Stop Justifying Why You Can’t, Fight For Why You Can!

Have you ever found yourself saying something along the lines of;

‘I want to do X but I can’t because of Y’

So in relation to health and fitness this might be;

‘I want to lose weight, but diets never work for me.’

‘I’d love to be able to do a pull up, but I’ve never been able to build upper body strength.’

It’s the weirdest thing when you think about it. Can you see how in both these examples we are justifying to ourselves why we can never have the thing that we want! We are fighting to keep hold of our own limitations and essentially making sure that we never move beyond them.

I can really relate to this when I look back at my sporting and competitive career in kickboxing. I have been at tournaments where my mind was not in a good place and I’d start talking to people before I was up to fight about how I could never perform how I wanted to, that I can’t win as my nerves get the better of me and how I won’t do well because I perform better in training. You can guess how those fights went!!

The competitions where I went in believing I could win and that I could overcome the nerves and challenges ahead of me…shock horror…. I performed my best! I remember clearly being at the World Championships, and whilst on a walk the day before the final, having a moment of clarity that I had done everything in training that I needed to, had all the skills to win and that I COULD do it.

Putting my energy into believing I could win and quite literally fighting for all the reasons that I could achieve this, opened the room for it to be a potential outcome, despite the fact that yes, I could get nervous sometimes. Fighting for my own perceived limitations however was a sure-fire way to make sure I did not progress or perform well and that those limitations remained mine!

I have come across so many clients in my time who start from this exact point. They have been stuck in this narrative of not being able to achieve their goal because as they openly say to me at the start, they have never been strong, can never stick to a diet, or they can’t lose weight like everyone else. If we think this way, I really do believe at some sub conscious level we make sure that this is the outcome.

A more productive way to approach this is to leave a little bit of room and potential for change and focus on all the reasons why we CAN do something. If we put our energy there, then we have every chance of achieving the thing we want. As soon as this shift in approach occurs, and again I’ve seen it first hand with myself and my clients, it opens that potential for a different outcome and more often than not, a different outcome is exactly what occurs. It looks a little something like this;

‘I’ve struggled before on diets but I’m going to start this different approach, invest my time into changing my habits, as I can see that it can help me lose 3 stone.’

It sounds simple and maybe even obvious, but I bet you can think of things in your own life that you continually place your own limitations on in the way you think and talk about them?? Whatever it is, give this approach a try. Fight for why YOU CAN instead of clinging on to all the reasons you’ve told yourself you can’t (which I can guarantee 99% of the time are not true!) and see what you can achieve!!