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@centralmorgan

When "failure" isn't, really.


My first month with UncleBod was a failure. Between booster shots kicking my ass and work trips popping up and my tonsils deciding to swell to the size of Ford Fiestas, I worked out a total of seven days in December. Seven. Complete failure by any of the standards set by the people shredding, squatting, pedaling, and punching across my screens every day. 1 out of every 4 days? I’m not even worthy of butt-lifting leggings.


Or…am I?


If you’ve been down the getting healthier road before (as I suspect we all have - a few times), you know that the only way to succeed at this thing is to make it part of your lifestyle. The bigger the change you try to incorporate quickly, the harder it is to integrate that change into the habits you already have. That’s when real failure rears its ugly head and you find yourself at one again with the couch.


But what if, instead of giving ourselves 30 days to change our lives and find our abs, we look at the small changes as victories and progress toward a sustainable overall goal instead?


BJ Fogg says in his book Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything, “In order to design successful habits and change your behaviors, you should do three things. Stop judging yourself. Take your aspirations and break them down into tiny behaviors. Embrace mistakes as discoveries and use them to move forward.”


What does that look like when it comes to being someone who enjoys working out rather than someone who dreads it?


Stop judging yourself. For me, seven days of workouts in December is more than zero days in November. Small change. Big win.


Take your aspirations and break them down into tiny behaviors. Like my kid says, “being there is 90 percent of the battle.” So maybe that tiny behavior for this month is just putting yourself in the space where the exercise can happen. Hell, maybe it’s just putting on the right clothes and shoes and sitting on the side of your bed talking to yourself. We’ve all been there. The small changes add up to the big results.


Embrace mistakes as discoveries and use them to move forward. I know that there were some small changes I could have made in December that could have made me even more comfortable with the routine, and probably more successful because of it. So I’m working them in for January.


No, I was not a beacon of fitness in my first 30 days of UncleBod, but if we’re being honest, if I was a beacon of fitness I wouldn’t be writing this. What I was is a former athlete getting real about losing strength as she ages, someone getting acquainted with the gym again, someone getting handed an absolutely crappy month by life. So I did what I could with no guilt, talked with Robbie through a few adjustments to my program going forward, and got back on the horse that looks strangely like a Hydrow. Failure? Nah. There’s a whole bunch of success there. I (and you) just need to reframe how we see it.



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