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Some thoughts on setting yourself
up for success and avoiding some major markers for failure.
There are much more complex and complicated things at play these
days compared to the dingy weight room of my rural high school in 1997. Social
media is awesome, but so many people, myself included, don’t seem to figure out
the negative effects of it until it’s too late. Aside from the constant desire
to remain connected and the endless battles with trolls, we get exposed to so
many messages and that alone can skew our perception of what we want and who we
are.
Instagram is the de facto social network for fitness and
training, but it’s easy to forget that most of the major players in that realm
do that for work, because their job is to be models and spokespersons for
products. I’m sure that many of them would love for you to achieve your goals,
but at the end of the day they need followers and engagement in order to make a
buck. These perfect bodies performing incredible feats of athleticism are
certainly inspiring, but too many people make the mistake of thinking that
those professionals are “just regular people.” You can’t set out on your
journey, whatever it might be, by comparing your present to someone else’s
because you’re neither on the same path nor in the place in life. When deciding
where to begin your journey and more importantly where to end it, you can’t
look to social media for concrete ideas as you will almost always wind up
selling your accomplishments short.
When I got crushed in the squat rack, I didn’t have Facebook
to talk about it on, I talked to the Coach and told him what my goals were and
he helped me. Piece of cake really, but that was all that was necessary.
Imagine if there was someone on Facebook Live recording that and everyone at
school saw it and I had to live with that everyday, I can’t imagine how that would
have affected me, but thankfully I only had a handful of jokers in class to
worry about.
Your journey should be personal and the successes should be
for you and you alone, even if you want to lose weight for your kids or your
spouse, you’re still doing that from a place of personal pride. If you lose 5
pounds this month, someone out there has lost 6 and if you post online that you
lose 5, whoever lost more than that will go out of their way to let you know!
You must remember that everything you are working on is not a competition and
that an untold number of people out there are working hard too. Being able to
share your wins and losses with people is a wonderful way to inspire and be
inspired but you can’t ever let yourself start feeling like everything is a
competition and you can’t let activity on social media validate or invalidate
the merits of your success. Setting goals, preparing to meet those goals and
holding yourself accountable might not look glamorous and it might not get you
new followers very much, but if your goal is to better yourself, then focusing
on the unnecessary things that come along with it can only hurt your progress.
A great way to keep yourself on task is to write it down.
Everything. Write down what you want to do, how you plan to get there and what
needs to change along the way. Update your plan periodically be brutally honest
about your wants and your progress. It’s all about what you want and how you
can get there, not about what others think or say. As the great Kai Greene once
said, “your dreams will always be more important to you than to anyone else. So
keep dreaming.”
Humbly I just add, when you get done dreaming, get started
planning!
Believe in yourself and what you’re doing!
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