E3: Before You Press The Fuck It Button!

That time of year before Christmas and in the festive period that all health and fitness goes out the window due to MOTIVATION issues.Let me help you overcome these issues an avoid the January blues or the January mountain to climb.


Social Media/Other Links:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lifestylelegacygym
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healthrevivalcoachben
Website: https://linktr.ee/lifestyle.legacy_ben

Transcript

Speaker A: Hi everyone. I'm Ben Johnson, mental health and exercise coach, private gym owner from Newcastle Online, coach of the revival program and outnumbered dad of two strong independent daughters just like my wife and I can't get a word in with them at home. Here's my chance. Welcome to my podcast. This show is a combination of my own personal growth, life experiences and experiences of coaching people for over a decade to help improve their health, happiness and life fulfillment. There's a lot of people struggling to find sustainable physical and mental health solutions, so I want to provide you with some key insights and key tools to help. If you find this information useful or even just enjoyable, it would be absolutely amazing if you could hit the Share button or leave a comment. You can also follow me on any of my social media platforms that can be found in the description text of this show. Episode Three here we go. I am recording this in early November and I hate to say it, but we are fast approaching Christmas. The shops are gearing up for it. You can see the Christmas adverts coming on the telly. I always feel like it's a key time when motivation struggles pop up the most. This is from my experience of coaching people over the last decade, but also from seeing friends, family members and how they approach this time of year as well. If you're in the UK, it's dark, I called a wetter, the days are getting shorter every day, social occasions are about to ramp up, there's no need for summer clothing, we're all wearing more layers, and potentially there's no holidays or travel until next year. All of these things are contributing to the **** it, I'll wait until after Christmas mentality, or as I like to call it, the allornoth mentality. More often than not, this same mentality, year on year, decade on decade, that's not only not improve people's longterm weight or shape goals, but more importantly, it's been massively detrimental to their long term physical and mental health as well. On top of that, not to mention how it impacts low mood, low energy around Christmas, around New Year, and then carrying this into January, also known as the January blues. This mentality, the allinone mentality or the ******* way after Christmas. It's the same sort of mentality that has led you to constantly fail at your New Year's health and fitness resolutions, which, let's face it, go out the window by February or March. This is something that I'm going to speak about in episode or the episode five closer to New Year. So if you haven't worked it out, episode three is going to be all about and focused on motivation. First of all, where and how motivation goes wrong, especially at this time of year. And then secondly, I'm going to give you some tips, some tools and advice on how you can change your approach and therefore your outcomes ie. Not have the January blues and not feel like you've got a mountain to cleanse come January. I'm going to discuss one of the most destructive mindsets to health and fitness that I've seen over the past ten years, and that's perfectionism. Seeking perfection. When people try to make sure that every single duck lines up or nothing at all is going to happen, this just breeds in action, it breeds paralysis, and it breeds zero momentum at all. Well, here's a news flash. Around Christmas and the festive period, it's going to be far from perfect social occasions. They're going to be more and also going to be more excessive. If you like me, you're going to have impaired sleep routines, potentially later nights. You're going to have more family events with kids. If you've got a family, there's going to be Advent calendar, chocolates, mold, wines, christmas parties, Christmas dinners, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. For me, and probably you as well, I'm going to say yes, please, to all of those things. I'm here for a good time, not a long time, and the kids are only young for a short period of time. I absolutely love having festive fun with friends, family and work colleagues. But this means that my health and fitness routines that I had and I'm going to say that you had in maybe August, September, October, November, that probably won't be the same in December, or they can't be the same in December. So what we've got to do is we've got to adapt and we've got to be flexible. I'm talking about maybe three workouts instead of four or two instead of three, less cooked meals adapted to how to eat out, less cardio, less walking. We've got to adopt realism instead of perfectionism. I'm going to say that again. We've got to adopt realism instead of perfectionism. During this festive period, controller controllables set, new weekly self care standards and targets. In my private coaching communities, we call these either push or pull periods of our life in December is definitely a pull, but it's important to point out that a pull is not a nothing period. It's still moving forwards, but in a different way. I fully believe that perfectionism can largely stem from incorrect, I'm going to say motivations that have been driven or promoted by our, as I've discussed previous, largely fail and health and fitness industry. I did discuss this. Episode one, we've lost health. Please go back and listen to that if you haven't already, because we've lost health. And we focus all of our motivations on just fat loss and shape change and weight loss and other aesthetic surface level conformant to media body ideal goals. If we know that during Christmas our calorie intake is going to be higher, our nutritious food intake is going to be lower, we're going to be consuming more alcohol, we're going to be going and doing less workouts, less activities complete. Let's face it, we aren't stupid. We know we aren't going to hit those fat loss, weight loss and aesthetic goals. But unfortunately, because we've been directed to focus all of our motivations there, forget button, hit stop everything and in the process give up and lose all of the other nonastetic benefits of still exercising, still working out, still being mindful of your food intake, even if it's at a lesser, more realistic level. All of these things that I'm talking about, I shared these, all of these tons of health benefits both physically and mentally in that episode one as well. So this leads us to big tip number one with motivation, you've got to flip your motivation from sorely extrinsic surface level, how you look, to more intrinsic internal, how you feel and how you perform. I highly recommend just writing down three intrinsic benefits of not hitting the effort button during the festive period and make sure that you read them every day. Here's a key tip. Alongside that, you're going to be opening your Advent calendar every day. That's a habit that you're going to have throughout December. Attach this habit to one that you're already doing where you can just read out those three things, those three intrinsic motivations every single day as you're opening and enjoying your Advent calendar. Little side note before I'm going to move in, move on with this, but it's a really, really important one. Things like Santa Shred programs, other six week fat loss programs, eight week LBD, little black dress programs, boot camps, etc. These are all added to the big longterm motivation problem. And I know this because I've been there and I've done them before. You might be thinking, well, that's going to keep us motivated during the festive fugue, during the darker months, December, et cetera, et cetera. No. They are teaching you to be driven by willpower. They're teaching you how to achieve a short term end goal and focus on just a specific outcome they're not actually delving into and helping you change your mindset or your habits. Habit change, behavior change, and leveling up your mindset will always, always outlast willpower and being willpower driven, which most of these short six to eight weeks to twelve week programs focus on. You'll have seen it, people counting down session six of 18, session twelve of 18, nearly there. Get a massive well done at the end and then just left to go on the own devices, no internal changes made. Guess what? You're, your cycle. If you follow your cycle and you constantly end up at square one or worse, over and over and over again. What I've just discussed is why you will power driven, got to start focusing on how to change behavior change and leveling up your mindset. Just a quick one. Before we move on with that, I have got a 28 day challenge feeling festive fantastic starting on the 21 November. This 28 day challenge is exactly what we just discussed there. It's going to level up your mindset. It's going to help you with behavior change and it's going to change your whole approach through education, support and accountability. If you're interested in finding out more info, the link for that is in the bio to this podcast. So for many people, it might have actually been months since you've done any sort of exercise or workouts or anything on improving your overall health and fitness, potentially since the summer holidays. So back July August time, or your holidays might have been the Easter. So it could be as far back as April or May, or it could even be as far back as since February March, when the last resolution that you made at the beginning of 2022 failed as well. For those people, if this applies to you, it's even more important not to fall into the same yearly trap of the **** that I'll wait until New Year again. You've got to start looking at past evidence of your life. It hasn't worked yet, so why are you going to do it again? Madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome. Look at your past evidence. How many years have you been doing this? How many decades have you been doing this and why hasn't it worked? Because you're doing the same thing over and over again. You're not delving deeper. So for those people that this applies to, to get started immediately. Here's my motivation tip number two. It's called the do something principle. And I'm going to explain here what most people think is that motivation is going to come from somewhere. If you've got a different motivation or it's low motivation, it's just going to come from somewhere. And once you get this motivation, you then going to take action. You're going to start exercise, you're going to start cooking some meals, you're going to start walking, you're going to start doing some selfdevelopment whatever motivation, then take action. Then the progress is going to come. For me, this is where it all goes wrong. What you need to be doing is flipping that to this process. Take an action. First and foremost, do something. When you take these little small actions, you're then going to feel the progress. You're going to feel you're going to see the benefits and what this does as it builds momentum. That's then going to build motivation because of the progress that you've made. That's going to show you why it's so important. So instead of it being seek motivation, take action. Feel and see the progress. Flip that to take action. See and feel the progress. Build motivation. The DoSomething principle helps with this. Do something, ie. Small actions. These small actions are going to help build momentum and avoid you feeling overwhelmed and paralyzed of any action. Examples of this instead of doing 45 minutes to an hour workout, just commit to doing 15 minutes. Instead of doing seven outdoor walks per week. Do three walks per week. Instead of doing three classes per week, do one or two instead of doing 1 hour of your week, do 20 minutes a couple of times a week. You get the drift. Even just starting and committing to doing a warm up, I can guarantee once you do the warm up and you feel how you start improving, you'll continue afterwards. It's the small positive actions from the do something principle that are going to create momentum. Give it a try to finish the podcast. Just to sum up, change your motivations, change your focus. Control what you can. More importantly, cut yourself some slack at this time of year. Change your weekly standards so that they are realistic. Remember realism, not perfectionism. And then lastly, sign up for my challenge 28 Days and it's going to help you. Thanks for listening. Thanks for sharing any of the previous episodes as well. It does mean a lot. Please keep doing so and take care.