Written by: Chris Deavin, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
As a coach, I constantly ask myself why some clients succeed beyond what they set out to achieve, whereas others struggle each day to accomplish the most basic health and fitness behaviour.
What separates the two? And how can I coach each client on what it will take for them to succeed beyond what they are currently achieving? The four most common health and fitness behaviours my more successful clients consistently do are the following.
Read each one and see how you can adopt them to the best of your ability.
1. Always Be Prepared
Life doesn’t always work out the way we want it to. My clients who are succeeding accept this and have planned for any eventuality. It might be they are held up at work one day and can’t get to the gym for a workout, so they have a simple home-based fitness workout planned, which requires no equipment and takes as long as the time they can give it. They understand that the consistency of doing a fitness workout every day makes them successful, not what they do, how long they do it for, or where they do it. Just doing something is the key. They could be in a daylong meeting with limited nutrition choices. Knowing that this was going to happen allows them to plan ahead. They either bring their own food or on the days leading up to the meeting, they make sure their nutrition is the best it can be, knowing that for one day, they will be forced to eat differently. The key is to create a planning behaviour that will help you make a challenging situation more manageable and less likely to throw you off course.
Behaviour: Set yourself a daily and weekly plan for achieving what you want and overcoming things out of your control.
2. Remind Yourself Why
The only reason you will plan ahead and change your life accordingly is if you have a strong basis for doing so. Clients who continually see improvement are the ones with a strong desire to do so. In his book 'Start With Why,' Simon Sinek talks about how organizations become successful by continually focusing on their why.
“All organizations start with WHY, but only the great ones keep their WHY clear year after year. Those who forget WHY they were founded show up to the race every day to outdo someone else instead of to outdo themselves."
Improving your health and fitness long-term doesn’t come from the latest and most popular diets or exercise craze. It comes from a strong reason and purpose for doing the right things repeatedly. My clients who see the best health and fitness results are continually reminding themselves what they want to achieve from following the proper habits and behaviours. They review what they want and what they are currently doing to achieve it. If they are not producing the desired results, they change what they are doing.
Behaviour: Each day, remind yourself what you want from having good health and fitness, then review at the end of each day and week what actions you performed to achieve that goal.
3. Be Honest
One of the most important behaviours of successful people is that they are honest about why they have the results they have. There are two ways to look at why you are where you are. You are either responsible for the results you are achieving or the result of external influences. When you start genuinely believing that only you are responsible for what you achieve, you will begin to see what you need to do to achieve a different result. My clients who are achieving the health and fitness results they want accept that what they do decides their success. When they start relying on others for their success, their results are out of their control and in someone else's hands. That is not to say everyone needs help from others to achieve the best results, but they know it is ultimately down to them to accomplish what they want. For example, we can get help from loved ones regarding better nutrition, but if we eat the wrong foods for the outcome we want, we decide that, not someone else. We are not prisoners to other people’s wants and desires.
Behaviour: At the end of each day, ask honestly if you did the best you could have and what could you, not anyone else, have done better.
4. Accept Failure As Positive Feedback
In the words of Stephen Covey (author of 'The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People'), ‘Don’t see failure, only feedback.’ Most people believe that failure should be avoided, and it is a negative that highlights what we did wrong. Successful people accept that failure is part of the journey to getting what they strive for. That you can’t be successful without experiencing a setback or two along the way. Clients who see continued progress accept failure, seeing every bump in the road as learning something new and how best to overcome this hurdle. Whereas other clients believe that they are unable to move forward due to their inability to apply the changes necessary and that failing reinforces their belief. The difference in belief separates my clients from succeeding or not.
Behaviour: Look at each failure as something new that you have learned, and then use what you have learned to work out what you need to do to move forward.
The above behaviours are not the only ones needed to achieve a lifetime of good health and fitness, but they are the cornerstone that other behaviours build on. Mastering these daily and smaller behaviours will be easier to implement and follow.
Chris Deavin, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Chris has been a behavioural health coach for over 20 years, helping people change their lives through enhanced health and well-being. Through 1000s of hours of coaching, he has been able to identify the most effective strategies to enable people to successfully work through the process of change needed to achieve physical & mental vitality and wellness. Now specialising in health for the over 50s, his passion is helping people improve their health span and lifespan.
