How_to_Deal_with_Overwhelm from John Lark on Vimeo.
In Summary:-
We look at a few ways to develop the level of focus that keeps you on track without getting overwhelmed in the process.
- Recognising that change is tough!
- So stop trying to fight it….
- Mind the Gap between knowing and doing…
- Finding Your Why
- Setting 90 Day Goals
- Daily Weekly Goals
- Keep Score
- Do something right now
- Make it super easy
Hi guys it’s John Lark here from Sphere Fitness.
I get a lot of emails almost on a daily basis, this kind of tone of being overwhelmed and I can’t blame you.
It’s partly our fault really in the sense that we do throw a lot of information at our new clients between the transformation center that we have, the articles and our blogs, the videos, the Facebook feeds, the Twitter feeds, there’s so much there and then you combine that with what’s out there on the internet.
It can really get overwhelming. But look. Let me just show you in this very short presentation how to cut through all the conflicting evidence and opinions so you have a very clear, laser like focus of what you need to do to get the results and kind of combat the sense of being overwhelmed gets the best of us.
It gets the best of us all the time.
We have so much stuff going on in our lives. More so than in previous generations, to actually do what is hardest, change becomes very, very difficult.
We all know this feeling. Right? You want to get going, but there’s so many opinions and views and conflicting information, but like I said, it is okay to feel like this.
Recognise Change is Tough
I think that’s the first point of call in this whole process. To just recognize change is very, very difficult. It’s one of the most difficult things you can do so just understand that and accept it.
Stop trying to fight it.
It’s a process and there is a simple way, which I’ll be sharing very, very shortly in very, very simple steps to have to unravel this and hopefully get you feeling more empowered.
I’d like to tell you, I mean every year I go to the book shops and I see all these diet books that come out and some are fantastic and well written and beautifully illustrated with photographs and so forth.
They really are the entirety of what you need to do.
They’re the end point of where you should be or where you hope to be.
Mind the Gap
In some cases garbage, in some places pretty sensible information, but what the problem is it doesn’t, there’s this huge gap between what the book is telling you to do or what the video shows and where you are starting from.
That level of application needs to be filled, the void needs to be filled and to do that, it takes so many steps.
Thinks about it this way. Say for instance you don’t do any exercise at the moment. You may do some walking with your mates, get to clear your head at lunch, but you want to start an exercise program.
Think about the steps you need to do to actually start that process.
You got to get your gym kit ready, you may have to sign up to a gym. If you don’t want to do that, you may have to get a home workout DVD. You may then have to learn to do these exercises. You may not feel great about exercising.
You’ve just got to get your confidence level up so for that to happen you may need to go talk to someone or get a few people in your corner just to give you that little pep talk to get you going.
So there’s so many different steps you actually need to do to get to the end point of implementing what behavioral changes you need then to do.
So that’s why people kind of drop off. They drop off because there’s just too many steps.
There’s too many steps needed to happen before you can actually start the whole process and that’s the problem with that kind of February March time there’s a huge drop off in terms of people’s enthusiasm and motivation.
Find Your Why – Why Bother??
Number one, you’ve got to find out why and be crystal clear in why you’re doing this.
You know for some people they might have a short time goal like a wedding coming up or party, reunion. I don’t know.
Whatever it is, but you need to find a very strong why this is important to you and [unclear 4:02] a bit of a pain point.
It’s like I’ve had a dreadful Christmas, I felt so self conscious in my clothes. That’s it. I’ve drawn a line underneath it. It’s not going to happen again.
Set 90 Day Goals
Well that’s fine. That’s a good pain point. You’re drifting away from pain, which is ultimately what drives human behavior and I always recommend setting 90 day goals, not year long goals, not starting your journey for I’ve got an October wedding.
Too far away. Way, way too far away. You’re better off setting a 90 day goal. You know, I used to do this myself. Three, five year goals and plans and well that’s great, but part with the long term goal plans. Just write them down and part with them.
Forget about them. It’s what you need to do in the next sort of immediate future, the next 90 days. No more, no less and you’ll have a much better understanding of where you want to go. So park that big goal and make sure it’s there.
Look, you still have it in your conscious, but you need to work on the kind of short term goals that you need to do to get there and that lends itself into point three, which is then…
Then Daily and Weekly Behavioural Goals
Set behavioral goals that have a daily and a weekly focus. So for instance, you want to lose 14 pounds or you feel that you’re a bit over weight.
Alright, think of what you need to do on a weekly basis to take you steps closer and then what you need to do on a daily basis. So for a weekly basis you may need to train three times a week. You may actually need to go to the gym three times a week or exercise a little bit harder with a bit of intensity and a bit of purpose three times a week.
You may also need to prep your meals for the week because you find that you’re eating on the go all the time.
So maybe on a Sunday or a Wednesday, so twice a week, you need to prep your meals and bulk cook things in advance. So that’s a bit of a weekly behavioral thing to do.
Daily it may be making sure that you take a lunch with you to work. It may be getting up 30 minutes early to have breakfast. It may be having more vegetables with your meal.
Maybe having more protein. A lot of stuff there, but just try and focus on and tie in to the big goal that you’ve parked and set aside.
What Skills are You Missing?
And then you need to really audit where you’re really at, to sit down and say okay what are my skill sets?
For instance, if you burn water or you struggle to make a pot of noodle, then you may need to invest and learn how to get some cooking skills.
You know, get a recipe cookbook and just try. Have some fun. Have some fun learning how to cook healthy meals and maybe knock out four or five meals in minutes, 5-10 meals in minutes.
If you don’t know how to train, maybe it’s worth it to invest in the coach or find someone who has an idea on how to train. At the very, very start, a little goes a long way.
So it’s good to invest and invest the time and the effort in finding out how to exercise properly because there are some great methods out there that don’t require a lot of time to get the end result.
So audit where you’re at. Find out, okay where’s my biggest weak link? If you want someone to have a look at your diet for example you can and it should give you a list of where to look at, where it’s gonna make the biggest impact in the shortest possible space and time and then focus on that one thing.
Alright so what skill set, gather that information. Gather all the information you need, but park it. The internet is a great resource. Right? But you don’t draw on it all the time. It’s there. It’s there when you need it so get all the information you need.
Get it all together. We likely have it in our bases and just park them. Use them when you need to.
Do Something Right Now…
So what can you do right now just to set this in motion? There’s so many things you can do right now.
For instance, it doesn’t take a mass amount of effort to drink more water. You just get a flask and whatever your daily goal is for the day you fill it up and make sure it’s gone by the end of the day.
You can do that now and what that does is it creates a snowball of motivation and a snowball of confidence in that you’re actually taking a step forward.
Most of us live in the past. We have tremendous amounts of guilt, which is problems of accepting our past and we have problems with anxiety, which is problems in accepting our future, what’s coming up, we worry about what’s coming up, rather than just focusing on now and that takes practice and that’s the reason why people really get overwhelmed because they’re guilty about what they may be eating or the lack of exercise and they’re anxious they’re not gonna reach their goal.
It doesn’t have to be like that. Walking you can do right, right now to make that change.
So pick one thing.
Pick one thing that you know is gonna make the biggest impact now.
Some people it can be like a sweet tooth they find when it comes to after their dinner when they’ve had a good, substantial meal with their family, they start picking.
Why not focus on that one thing there?
Don’t worry about anything else. I could care less whether you’re eating a Mars bar at mid-break. You’ve got to focus on that one thing.
That one thing only because your chances of success, when you focus on one thing and one thing only are astronomical. When they start going over, trying to do 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 things or 6 thing, then the chance of your success drop substantially. They drop substantially.
Make it Easy to Do (And I mean Super Easy)
So point number seven is make it so easy to do.
Alright, we use a technique. I’ll give you a bit of an inside scoop.
We use a really cool technique called motivational interviewing where we ask our clients on a scale of 1-10, how likely is it that they’re able to complete whatever we’ve asked them.
If they don’t give us a 9 or 10, which is dead certain then we just shrink the changes a little bit.
We make it a little bit easier for them to achieve so if they can’t commit to training three times a week for maybe 45 minutes, then we say how about three times a week for 20 minutes?
Normally it’s accepted that they can do that and we move on from there and that’s the one thing they focus on. So the motivational interviewing technique works and then keep score on a weekly, on a daily basis.
Keep Score
Keep score, keep it in a journal, keep it on a pad, keep it in a note somewhere.
There are so many resources now. On your phone or in a book. Just keep score. How well? How compliant are you? If you said I’m gonna focus on my water intake every day this week, that’s seven days. So if you missed a day, that’s maybe a 90% score rate. That’s good enough. 100%, you don’t need to do 100%, 90% is good enough.
Likewise, if you’re trying to get your intake of vegetables up or you’re trying to hit the gym three times a week over the course of a month, that’s 12 work outs so you can afford to miss one or two work outs over the course of a month for a 90% compliance score. My point is, no matter what your score is, try to keep score of something every week. Calorie counting, something, keep score.
Celebrate Success
Celebrate success! We have a huge amount of guilt. You know, I do blame the church! It’s a joke. We don’t celebrate success. You know, we don’t give ourselves that little pat on the back. No matter how small.
We wait until there’s fireworks pumping outside before we actually celebrate success.
Well how about the fact that you got off your back side and did something better for yourself today?
I think that deserves a round of applause and then get another one tomorrow.
Drop the Guilt
But drop the guilt. That’s point number ten, the last one. There’s no place for it ever. You should never, ever feel guilty for not doing something. Focus on where you are right now. Right now. in terms of levels of anxiety this or the guilt you had in terms of drinking too much over the weekend.
It’s gone. It doesn’t matter.
What are you gonna do now? Alright so drop the guilt.
There’s no place forever. Just focus on just taking those steps, taking those steps. You’re not perfect. No one ever is, but keep celebrating the positivity, you’ll come back to you. You’ll come back to you and you’ll keep manifesting the good stuff.
So hopefully there are a few good tips in there how to deal with overwhelm. Just to reiterate. You focus on the now, shrink the change, be crystal clear on your why, set small short term goals and park the big ones and then work as hard as you can on the now.
John Lark is a personal trainer, founder and owner of Sphere Fitness, Maynooth. Since 2005 Sphere Fitness have helped over 500 people transform their goals and transform themselves inside and out. Unlike overcrowded training facilities and gyms with one-size-fits-all programming and cookie cutter diets, our clients say they love our approach that is truly customised to their approach.
