Why Rushing Your Progress is Keeping You Stuck (& How to Break Free)

Embracing Sustainable Success: Overcoming the Urgency Trap

Welcome to the Muscles and Mindset Revolution podcast! I'm Anne Jones, your host and a certified life coach and fitness professional with over 15 years of experience. This episode is for ambitious women ready to achieve lasting results, build stronger bodies, and form sustainable habits. We dive into the importance of progressing at a sustainable pace and overcoming the pressure to rush success. Through the breakdown of urgency, importance, and significance, I will guide you on how to prioritize wisely and embrace a long-term approach to fitness, nutrition, and mindset. Learn why true success is about sustained progress, not quick fixes, and how to keep moving, stay strong, and be kind to yourself.

01:00 The Temptation of Quick Results
01:38 The Pitfalls of Crash Diets and Quick Fixes
03:39 Understanding Urgency, Importance, and Significance
12:34 The Trap of Feeling Behind
15:10 Embracing Abundance and Long-Term Success

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Transcript

Speaker 7: 0:00

Welcome to the muscles and mindset revolution podcast, the podcast for ambitious women who are tired of chasing quick fixes and are ready to finally achieve real lasting results, stronger bodies, sustainable habits, and longterm weight loss. I am your host Anne Jones, certified life coach and fitness professional for over 15 years here to help you break free from inconsistency, overwhelm and burnout. No BS, just simple, sustainable strategies. Welcome back in this episode, we are talking about succeeding at a sustainable pace. If you have ever felt the pressure to rush your progress, if you have ever felt like you were falling behind or struggled with the fear of missing out, this episode is for you. We are diving into the mindset behind. All of that and uncovering how you can find success at a pace that actually works for you long term. Let's dive into it. I know how tempting it is to want quick results. We've all been there. You start something new, whether it is a fitness routine, a business, a meal plan, a mindset shift, a meditation practice, baby led weaning with your baby and you want to see instant changes. You want to see the scale drop, you want to see the muscles show, you want that thing in your brain to shift overnight, to click overnight. And I get it, waiting is hard, but here's the thing, fast does not mean sustainable. Let me ask you something. Have you ever seen, and I know you have, have you ever seen someone crash diet, lose 10 pounds in two weeks and then a month later they're back where they started or worse, they've gained more weight? That is what happens, right? And I, and I do have to say no shade to any other like method or program, but a missed opportunity by most. By any diet, in my opinion, and by most programs or methods, is that they get you from point A to point B, wonderful. And then there is no plan for after, and what happens, the person reverts back to their old habits. If it was a weight loss thing, they gain all the weight back. Usually more and not only that, but they are stuck in this I failed mindset and they have to gather all that momentum to start all over again and they still don't have the tools to keep it going. What's rushed is rarely retained. The same goes for building strength, changing your habits and shifting your mindset. I've been there too. Oh my gosh. I have had mindset coaches since. 2019 and I know this now, but there were so many times where I was so frustrated and honestly shaming myself. Ask my coach Cara where I was like, I've been doing this for so long, I'm doing all the things. Why am I still feeling this way? Or why do I still do this thing? Or why am I engaging in this bad habit or self deprecating language or whatever? It takes. So much time, especially if these are habits or thoughts and beliefs that we've been holding for years. And so when you build something fast, it's like stacking a house of cards, right? It might look good for a second, but it won't stand the test of time. True success isn't about how quickly you can get results. It's about how long you can keep them. And sustainable results require sustainable methods. Don't confuse urgency, importance, and significance. Let's break this down in some real life examples number one, Urgency. Urgency is the scarcity driven, anxiety inducing trap. Urgency makes you feel like you have to do everything now, or you are failing. If you are comparing your home to, like, the home edit, it's gonna feel very urgent, like, oh my god, I'm a garbage person, I have to fix all of this now. Your phone, with its little red dot. That which you can turn off, by the way, I have no red dots on my phone. Oh my gosh, no, they can go straight to hell because they're just lying to you. Oh, that's a sense of urgency. I need to do this thing. It's not urgent. Urgency makes you feel like you have to do everything now or you're failing here. I'm going to give you a fitness mindset and nutrition example for each of these thoughts. So in fitness, urgency is like, I missed a workout yesterday. I need to double up today or I'm going to lose all my progress. With mindset, it's like, I have to respond to this message immediately, or they'll think I'm unreliable. They'll think I'm flaky. They won't like me anymore. They'll be mad at me. That's coming from a place of urgency. Nutrition is like, I need to start a strict diet on Monday or I'll never lose weight. That's urgency. This creates panic. This creates reactive behavior. You're not being proactive. You're constantly reactive. That keeps you in fight or flight. And that does not feel good. Even if you're not aware that your nervous system is in dysregulation, is in sympathetic, that's where urgency lives. And you can get quite good at it. In fact, most ambitious women who I know, including most of my clients,

Speaker 8: 5:21

we're very comfortable in urgency, high anxiety, and reactive behavior. We actually perform quite well there.

Speaker 7: 5:29

We may have even been awarded for it. I have tons of clients who are police officers and nurses and on live television. And so they got where they are because they got quite good at responding to panic and reactive behavior, but it's either not serving them anymore or it's not serving them in their personal life. Everything feels like an emergency, but it's really not. So that's urgency. Those things feel urgent, right? And they are not true emergencies, which I hope we can recognize the difference between. Number two. Is importance. So that's urgency. Here's importance. Importance is intentional and it is focused, right? This is important. However, still not everything can be important. Importance helps you prioritize wisely instead of reacting to everything like it's do or die. Right? So. Not urgency, but you do have to know what your priorities are and you cannot prioritize everything because then you're essentially not prioritizing Anything at all when you prioritize everything you prioritize nothing. I'm just gonna slide this in here that you can't really prioritize anything or place importance on anything If you don't know what your personal policies and values are I will say this to my clients all the time like they'll have a disagreement with their partner about money, where money is to be spent, or who is to do what around the house, or is it okay for me to work out at this time, and I'll be like, what's your policy as a couple, like, what are your values, what's your personal policy when this happens? And often we don't have a personal policy, so we can't prioritize everything. We get into thinking everything is important, and then we get into that sense of urgency, and then there's panic and conflict, because we don't know who we are, what we want, what our values are, or what the other party's personal policies are so we're both reacting to everything like it's do or die and there's no plan at all. So you have to know who you are. Which sounds big, but you have to know what your values are at the very least so that you can place importance on things so that you can prioritize wisely in the moment. So here's importance in action in regards to fitness. Consistency matters more than perfection. I'll move my body today in a way that works for my energy. That's like, this is important. This is important to me. I would rather be consistent than perfect. So this is what I'm going to do in terms of mindset. it can wait until I'm done with my deep focused work time. Like I do not have notifications pinging at me. I have no email notifications. When it is time to check my email, I will go and check the email. Like somebody who urgently needs me is going to call me. I just, right before this, actually, I got a call. My daughter's at musical theater. I got, I was in the bathroom about to come down and record this. And I got a call from the theater. My daughter has an upset stomach, so I'm like, okay, like, is she okay? Is she puking? And they're like, yeah, she's okay. But she says she wants to come home. I'm like, okay, this is important. She's important. It's important that I took this call. And there is some significance that we respond to her so that she feels safe. You know, when she's not feeling well, that's not urgent, she has not broken her leg. So same with, all that to say, I answer my phone when it's the theater where my daughter is at, I'm not responding and reacting to notifications on my phone or computer all the time, particularly not on a Sunday, which it is today. So it can be like, this email is important, but it can wait until I'm done with what I'm doing. For nutrition, fueling my body well is important, but it doesn't have to be all or nothing. Like I can have a shortbread cookie. when you shift out of urgency to importance, you move from reacting to responding in line with your values and what you have said is important. So that's urgency and importance. And now let's talk about the big one, the big picture perspective, which is significance. Significance shifts your focus to long term sustainable success instead of the short term hustle and scramble. for fitness this is like lifting weights consistently over time will make me stronger, more confident, more resilient in life. And I know that's the number one thing that leads to longevity. So if you're looking at living a long time, you know you need to strength train. For mindset. significance is consistently setting boundaries and respecting my time because that helps me show up better for myself and for others. So this person might be messaging me or asking something of me now on Sunday afternoon. And if I was coming from a place of urgency, I would just be responding to it and doing whatever they say that they need. And that's not of service to me and it's not of service to them because then it's just training them to be more in urgency, right? So by consistently knowing my personal policies, knowing what my priority is right now, and setting boundaries and respecting my time, helps me show up better. Like, I'm here with you right now. This is the time that I'm spending with you right now, recording this podcast. sharing this with you. I had to intentionally plan and prioritize this because it's a commitment that I've made. I'm doing it on Sunday, whereas normally I do it on Monday because it was a busy week and I have a plan and the plan is flexible. So setting up the boundaries, knowing what's important to me, respecting my time helps me to fully do those things, like to go skating with her. the 30 minutes I spent doing our meal plan and grocery order last night. Sets us up for the week. Like that is significant because it gives me my time back later in the week when I'm not hustling to figure out what to make for dinner. I go to a grocery store, I pick up that grocery order and usually I don't step foot in a store for the rest of the week unless I want like special sourdough bread or something that I can't get in my grocery order. That gives me so much time back spending that 30, 45 minutes to meal plan and grocery order. So then I'm able to show up better for my clients. I'm not cutting out of work early. My daughter, we have such chill evenings when I'm like, I have the meal plan. We're hanging out making dinner. That investment in my time, is compounded interest. It saves me time in the long run. And that is significant. And it makes it feeds everybody well, right? So speaking of nutrition, significance and nutrition is nourishing my body. Well, isn't about perfection. It is about feeling my best so I can live fully. That's significant over time in years, right? If you feel your best and you're well fueled so that you can live fully and chase your kids around not have a nervy B when you go to a restaurant when you don't know what's going to be there. That is significant. And when you focus on significance, you stop obsessing over what's fast and start building what lasts. Ooh, that's good. You stop obsessing over what's fast and start building What lasts. I love that. So now let's talk about something that I know many of you struggle with. And that's the feeling of either being behind or falling behind. So I am on social media as you guys know, because I have an online business, but I am not a scroller. I do not see anything on Facebook. I don't scroll. I watch people's stories, my clients, my friends, people I know. But I'm just like, I just, I'm not falling into the comparison trap. And I've even been known to give my clients like a cutoff, like a no social media scrolling for like three weeks. Because maybe you see someone on social media who just ran a marathon or lost 20 pounds. And then a moment ago, you were having no kind of thought about yourself and then you're having the thought that you're not doing enough because you aren't doing both of those things. Maybe you're thinking, why is it so easy for her and not easy for me? First of all, What you see on social media is a highlight reel. I know we know this, but we forget, we forget. you're looking at all these different people, putting them all together and then thinking that you're not doing all of these things, which no single person is doing. Everyone's not doing something. People rarely post their struggles, their setbacks, and the days they wanted to quit. It's more common for influencers, people are getting honest now and sharing their struggles. But let's be honest, your friends, your colleagues, the people that you know on a daily basis are mostly not. Because it's scary. And it's not their job, so why should they? They're probably just posting their kids birthday parties, when their house looks clean, when they have makeup on, and the workout that they actually did do. They're not posting all the workouts they didn't do. the spider on the floor or anything else, right? So keep your eyes on your own page because what they are or are not doing has literally nothing to do with you. Secondly, there is no behind. You are always exactly where you need to be. And if you don't like where you are, that's cool. You can change it. But You probably needed to be here to feel uncomfortable so that you would move. Your pace is your pace and you can have goals, you can have places that you want to go, but you are exactly where you need to be right now until you're ready to move forward. I think you're usually ready, but sometimes we're not. Sometimes we're not. Scarcity will tell you there's not enough time. There's not enough money. There's not enough progress. There's not enough success to go around. If she's already started it and she's lost 20 pounds and I haven't, I'm behind. What's the point? But abundance says you have all the time you need to succeed. I am all about this. I'm always just like, there's always enough. There's always enough of everything to go around. There's no point in believing that there is not. I have more than enough time to do all the things I want to do. We can't change time anyway. It's just happening. It's ticking. Regardless of what we're doing, there's always enough money. I can always just get more money. There's always enough love. There's always enough like friendship to go around. I'm not going to gatekeep or withhold when you adopt that belief. That there is always enough, you stop racing, you stop comparing and you start actually enjoying the process because you start stepping into an embodying what you do want, where you do want to go. I want to leave you with something powerful, something that will help you to shift out of urgency and into significance. I want you to ask yourself this. If I knew 100 percent confident I would reach my goal in exactly one year, how would I approach it today? Would you panic over missing a workout? Would you feel like you needed to overhaul your whole diet in one week? Would you still rush this process? Or would you focus on building habits you can actually sustain? The truth is, when you see the big picture, when you look at that long runway, everything shifts. So, my challenge for you today is this. Slow down to speed up. Pick one habit that you can commit to for the next Month. It's the end of February. Let's do it for March. Not out of urgency, but because it is important and significant to your long term success Okay? All right, friend, that is it for today's episode. I really hope this helped to shift your mindset around success and what it means to move at a sustainable pace. Please remember you are not behind. You are exactly where you need to be. And if this episode resonated with you, I would so love for you to leave us a five star review and to share it with a friend who needs to hear this. I know women need to hear this. And if you're ready to go even deeper to build strength, to feel confident, to achieve lasting fat loss without the stress, I would love for you to check out muscles and mindset. The link is in the show notes here. Inside Muscles and Mindset, we create a customized fitness and mindset journey that works for you, not against you. There's no falling behind. You can find the details in the show notes, or you can send me a message on Instagram at@annejonesfit. I would love to connect with you until next time. Keep moving, stay strong and be kind to yourself. I love you. Mean it.