7 Steps to Help You Get Back on Track after a FUN, LONG Holiday Weekend!

How to get back on track:

7 Strategies to Help You Bounce Back After Slipping Up

1. Schedule your habits into your life.

Give your habits a specific space in your life. There are two main options for making this happen…
Option 1: Put it on your calendar. or Option 2: Tie it to your current behavior.

2. Stick to your schedule, even in small ways.

It’s not the individual impact of missing your schedule that’s a big deal. It’s the cumulative impact of never getting back on track. If you miss one workout, you don’t suddenly feel more out of shape than you were before. Find a way to stick to the schedule, no matter how small it is.

3. Have someone who expects something of you.

I’ve been on many teams throughout my athletic career and you know what happens when you have friends, teammates, and coaches expecting you to be at practice? You show up.
The good news is that you don’t have to be on a team to make this work. Talk to strangers and make friends in the gym or join an online fitness group where people are expecting you to post about your workout. Simply knowing that a familiar face expects to see you can be enough to get you to show up.

4. Focus on what you can work with.

We waste so much time focusing on what is withheld from us.

This is especially true after we slip up and get off track from our goals. Anytime we don’t do the things we want to do — start a business, eat healthy, go to the gym — we come up with excuses…
“I don’t have enough money. I don’t have enough time. I don’t have the right contacts. I don’t have enough experience. I need to learn more. I’m not sure what to do. I feel uncomfortable and stupid.”'

Here’s what I want you to think instead:
“I can work with this.”

Because you can. The truth is that most of us start in the same place — no money, no resources, no contacts, no experience — but some people (the winners) choose to get started anyway.
It’s not easy, but I promise you that your life will be better if you choose to feel uncomfortable and make progress, rather than complain and make excuses. Shift your focus from what is withheld from you to what is available to you.

It’s rare that your circumstances prevent you from making any progress. You might not like where you have to start. Your progress might be slow and unsexy. But you can work with this.

5. Just because it’s not optimal, doesn’t mean it’s not beneficial.

It’s so easy to get hung up on doing things the optimal way and end up preventing yourself from doing them at all.
Here’s an example…
“I really want to eat Paleo, but I go to Chipotle every Friday with my friends and I like to get sour cream and cheese on my burrito and I know that’s not Paleo. Plus, I have a book club meeting every Tuesday and we always have ice cream and I don’t want to be the only one not joining the group. Maybe I should try something else?”

Seriously? Is eating clean five days per week better than not eating clean at all?
Yes, I believe it is.

In fact, eating healthy one day per week is better than none at all. Make that your goal to start: eat clean every Monday.

Just because you can’t stick to the optimal schedule, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t stick to it at all. Good habits are built gradually. Start slow, live your life, and get better along the way. Progress is a spectrum, not a specific place.

Furthermore, if you haven’t mastered the basics, then why make things harder for yourself by fretting about the details?

The optimal strategies will make the last 10% of difference. Meanwhile, 90% of your results will hinge on you simply sticking to the basics: don’t miss workouts, eat real food, do the most important thing first each day. Master the fundamentals now. You can optimize the details later.

6. Design your environment for success.

If you think that you need more motivation or more willpower to stick to your goals, then I have good news. You don’t.

Motivation is a fickle beast. Some days you feel inspired. Some days you don’t. If you want consistent change the last thing you want to rely on is something inconsistent.

7. Care.

It sounds so simple, but make sure that the habits that you’re trying to stick to are actually important to you.

Sometimes forgetting your habit is a sign that it’s not that important to you. Most of the time this isn’t true, but it happens often enough that I want to mention it.

It’s remarkable how much time people spend chasing things that they don’t really care about. Then, when they don’t achieve them, they beat themselves up and feel like a failure for not achieving something that wasn’t important to them all along.

You only have so much energy to put towards the next 24 hours. Pick a habit that you care about. If it really matters to you, then you’ll find a way to make it work.