance,
“…start where you are, use what you have, do what you can.”
Monday, or whatever day we decide to delay to, isn’t some magical day where all of the good things start. Today, right now, is that time. Maybe you’ve had a hiccup in your nutrition, cool, that happens. But it’s over now, so, let it be and do what you can to improve just on the next meal. Once you get through that, then you can focus on the next, until you’ve strung together a series of meals that kick total ass!
But if you decide that you have to wait until Monday, or give yourself the excuse that you need a clean start during a new week, you’ll miss out on all those opportunities to kick ass, to start where you are, to use what you have, and to do what you can to get your nutrition moving in the right direction again. Nutrition is just the current example, this is applied to any change we’d like to make.
Just forget about Monday and start now.
The owner of BSP NOVA, Chris Merritt, often tells a story about how he used to go off the rails with his workouts when he didn’t nail his nutrition for the day. His mindset was, “Well, I didn’t fuel myself properly for the day, so there’s no point in working out.” He thought he needed perfect to make progress. He loves to admit how wrong he was about this.
We also have a client that’s a busy personal trainer in New York City. Throughout her day, she has to hustle from session to session in the “keep moving or you’re going to get run over” world of Manhattan. She’d often look at her program spreadsheet, decide that since she didn’t have time to do all of it right now, so there was no point in doing any of it. She wanted the perfect time slot, to fit the entire workout in, or else the entire cause was lost. But reality is a harsh bed mate. That perfect time slot wasn’t coming—at least on most days.
Each example illustrates a person missing an opportunity to take action because they were waiting for perfect. The problem with perfect is he’s not coming. And if he does, he’s only making a short stay, so you can’t count on him. He’s like that friend you call to help you move that flakes out on you at the last second—every time. So, if we depend on him, we’re going to end up in that same old holding pattern. Start where you are and with what you have.
Chris ultimately decided that he’d workout even if his nutrition wasn’t perfect, that he could still make progress via the consistency of his training. He’s been training at least 4x per week, every week, for over 2 years now.
We worked with our client in New York to chunk up her program into smaller, manageable segments that fit into her schedule. She got her training in and it taught her to let go of always needing that perfect hour to train.
Progress was made because they each let go of needing perfect conditions.
Sometimes, we can’t help but mentally kick our own asses when we make a bad choice. We end up in a cycle of self-deprecating thought about how we’re idiots, or worse, and we keep thinking about how we ‘just messed everything up.’ It’s the cycle of negative thought and emotion that actually derails us, not the individual choice.
Reality is, choice isn’t an all-or-nothing, zero sum, win-lose endeavor. Choice exists on a spectrum between completely optimal and completely detrimental. And it’s rare that day that we completely make choices at either extreme end of the spectrum. We are human beings. We are infinitely complex, weird things. But we often think that that singular, less-than-optimal choice is an irreparable check mark in the loss column that can only, maybe be redeemed by the purity of a perfect choice. That’s just not so.
The notches of improvement on the spectrum of choice happen to be close together. So, you don’t have to completely repair a bad mistake, and “cancel it out” with a great one, you just have to make a little bit better of a choice next time. And then the time after that, you make a slightly better one. Then all of these choices combine to move you forward. If you happen, however, to have a hiccup, remember, you don’t have to wait until Monday to take the next step toward progress. You can make the next step forward on the spectrum of choice right now.
“Small daily improvements are the key to staggering long-term results.”
-Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge
The long game—it’s the toughest game to play, but it also happens to be the most productive. And playing that game requires thinking big, but acting small. That’s why we started off by setting our aim—our heaven, or ideal situation. We need to have something to move towards. But we can’t get to it by just deciding to take one big jump. As nice as it sounds, it’s not reality. And, like we mentioned earlier, we find most of our rewards in feeling like we are moving forward, not necessarily in attaining our aims. So, we’d miss out on a whole lot of awesome experiences and doses of meaning in our life if we didn’t have to to consistently act positively to move ourselves forward.
The book The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson has profoundly impacted the way that we think, and play, the long game—with ourselves and with the way that we coach our clients at BSP NOVA. Like the quote at the beginning of this section says, the slight edge is about doing the little things that compound to produce big changes.
Consistency is the magic potion that transforms lives. While we all experience events that dramatically shift our cognitive and emotional frames, it’s the consistent action that rises from paradigm shifts that ultimately changes our lives—and the lives of those we affect.
So we developed a simple allegory to illustrate consistent investment—the piggy bank.
Each day we make a small, positive action deposit into the piggy bank that compounds interest into transformation. They are small investments, pennies, and they’re always easy-to-do tasks.
As Jeff Olson says in The Slight Edge, it’s always the things that are easy to do. They’re just as easy not to do. How do we do these profoundly easy things?
We start small. We stay small. We focus small.
Check. Got it. But how?
We create a frame that expands on the investment allegory—more specifically using the idea of compound interest.
Let’s consider each behavior an investment. At this point, specifics are irrelevant—it could be any behavior. Getting up as soon as the alarm goes off. Prepping food on Sundays. Etc. Etc. Etc. (50 points to those that get the Etc. reference.)
Big behaviors come with a big cost. Small behaviors aren’t as aggressive.
Think about that from a financial perspective. Making a lump $2,600 investment most likely makes you tap the breaks and causes you a little anxiety. Over a year’s time, however, that’s only $50 per week. We spend fifty bucks per week on stupid crap that we don’t even think about, when we could invest it into something worthwhile.
Seeing $50 instead of $2,600 also grabs us differently—much less aggressively. At the end of the year, however, the result is the same–$2,600 dollars is used positively on your behalf. Too often we think in terms of the $2,600 lump investment instead of the consistent $50 investment. We want to make the big investment because we want to make a quantum leap in our lives, our finances, our fitness.
But quantum leaps, epiphanies, whatever word you choose to describe massive change, are, in reality, the outcome of consistent effort over time. This, friends, is how we must frame our thinking.We invest small to make big changes. We feed the piggy bank every day, and at the end of every week we’ve put away $50. At the end of the month we have $200. At the end of the year we’ve accumulated $2,600.
Consistently feeding the piggy bank builds momentum. Huge investments are harder to make, and tougher to access in our thinking, they’re also not as transformational. Small victories won consistently snowball and eventually permeate every aspect of our lives. One small change in your daily routine builds the momentum that makes it easier to make another small change.
Sometimes we have to jump over a small hurdle and say, Ta da! And that sometimes is every day.
We start the momentum by setting ourselves up to win “battles” early in the day. Set a small hurdle, something that’s easy to do, and jump over that thing first thing in the morning. Take that win and move forward as a conqueror.
In each moment we find a choice: win a small, momentum building battle, or lose. Either way you’re going to move—you’re either going forward or backward. You’re not going to stay in the same place.
Win the first battle of the day. Set the tone. Crush your goals with momentum.
All this talk of the Slight Edge and of piggy banks boils down to something simple—consistency and momentum are the most powerful agents of change. Showing up every day and doing something is a huge part of the battle. Consistently doing small, positive things adds up to create big positive changes via a compounding momentum. Momentum keeps us rolling even through the tiny hiccups while also helping us create more positive change in other parts of our lives. So, if you think something is too small to matter, don’t. Even something as small as drinking one extra glass of water today adds up. Nothing done well is trivial.
You’re armed with a solid strategy for setting goals, aims that draw you forward and little hells to avoid, and some simple strategies for taking action toward them.
You’ve learned how to avoid the perfection pitfall and use choices as means to get a little better, rather than worrying yourself with “optimal” all of the time.
And The Slight Edge Principle armed you with the realization that big changes are the result of a lot of little, positive things, done consistently and compounded over time.
There’s only one thing left to do—the work. It’s time for you to go back to the email and click the link for the Mindset Exercises. This mindset stuff isn’t a ‘read once and you’re good’ type of thing. In some way, we all have to touch on it every day—consistency, remember? Use these tools—use them—and you’ll put yourself in a better mental position to succeed.
