Focused on a Quick Fix You can do quick things to feel better, but it’s only temporary. Your body requires time to heal and there is a limit to how fast anyone can accelerate this schedule. When results don’t happen quickly enough individuals can feel disillusioned and demotivated.
Over-committed Brain Bandwidth People who are over-committed with their time find it difficult to integrate necessary lifestyle change. They explain they are simply too busy to give the appropriate time and focus that is required.
Working together It’s not easy to always eat right, balance appropriate amounts of recreation and work, limit your alcohol consumption and follow a discipline of proactive wellness – especially when you attempt it alone. If you don’t pull together a team of people who support you personally and your specific health and fitness goals, you run the risk of taking detours that could either delay your results or shift your focus entirely away from them.
Don’t design your health journey as a solo trip. Going it alone can leave you frustrated and disappointed. And, let’s face it, without creating a system of accountability, you can quickly lose your motivation. Stickability is essential to everyone’s success. If you don’t have anybody to share in what you are trying to achieve, no one will be there to hold you to your course and celebrate in your achievements.
People who attempt major solo challenges, like climbing Mount Everest or sailing around the world, build a team of people to help them achieve their goals — logistics managers, sponsors, trainers, publicists, physicians, nutritionists, equipment suppliers, maintenance staff, technical advisors and a crowd of often unnamed people who simply cheer them on. Individuals may climb or sail alone, but they don’t truly achieve their success on their own. This shouldn’t be misunderstood.
To get and keep you moving well, you need to assemble a team of people who will accompany you throughout the different stages toward lifelong health and wellness.
The same holds true for your personal health journey. To get and keep you moving well, you need to assemble a team of people who will accompany you throughout the different stages toward lifelong health and wellness. Amongst others your team should include an insightful practitioner, a compassionate family member, understanding peers and a co-operative workplace.
Is Anybody Watching? How many times have you sneaked a chocolate bar, biscuit or other treat when no one was looking? You didn’t want to hear the reprimands that reminded you of childhood days.
We’ve all done it. For some reason, if no one catches us doing the wrong thing, we kid ourselves into believing that it doesn’t count. If we skip a day of exercise, we think no one will notice. If we sit with a lazy posture in the evenings when we are on our own, we feel it won’t disadvantage us. If you miss an occasional health checkup, you rationalise that you’ll just make it up some other time.
This sort of ‘self-talk’ creates gaping holes in the fabric of your discipline and opens escape hatches that permit you to retreat from your health plan. As soon as you start excusing yourself, from the expectations that were originally set, you weaken your chance for success.
To succeed with Results4Life you eventually need to develop internal accountability. This means that ultimately you will become responsible for your own health and wellness decisions, rather than relying on others. You must be passionate about and committed to achieving your goals. You need to become well informed about the choices that will guide you there. Ultimately, you will take authority for your decisions by being disciplined, aware and responsible. This might sound unrealistic and overwhelming at the moment, but that’s alright – we all have to start somewhere.
To get you to this point, it’s much easier than you think. Firstly, you must introduce some external accountability into your life as a counter-measure for overcoming all the natural detractors. With time, this will help develop the necessary internal fortitude to be self-driven. Seek out teammates who will hold you responsible for your self-declared goals. These people can be family, peers or actual practitioners, as long as they all have one set of attributes in common – that of coaches and mentors. Coaches don’t do things for you, they teach you how to do things for yourself! Mentors are characterised by people who through a delicate mix of sensitivity and assertion will share your concerns, understand the fears and challenges, motivate your performance, call you on your commitment and provide the support you’ll need to endure to the end.
Your Personal Health Coach A carefully chosen physiotherapist can make for an essential mentor in helping you achieve better movement and health. I never properly understood this in my early years of practice and, regretfully, though with the best of intentions, assumed the role of a benevolent health dictator instead. I would make decisions for and give instructions to my clients rather than empower them through the process.
“Coaches don’t do things for you, they teach you how to do things for yourself!”
However, in more recent years, I have come to value my coaching and mentoring role as one of the greatest contributions I can make in someone else’s pursuit of wellness.
A trustworthy and effective healthcare practitioner is essential to your team. This is not just a professional, who can diagnose your problem and treat the sore parts, but is someone who will discover and teach you ways to become an active participant in the solution. Your preferred healthcare practitioner must be a strong advocate for your health goals…and not just interested in what they want to achieve for you.
“I have come to value my coaching and mentoring role as one of the greatest contributions I can make in someone else’s pursuit of wellness.”
Over the years, I have spent countless hours counseling my clients, not just in what they need to do to reduce pain, but also in how to be accountable for their wellness. I ring them to check on their progress, equip them to self-manage with detailed exercise diaries, and encourage them with a system of introspective reflection and feedback that keeps them focused and committed. My goal is not to control them, but to support. As they achieve increasingly positive outcomes, I can effectively transfer this accountability from myself to either one of their family members, close friends or training partners. Shortly after they can take control for their own decisions and actions and shore up positive results through their own reasoning. I am a more effective and fulfilled practitioner when I achieve this type of behavioural change in my clients. Succeeding with this is far more important than just getting them pain free, as it’s a sure sign the client is on a self-managed journey to better movement and health.
“Your preferred healthcare practitioner must be a strong advocate for your health goals…and not just interested in what they want to achieve for you.”
The Hub of Your Health Wheel A client once referred to me as the “hub of their health wheel”. I didn’t quite know what they meant at the time, but it wasn’t long before I understood their meaning. I was the central person in the management of all things related to health, fitness, injury and wellness for them. This didn’t mean I was able to solve all of their problems nor was even the most qualified practitioner for some of their concerns. But they came to me first, discussed the situation, and then we worked together to design the right pathway for them (including at times referring to a more suitable practitioner). Plenty of times I would involve a doctor, pharmacist, podiatrist or local sports shoe shop in the overall solution. I was their ‘hub’ and all of the other team players became the ‘spokes’ on their health wheel. What an incredible model for success as this person gradually, over time, became more empowered and energised into taking charge of their own health direction. Like all healthy relationships, this was mutually rewarding and become something I pursued with other clients. Before long, I had matured my ‘hub practitioner’ model to help transfer autonomy and independence to thousands of clients as they journeyed through their own challenges.
Do you have a hub practitioner in your health wheel? Do you know what attributes