I failed! – Clair MacKenzie Life Coach

I haven’t written and posted a blog post for the past three days and I feel a bit gutted about it.

I really wanted to meet the goal I set myself of writing and posting for the 40 days of Lent. And well life got in the way, just like life does.

It’s been interesting to observe myself go through this failure. There have been many parallels to my weight loss journey. So, I am being both coach and ‘coachee’ in this blog post in order that I can share with you what I’ve learned as I’ve observed myself over the past few days, and also illustrate how the skills we need to develop in order to manage our weight for life, are skills that can be valuable when applied in other areas too.

Plan for obstacles and have strategies in place for them

I didn’t put strategies in place ahead of time to help me when life gets in the way. Of course, life got in the way, because that’s what life does. You may get sick, family may need you and, on those occasions, writing a blog post compared to supporting your family, of course you are going to opt for supporting your family.

And the same is true when you are trying to lose weight. You may choose not to tell your Mother you can’t take her to the hospital tomorrow because that’s when you had planned to prepare some healthy meals for the week. What we need, is a back-up plan – strategies to help us through those moments. It sounds obvious, and it is, but that doesn’t mean that we do it. In hind sight I should have had some blog posts ready for the days when life got in the way. In the same way that I have a back-plan for when I can’t make a healthy meal. I have a surplus of healthy meals in the freezer ready to go for when life gets in the way of me cooking on certain evenings, and if I am out of the house then I ‘dine-in’ which means I don’t eat and my body accesses my fat reserves for fuel, a bit like getting something out of its own integrated freezer.

Start from where you are

I didn’t address what I thought of as failure for three days because I thought I was behind and had to catch up.

When I missed the first day, I told myself I would catch up the next day and write two posts…but that wasn’t realistic because I already had other stuff planned, and so rather than just do that days post…because I felt I needed to do two posts, I didn’t do any and then that continued into the next day with an overwhelming feeling of needing to do three posts…which of course again didn’t happen.

Likewise, when I used to try to stick to a diet I would generally manage for a period and then I would invariably eat something that wasn’t part of the diet, such as chocolate or cheese cake. Rather than immediately continue with the diet it would totally de-rail me. If I had dessert with lunch I would tell myself that I would skip dinner to make up for it, then I wouldn’t because I was hungry, so I would tell myself that I would be ‘really good’ for the next few days to make up for it, and again it wouldn’t happen and I would regain any weight I lost in the first place. And it would feel terrible. It’s so fascinating to see myself repeat my old patters with regards to writing these blog posts.

So what I could do next time this happens is just start the day after I missed the post, exactly as I had initially planned by writing one blog post and not making it mean anything negative that I had missed a day, and instead have observed that I needed a back up plan in place for days where life gets in the way and then just carry on. No big deal. The same as how I coach a client when they eat something of protocol. Rather than make it mean anything negative it just means they are human, life gets in the way and they’ve not failed, they’re learning. They are practising how to lose weight and maintain that weight loss for life. It doesn’t happen instantly, it’s a process of practice and learning and evolving, just like I am practicing and learning how to be a daily blogger.

Be kind to yourself

There is absolutely no upside to feeling guilty or berating yourself when things don’t go to plan. Add this self-critical negative emotion simply adds another layer of emotion that then needs to be dealt with before you can address the initial issue that needs resolving. Sometimes this layer of self-criticism is the voice in your head telling you some version of ‘you’re not good enough’ other times it may not be obvious because you’re resisting the negative emotion by ‘burying your head’ in the sand and avoiding acting.

Ask yourself what result you want to create

So, you ate of plan, you devoured the cheese cake. What result do you want for yourself next? You could decide that you want to understand why you ate the cheesecake and what you would do differently if you were in the same situation next time.

Likewise, I have asked myself what result I want to create from missing three days of blog posts. Well, I don’t want to make it mean anything negative. I may have failed to continually write 40 blog posts for 40 days but if I create 30 blog posts in 40 days that is still a great result. Just the same as maybe wanting to lose 40 lbs in 5 months but instead of losing 40 lbs you lose 30 lbs. That’s an amazing achievement, not a failure, but if you allowed yourself to be derailed when you over ate, rather than just thinking of it as an opportunity to learn you may have lost 10 lbs and then regained it.

So, from missing three days of blog posts, I want to use it as an opportunity to demonstrate that success is not just the result, it’s the lessons that we learn and the obstacles we overcome on the way. The person who eats off plan a number of times and learns from those occasions and loses 30 lbs instead of 40lbs because they never ate off plan will be better prepared to manage their weight going forward because they will have developed a level of confidence in their ability to lose and maintain their weight when life gets in the way.

I failed! I learned!