Hi everyone. Dr. Eric Cobb back with you this week.
I hope you’re having a fantastic week.
Now, what I’m going to offer you this week a mindset shift. I’m going to ask you to consider changing your identity.
Now what I mean by that is not go out and get a false identity and a new passport all that stuff. Instead I’m want to talk to you about your fitness identity, now when I work with people around the world what I often times find are people who are very confused about who they are and how to go about becoming a fitter, stronger and healthier person.
I tell them very often, the reason for that is we haven’t adopted the right identity, the right personal brand if you will, because most people approach fitness in a completely opposite way than how they approach their jobs.
Let’s talk about our jobs first. Unless you’re living on a trust fund somewhere, the likelihood is that you earn your living, right? You get up and you go to work, and the way that this occurs is there’s some really standard characteristics.
If you have a job, you know what time it has to start, right? I started 8:00 am or seven or six or nine, and whatever it is, I know what time I get to finish. Right? Maybe I end my day of three or five or seven, but there’s a define start time and define end time.
Next, if you had your job for any period of time you likely know when you don’t have to be there through the year, it’s called vacation. You already go into a year knowing at some point, I’m going to break from this stuff.
Then, another hallmark characteristic, you know what your job is, you show up and, go “ok, these are my responsibilities, these are the things I have to get done,” and finally you have a pretty good idea of how long is going to take you to get that done.
Now, if you think about your fitness goals and your fitness approach, do you, on a really regular basis have a defined start time? Do you have a defined ending time? Do you know when during the year that you are going to get an opportunity to take a break, chill out, not exercise, breathe, just relax? Do you know what your responsibilities are in fitness? And finally do you know long is going to take you to train in order to meet those responsibilities?
Now here’s the thing, most people when they start considering fitness or diet or anything else in their health, from a more professional standpoint, things begin to change, because you go, you know what? I really like to do strength training and in fact, whenever I do my own training I can get a ton of work done in twelve minutes or seventeen minutes or twenty-two minutes.
Imagine if you got to earn your living, you got all the rewards of having a job where you showed at up 8:00 am, and you worked until 8:22 am five days a week and you had the weekends off.
Do you think you could find the energy to show for those twenty-two minutes?
What we are learning more and more about health and fitness is that it is the first twenty minutes in most cases that make the biggest difference for us, long term.
So, this week my challenge to you is not to change anything. My challenge to you this week is to consider, who do you think of yourself…How you identify yourself in the fitness world? How do you identify yourself in a dietary world? Because I believe that when we begin shifting identities, we really begin to shift behaviour.
I see this over and over and over, people that are constantly searching the web looking for the latest and greatest fad and exercise and dietary change, etc. rarely find the consistency required to create long term change.
Those that most easily change their lives are the ones that change their personal brand, their personal identity of how they think about themselves.
So consider that this week.
I hope you have a fantastic week.
I look forward to talking to you soon.
Thanks.
