Fall off. Dust off. Carry on.

Thought For The Week

One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned in life is to see setbacks and failure not as shameful, or a reflection on my worth, but as an opportunity to learn and grow. Setbacks are an inevitable part of life. We can choose to ignore them and bury our head in the sand, we can choose to fall victim to them, or we can choose to look for the lessons, build ourselves back up, add another layer to our armour, and carry on. When we’re able to see mistakes as learning tools and failure as feedback, we can find unexpected power and freedom.

Exercise Tip

If we’re after any kind of meaningful, long-term goal, it pays to stop seeing exercise as a means to an end and start seeing our relationship with exercise as a journey instead. Adopting this mindset shift, we’re less inclined to take an all-or-nothing approach to exercise. Going all out at the start just simply isn’t sustainable, and it won’t be long before we feel like giving up all together. When we play the long game, we’re better to pace ourselves. There will be times when we miss a workout, or we get sick, or we go on holiday, or we just feel like taking a break. And that’s fine. It doesn’t mean we’ve stopped, or failed; we’re just easing up on the intensity/frequency while we manage other demands. When we learn to see that exercise is not a case of all-or-nothing and we can accept that the journey will not be linear, we give ourselves a much better chance of staying on track and achieving our goals.

Nutrition Tip

If we’re working to try and break disordered eating patterns, and we’ve managed to increase the period between binge eating episodes, experiencing a subsequent episode can be particularly difficult to cope with. Feeling like we’ve failed can leave us thinking we’re right back at the start and with little hope. But if we reframe our relationship with food and see it as a journey, we can start to see episodes of disordered eating like bumps in the road— kind of like a bicycle ride. Once you hop on, you want to keep riding but you might hit a bump and fall off. You’re not going to wind up back at the start though. You could give up. Or you could pick yourself up, reflect, see if there are any lessons to be taken from your fall, and hop back on knowing that you’re now better equipped to deal with any subsequent bumps or falls. Instead of all-or-nothing, success-or-failure, our approach becomes an exercise in anticipating the unwanted events, paying attention to see what can be learned from them when they do occur, and then applying what we’ve learned next time around, so that hopefully these episodes start to become less frequent.

Links & Resources

Video: Simon Sinek explains the difference between failure and falling, offering a useful way to think about taking action and taking risk.

Book: Rising Strong by Brené Brown provides a practical guide on how to recover after emotional and personal setbacks.

Resource: The National Centre for Eating Disorders is a good place to start for more information about eating disorders and disordered eating, and for signposting to support and treatment.

Inspirational Quote

"For me, becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self. The journey doesn't end."

Michelle Obama