When I think about the times that I have admittedly self sabotaged,
the thing that comes to mind is that heart wrenching awful feeling of failure.
All the missed opportunities, injuries, losing the game… the job, even lost relationships and friendships.
We don’t often think about the days, weeks, months and years leading to the ultimate and awful ache in our stomach.
Even today, regardless of how old these failures might be, there is a slight sinking feeling at the thought of them.
If you’re like me, it creates an anxiety that makes that feeling seem unbearable and like I never want to feel it again.
So do you try again?
“What if?”
What if injuries or sickness pop up? What if you’re wrong? What if you fail? What if you lose?
This anxiety can keep you from ever trying again.
Some good news here, there IS a bright side to anxiety…A much nicer and more helpful sister to squashing anxious feelings....
PREPARATION.
Preparation is how we change your "what if" to "how I'm going to" by creating a road map of success.
It's similar to how we program for our clients at Unbound.
We start with the end result in mind. Your goal.
At Unbound, we build backwards from there with data, best practices, and straight up experience in the trenches with hundreds of clients over 15 years of achieving the end goal.
You know the outcome that you don’t want. The one that creates the ache.
With a little thought, you can determine the habits that led you there. Now, let's think about what you DO want... Plan from that place, make decisions based on the person who HAS achieved what you desire.
Change your “what if” to “how will I avoid it?” or better yet, “how will I achieve it?”
Feeling anxious about a test? Study.
Don’t want to be wrong? Research.
Avoid injury? Prehab and Rehab.
Win the game? Train.
Daily habits and modest improvement consistently done create incremental, realistic change and ultimately success.
Life comes at you hard and smacks you in the face.
But here’s the thing, if we use our anxiety, our past pain, the fear and pit in our stomach as a directional pull to avoid it… not by sticking our head in the sand but to create foundational habits and daily rituals around preparation and building skills to avoid the deep, heart wrenching and awful setbacks… we might just find success.
