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If you struggle with eating better, losing weight and pushing your performance to the next level, self-criticism and always doing more is not always the answer.
Plateau is defined as being stuck in one place and often it seems like nothing you do moves you forward. Sometimes it can even feel like the more you do, the worse results you get and that is frustrating.
I am speaking now to you, motivated, driven people who want more from life. I know that you always want to be better, improve and you know that to live a better life comes with a cost.
And you are willing to pay the price to become a better version of yourself – the price is spending time learning about nutrition or business, training hard, making compromises.
But you might be forgetting one important thing.
And that is having self-compassion.
You can tell yourself that there are people who have worse life than you. That there are people who struggle because they don’t invest their time and energy into self-improvement and you don’t want to be like them!
Instead, you constantly compare yourself to a person that you strive to be like. It can be a famous athlete or a that lady who has lean and tonned body. And you understand that if you want to be like them you need to make sacrifices.
“You’ve been criticising yourself for years and it hasn’t worked. Try approving of yourself and see what happens.” ~Louise Hay
What you might be forgetting that they have not always been that person they are now. That they had to make their own sacrifices, overcome conflicts and obstacles in their life and what you see is just a tiny picture of their life, usually from the time when they have already ‘made it’. Especially now on social media you can see people who seem to be happy, with great body’s, great girlfriends and boyfriends but has it always been like that? Often it is not even real!
So it does not matter where they are or where you are in your journey, there are always people who have it harder than you and people who have it easier than you.
Practice Self-Compassion
When psychological researchers tested self-compassion approaches they found that self-compassion was surprisingly powerful (Breines & Chen, 2012). In comparison to self-esteem boosting and distraction, this study found that self-compassion was most likely to help participants:
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See the possibilities for change,
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Increase the motivation to change,
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Take steps towards making a change,
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Compare themselves with those doing better, to help motivate their change.
Accepting and embracing your own circumstances and being compassionate with yourself will allow you to break through the barriers.
Don’t consider yourself weak just because someone else did not break in a similar situation to yours, or that someone else stuck with their diet better than you can or trained harder than you ever will.
“Self-compassion is simply giving yourself the same kindness to ourselves that we would give to others.” ~Christopher Germer
We often show compassion towards others but not as much towards ourself. We are our worst critics.
It is not productive in any way to think less of yourself even if you could exercise harder, even if you could diet harder, even if you could be more consistent.
Be compassionate with yourself and practice being your best in any given situation, starting now.
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15 minute strategy call
I would like to invite you to schedule a 15 minute strategy call with me during which we will cover how you can eat better exercise smarter so you start getting results!