“Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.”

Dale Carnegie

I thought I would take this opportunity to write about what I see so often in practice…the struggle to success.  Every day I have the opportunity to work with brave men and women that decide to take on and conquer their health. Some of these individuals have been struggling with their health and/or weight for years, and despite previous failed attempts, continue to strive for success.

While I cannot personally relate to a weight struggle, we all as humans can relate to a struggle in some aspect of our lives.   As a human if we can draw on our experiences with our own struggles, it can make us more sympathetic when connecting and helping others through theirs.

Let’s face it…

Every success has it’s fair share of struggles….

I have recently experienced my own struggle with respect to purchasing a property to move my practice. While I can happily say that we have just closed a deal, this was after 3.5 long years of countless hours, tons of deals falling through and some hurt feelings along the way (mostly mine!)

One night after yet another deal fell through, I had an epic meltdown that I was destined to never move forward in my career and I might as well just pack in the towel (oh yes, it was a good one). The next day, my husband sent me this diagram.

This diagram couldn’t have come at a better time, as I realized that it was my perception of how things were going that I was so stressed about. I mean how hard is it…you go and look at properties, you like something, you put in an offer and you buy it!  Right?

Well now I can tell you it was totally wrong. No wonder I was feeling frustrated, as my perception was not lining up with the actual realities of  life.

Since I can’t change the past and take back all of those hours I worried, I have decided to write a blog about it in those hopes of saving others some hours of angst.

These same patterns that I went through with respect to this house, I see every day in the individuals that I work with that are on their health journey.

They have a perception that they should lose “x” pounds of weight in ‘x” period of time, and when that doesn’t happen…even if their weight loss was amazing, they are disappointed.

As all of my lovely stress management coaches would say, focus on the things you have control over. With respect to weight…you have control over what you eat, how you exercise, how much sleep you get, if you are staying accountable to someone, and if you are managing your stress. After that you have no control over how much weight you lose…your body determines that.

If you focus on the health outcomes and what is in your control, your body will handle the rest. If you continue to have a perception that it should be different…the stress and negative thoughts about that perception are going to slow down your weight loss. ( If you feel like you are doing that and not seeing any results…come in and talk to us to see about hormonal imbalances affecting your progress.)

We also have to expect that we are going to fail, and use the failure as a motivator and learning tool.  I heard a recent interview from the woman that started the Spanx company and she said that her dad would ask her at the end of each day what she failed at, and then they would celebrate that. Her dad’s perception was that if you weren’t failing at something that you weren’t trying.  She said that from this, she never had a fear of failure, and was more than ready jump in and take a risk. She then went on to grow a billion dollar business.  What a great way of looking at things!!

Just like the diagram, you are going to fall off your eating and lifestyle plan and you are going to feel frustrated, this is a normal human response.

What determines success is what you are going to do about this…if you want something badly enough just dust yourself off and keep going!!  Sooner or later you will get there!!