We’re currently in the process of writing a transformation guide. This sucker is going to be awesome—and yeah, I’m totally biased—but seriously. It’s going to cover 5 game-changing topics: Mindset, Training, Recovery, Nutrition, and Community.

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Today’s post provides a preview of a piece from the mindset section. Mindset is arguably the biggest factor in your personal transformation journey—be it physical, mental, or performance. Many great endeavors have been crushed before they ever actually began, with many more dying before they made much progress. Why? We beat ourselves up in our own heads all too often.

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– Chris

Perfect = Failure

“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.

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Break the “Start Monday” Mindset

“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.

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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!

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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.

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If You’re Waiting for Perfect Conditions…You’re Going to be Waiting a While

“Well, I didn’t fuel myself properly for the day, so there’s no point in working out.”

Chris 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.

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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 that 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 bedmate. That perfect time slot wasn’t coming—at least on most days.

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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 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.

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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 needing that perfect hour to always train. Progress is made because they each let go of needing perfect conditions.

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Spectrum of Choice

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.

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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.

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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.