The Plan

You did it! You’ve kicked off your fitness journey, started a new diet, and feel ready to attack whatever the day tosses at you! Fast forward, you’re two weeks in and going strong and nothing will get in your way… except your alarm clock.

The Reality

Your fitness journey which you told all your Instagram followers about doesn’t seem like such a good idea when your alarm keeps going off at 5AM. So you choose sleep over working out because what’s one day going to hurt? Next thing you know you’re elbow-deep in a bag of Doritos and somehow managed to finish all of Netflix in its entirety.

So often we find ourselves with the drive to kickstart our fitness journeys yet ultimately fail after a short period. The question arises why? Why did I fail? Why did I not stick with it? Why can’t I fall into a routine? We ask ourselves why instead of establishing our “why”.

What Is The “WHY”?

Your why is your reasoning. For what reason are you choosing to do this? It can be simple or complex, but it’s what establishes your reasoning for becoming healthier. It’s great to start a plan but to simply set your goal as ” to get in better shape” is the equivalency of saying I’ll do the dishes later (we both know that won’t happen).

Discovering Your WHY

A simple question to ask yourself is what am I doing this for? Is what I’m doing this for enough to get me out of bed in the morning? If not, you need to find a new why. Your why should be something that you can’t let out of your mind until you find a way to temporarily satisfy that need.

Your why is entirely brought on by personal experiences. While we can have similar “why’s”; no “why” will ever look the same compared to someone else. Some examples of why’s are your physical health is in danger, you’re coping with a loss, battling depression/anxiety, there are a plethora of reasons. But, at the end of the day, it is what you achieve by featuring your why and using it as motivation to keep pushing forward.

Discovering your why is not an easy process, it requires us to have conversations with ourselves that may be tough to have, ones we may not want to have.

Making Your WHY Permanent

Once you’ve had a true heart-to-heart conversation with yourself on what your why is and how you are going to leverage it to push you forward. The next step is maintaining your why. While your why doesn’t need to be permanent, find something that is unlikely to change, something you can keep looking back at.

In the moments where you don’t feel like going, consider not pushing yourself as hard as you can, or ultimately giving up. Remember your why. Your why is important to YOU, no one else can understand it unlike you. If you are seeking true change for a better impact everything begins with you and the reasoning behind your why. Personal fitness can be a true struggle even for the best. But what sets those greats apart from everyone else is the dedication to their why. These individuals have the simple mindset that no one will remain more dedicated than me.

My strongest advice is to make your why known. Establish your why into existence, speak it, write it, tell someone about it. Take every opportunity to make your why known. While it is great to tell others of your why the person you need to convince MOST and make them BELEIVE is yourself. By bringing our why into existence we don’t only become more inept to keep thinking of it but it solidifies and validates our thoughts.

A Task For You To Try

I challenge you today to ask yourself why? What is it that makes you dedicated to achieving a specific goal? What is your reasoning or “why” for doing this? To those who may already have a why I task you with rethinking your why. You’ve grown as a person since establishing one, now it may be time to reevaluate and establish a why that’s outside your comfort zone. Establishing or reestablishing our why is never easy but if it we’re easy everyone would do it. Make your why known to yourself and hold tight to that thought, there’s a world of opportunities waiting for you.