I’ve been on a quest (cue Shrek music) to ditch a lot of old beliefs about myself.  Often as humans, once we get to age 40 and over, we’ve been through a bit in life, learned a lot from our mistakes, and settled into some ingrained ways of thinking.  How much of what we think about ourselves and our capabilities is because we’ve settled on a faith of failure?

Here’s what I mean.  You try a new nutritional program to lose weight but in the back of your mind you’re thinking “this probably won’t work because none of the other diets worked”.  You decide to try a longer race distance or a longer training run and you’re thinking “I can’t run that far but I guess I’ll try”.  The first half of the thought is doubt; a lack of belief that you can achieve the task at hand.  Why isn’t the first thought “I know I can do this so let me start taking small steps towards success”?

I was listening to a podcast this morning and the guy was talking about how one of the top 4 things people bring to every new nutritional/diet program they try is a lack of belief or self doubt.  They’ve placed their faith in the failure rather than in the success.  That hit me hard because I’m skilled at believing I’ll fail at my health and fitness goals.  I’m slowly breaking that internal dialogue.  It took 48 years to build so it’s going to take time to break it down.   In case you’re wondering the other three pieces of baggage nearly every person carries around with them related to diet is a bad mindset, a lack of a good goal, and overeating.  I’m breaking all 4 barriers on my path to success. To give credit where it’s due, you can find the podcast as “The Hamilton Trained Podcast”.  Jared Hamilton puts out some good stuff on health and nutrition.

I find people fascinating when they set a huge fitness goal and just simply achieve them.  So many of you impress the heck out of me in the LHRL group!  Keep it up – I need the reminder that I can achieve my goals, too.