2 Lessons from Fitness Training Failure

I grew up with a mom who taught me how to pronounce “hydrogenated oil" when I was six, competed in a "body building light" competition at the end of high school, and have had an ongoing fitness practice my whole life.

So when I serious training with a coach recent years, I thought I was ready to knock the program out of the park; I'd be a perfect client.

My coach set me up with macro and calorie goals she could track in an app. I had to log every bite, lick and nibble; major accountability, and my fire was lit!

I obsessed for about 2-3 weeks and landed nearly spot on.

Then, I started falling off.

I was eating “healthy," but my meals were ad-hoc. I started getting tired figuring it out, slipping, then beating myself up.

The mental load doing calcs and workouts daily with normal life was too much.

The voices of self-judgement made their visit, ridiculing me for not being perfect at hitting my macros straight out the gate.

Then it dawned on me:

I AM EXPECTING MYSELF TO ALREADY KNOW HOW TO DO A THING (SUCCESSFULLY) — THAT I HAD NEVER LEARNED TO DO.

I was believing I "should" know how to do this thing nearly perfectly DESPITE NEVER HAVING LEARNED OR PRACTICED at this level before.

I was trying to be deliver END RESULTS successfully before I had mastered the BASIC SKILLS (building blocks) I needed to roll up into SYSTEMS to power those end results.

I was so caught up trying to show myself (and my coach) how committed I was - how seriously I was taking my goals - that I had forgotten humility, curiosity, a growth mindset, and leaning on my coach for learning and stacking gains in skills over delivering perfection.

I’ll never forget the call with my coach when I admitted, “I don’t know how to succeed at this. I need help.”

I gained a couple key insights that have totally changed my game when it comes to learning anything new or goal-setting.

Lesson #1:

Understand and seek to master the building block skills that lead up to the bigger goal.

• For any goal, first identify the smaller, more fundamental skills or building blocks you need to master to power the bigger results, or create a support system for the end result.
• Ask “What small things do I need to be great at that are core components of this goal? Do I already know how to do these things, or do I need to start there?
• Get good at those FIRST and count them as wins/progress!

In this case I needed to FIRST MASTER MEAL PREP. Even though I was stoked with healthy food, I was winging it every meal and needed to make things more efficient and sustainable.

I asked my coach to send me a video of what it actually looks like when she did meal prep.

I was not aware! 2 sheet pans. A huge bowl. Olive oil. Veggies everywhere. Meat. Spices. Chopping all the things. Timers. Several rounds of baking. So many containers!

It was eye opening. Now I knew what kind of production I should be doing. I could carve out 1.5 hours in my kitchen on Sunday afternoons. It changed the game, simplified everything, and changed HOW I went about meeting my macro goals with way less mental load meal to meal.

Now, Sundays are meal prep day! (see pics)

Lesson #2:

Plan well for failure and success by leaning on support from others experiences from the onset.

• Instead of waiting until the alarm is sounding, proactively ask friends, bosses, mentors, clients, coworkers etc - where have they run into problems or breakdowns in similar endeavors or circumstances?
• What are key habits or systems they've set up to contribute to success?
• Normalize cringe, not knowing, not looking like you have it all figured out, asking for help, and yes, being seen trying!

Despite my past successes, best intentions and true commitment to deliver results, I now expect to suck at stuff and “not got it” from the start.

We’ve got to stop with these ridiculous expectations to be good at things we have never even learned or done before!

I hear this from so many friends and clients. This subtle (or not subtle) standard of perfection that makes us feel like cr*p for not being amazing at everything the first time. More importantly, that belief system makes us HIDE and endure SILENT PRESSURE until we absolutely have no choice but to reach out for a life line. No fun.

For me, this looked like: VULNERABILITY. Reaching out and saying “I DON’T GOT THIS, coach. I NEED HELP. What am I’m not seeing? Where do other people typically fail, and what do successful people do? What questions should I be asking here? I don't know what I don't know. ”

Wrapping it up:

Happy practicing friends!

Break it down. Be good with cringe and building blocks. Plan ahead for success and failure.

Breathe deep, have fun evolving, and being seen trying.

You're beautiful.

We are all in this together.

+NOT PICTURED: delicious vegan paleo chocolate chip cookies from Detoxinista.. I highly recommend!

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