The fear of failure. It can disrupt your ability to begin a task.
Nobody enjoys failing, it doesn’t feel good. It can feel like wasted effort. It can be an attack on your ego.
But the fear of failure doesn’t hold everyone back.
If you’ve tried countless diet plans or workout programs, you weren’t fearful with each new program. You were hopeful, determined, even excited. Some of these fitness plans might have been crap, a program that guaranteed your failure from the very beginning because of extreme approaches or poor structure.
Other times, in absence of the fear of failure or a bad program, people fear success.
You might fear tracking calories because you know it forces you to confront your choices. It forces you to look your problems dead on. Once you learn how to log your food you won’t ever be able to sit on the couch mindlessly snacking ever again. You’ll know too much, and this will stop you from making poor decisions that you otherwise enjoy making. (Except for its effect on your waistline.)
In another scenario, you might have already seen great success. Ten, twenty, even thirty pounds you’ve already lost. Now you’re down to the last ten. What happens? All you have to do is continue the same habits that have taken you this far, but you let things slip. You go out to eat more with friends. You stop being diligent about tracking your eating and meeting your nutrition goals. You skip one too many workouts. Now the weight starts creeping back on, entirely from self-sabotage, and you tell yourself the plan failed you.
It wasn’t the plan. You can feel deep down that by meeting your goals you’ll become a new person, and this means losing parts of who you are now. You weren’t ready to lose those parts of yourself.
Change is scary, but change within ourselves is the scariest of all.
Success is equally about putting in the effort as much as it is about letting go.
In my experience, I’ve worked with plenty of people who feared the changes that came with success. And yet I’ve not once witnessed anyone who regretted what they achieved.
It’s not about what you’re losing, so much as it’s about what you’re discovering. The skills you’re learning and the person you’re becoming. Those are the things you’ll be grateful for at the end of the road.
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