How to Stay in a Good Mindset During Quarantine
Apr 14, 2020 mindpumpMotivation is Short Term
I used to think it was about motivating clients, and teaching them proper exercise, and giving them perfect regimen with diet etc. What I ended up realizing was how short lived my clients followed that. What do you do when you aren’t in the mood, or don’t have a motivational speech to watch on YouTube? Motivation is what you seek out when you don’t have the tools necessary to change your mindset.
It’s a psychological game. Motivation can only last so long. You can watch a thousand videos, but what did you actually teach yourself to walk away with when you have to go on your own? Are you motivated to brush your teeth or go to work everyday? Or is it a DISCIPLINE that you’ve put into place in order to succeed in life?
Discipline
To put it simply, everyone knows what they NEED to be doing (eat less, more exercise, etc.) but we rely too much on the motivation. If we look at those succeeding it’s because they’re consistent. They follow through with ideas, they experiment and fail and try something else. They don’t assume they have the end result before they’ve even tried. I’ve had clients with zero knowledge of fitness but a better mindset way out perform the ones that had to show me how much they knew already. Also, it doesn’t mean to always go HARD and be on point. It’s knowing how to assess each day based on how you are feeling.
Don’t get me wrong, motivational videos aren’t bad, it just won’t be what gets you to success and happiness. It’s your habits and discipline. Changing your habits and outlook on each day and focusing on what small behavior changes will get you closer TO the goal. You are probably going to have more days where you don’t feel like doing what you have to. So if you know that how do you plan for it? Create a discipline where you’re focusing on the skills you think will be valuable that day to get you closer to where you need. It allows you to keep consistent while still making progress. If you were supposed to lift but feel tight, work on mobility.
Driver of Self Hate
Self hate can be a hugely powerful driver in the beginning. We could be sick of what we see in the mirror, or how little progress we’ve made. But you can only use that for so long. Let’s say you binge ate one day. You feel like shit, so you say you’re gonna kill it in the gym. You go nuts and destroy yourself. Now what? You’re gonna do that every single time? Or make that the standard for what’s acceptable behavior because you slipped up? You end up doing workouts or processes that are too intense. It also never ends. You’re never happy even after you hit your goals (need to be skinnier, look bigger, etc), because you’re still unhappy with yourself. It’s toxic.
Driver of Self Care
On the flip side, self care involves judging your progress not by the end goal, or the image. You judge it by the behaviors and the process of skill acquisition. What skills are you focusing on where even if you slip up you don’t fall behind? Instead of worrying about binging, teach yourself the habit of eating less, so you don’t go overboard. Or if you do binge, you have built up the behavior skills to get back on track regardless.
Growth Mindset
A growth mindset is trusting you can change and grow. People with this mindset have a higher rate of success in business, relationships, success, fitness. It allows you to question everything you do. No one ever succeeded with everything going right all the time. It was just as important, if not more important during the failed times, that you had to learn what went wrong, or what could you have done differently.
Having this mindset can become one of the big positives throughout this quarantine. Reevaluate your life and ask the right questions. Think about how your disadvantages can be advantages. Find gratitude for how the positive and negative aspects of your situation can all be used to help you get better. Does a baby fall down when they first learn how to walk and just quit? Or do they keep getting up, and trying over, and over again. Somewhere as we get older in life, we just get too cynical by the obstacles life throws at us. We need to shift our perspective.
Fixed Mindset
“This is the way I am. I don’t wanna self reflect or assess what went wrong. It just is. I’m just not a math guy, that guy over there is.” This is what someone with a fixed mindset thinks to themselves. Everything just is the way it is and there is nothing you can do. You only focus on the disadvantages and how they are the reason life isn’t going the way it should be. You absolve yourself of the downturn your life has taken. Put the blame on anything and anyone other than yourself. Again, this is all toxic and won’t give you the necessary skills or years of experience you need to have that successful business or body you want.
It’s like the guy who prays every day to win the lottery. He finally gets to heaven and asks God why he never won. God tells him “you did all this praying but never took the action to buy a ticket”. Find the growth mentality.
It’s Gonna Take Time
At the peak of a successful person’s career most of them say they wouldn’t change a thing because it made them who they are today. That includes the good AND the bad. We need to learn to accept what we can’t change and focus on what we can. Work on those skills and focus on the process and you’ll find you get a lot farther.
