Consolidating resources to survive & thrive!

As you may know, I’ve decided to run a 1/2 Marathon in August – in Iceland. Having been away from racing of any kind since 2008, this was a welcome challenge, and for the first few months of committing to this goal – lots of fun! And now that it’s been a few more months – this commitment has given me a lesson to share with you. You see, the reason for my quiet blog lately has been my decision to consolidate my resources in order to survive & thrive.

When you’ve committed to something that is truly a challenge, you’ve got to allocate yourself accordingly – or risk failing the commitment, yourself, and others. Whether you’ve committed to completing a sporting endeavor or delivering on a work goal that will make a major impact on the way your company does business; whether it’s a healthy lifestyle change you’ve committed to or a committment you’ve made to your spouse – if it’s a big commitment to you – it’s going to require a fair amount of your resources.

And in case you hadn’t noticed, we are not a source of limitless resources. Regardless of how many Iced Starbucks Via’s you have, you will eventually burn out if you do not manage your resources well.

Thus, no blogging for the last few weeks. Training for this 1/2 Marathon, combined with commitments to my awesome clients & amazing coworkers at my job in Barone Performance has required serious pulls from my resources & I learned quickly that if I wanted to hope to perform well in any of my commitments, I needed to pull energy from other things & direct it toward those biggest commitments.

Especially because training/keeping a commitment is not always fun & happy times – there will be peaks when it all comes easily, results are popping everywhere & you’re enjoying working toward your commitment. And there will be vallies where you slog along, feeling like you’re putting out lots of effort with little gain. It’s tiring, takes lots of focus, and requires you to keep mentally focused on the end goal in order to climb through the valley.

Everybody you’ve committed to would prefer to get the best out of you they can – and that includes the little voice inside you who talks to you all day long every single day. Sure you can plod along & give “just enough” to get by for a bit, and you won’t do serious damage – but you certainly won’t get your best results possible, and you may get even worse. Give “just enough” in your workouts and you get “a few” results. Give “just enough” at work and you probably won’t get fired, but you definitely won’t get promoted. Give “just enough” to your spouse & you’ll get dinner prepared for you if you’re lucky & canned soup if you’re not.

How do you know if you need to consolidate resources & “cut the fat”?

• Are you feeling energized by your commitments or drained by them?
• Are you seeing progress on your commitments or are they plodding along with minimal forward progress?
• Has your overall mood changed (probably for the worse)?
• If it’s a sports commitment, are you starting to get overuse injuries & breakdowns?
• If it’s a work commitment, are you missing the little things that normally are completed without a 2nd thought?

If you notice yourself in any of these questions, then you need to cut the fat & consolidate if you want to get the best results you possibly can. Some people may tell you that if you see yourself in any of those questions that you’ve over-committed, that you should pull back on your commitments. More than likely, they are wrong. You most likely do not need to ‘pull back’ but rather prioritize and plan better so that your best efforts go to your biggest commitments. This in turn takes pressure off when you’re working on the smaller commitments you’ve made – you do not have the big commitment hanging over your head reminding you that you didn’t give all you could to that goal. If you’ve decided you want to do something – and have committed to it in your head – then you have the ability to achieve it.

No desire is given to you without also acquiring the tools required to do it.

There will be commitments you feel like pressured to uphold, but in reality, they may have been commitments someone else placed on you, and feel like you have to live up to them. You do!, but in the order in which you committed yourself – which means the commitments you made first, commitments others put on you 2nd, and on down the line. This doesn’t mean you get a free pass to be selfish – it means that whether the commitment is to help someone else get something or to get yourself to achieve something – YOU made the commitment, so it takes top priority. Besides if you’re not fully committed to whatever someone has asked you to do, you’re not going to get an amazing result anyways. So commit – or get it off your plate for the time being.

And when it comes to committing to a healthy way of life – there are not many better commitments you can make in this world! So it is well worth your time to evaluate if you’re diverting resources that could help you better keep that commitment!

New to exercise and committing yourself to a healthier way of life? It’s much more likely to work for you if you acknowledge early on that the time you need to commit to yourself to get the workouts & healthy cooking done, is far more important than watching your favorite shows, going out for drinks after work, or sleeping in as late as you can & then skipping breakfast as you rush out the door.

Committed yourself to completing an endurance race, setting a new PR, or to completing many sporting endeavors this season? It is going to take more of your time than the you’re already using for workouts. If it didn’t, then you’d already have achieved that goal, but you haven’t, thus you need to train more/harder. Trying to train more/harder while skimping on sleep, failing to leave time to prepare adequate meals for proper nutrition, or trying to do things that are sucking your time away from having focused workouts will not work in the long haul – and doing so will risk unnecessary injury during training or competition.

Take a look at what you have going on & determine where you can consolidate so that you not only survive on the journey to goal achievement – you THRIVE!

Tagged: commitment, fitness plan, goal setting

Posted in: fitness