Welcome to Part Three of this 6-part series. Today we'll continue to explore the insider secrets of how to deal with the inevitable roadblocks, bumps, and barriers on the road to lifelong fitness success. Last time we looked at Roadblocks 4-6 and how to blast them out of your way. In today's article (Part 3) we'll look at the next three in some detail. I'll cover the rest of them as we move through this 6-part series. Success Roadblock Number Seven: Severely Limiting (But Unconscious) Self- Sabotaging Beliefs And Attitudes Are Still In The Way In Chapter 8 we laid out a step-by-step plan for creating your own personal health and fitness Recipe For Success. As you got into steps six through nine of that program, your primary job was to evaluate whether your current plan was working. If it's not, it's a safe bet that you still have some "search and replace" work to do with your beliefs and attitudes. The bad news about beliefs and attitudes is that they are very often hiding out in your subconscious, where you can't really detect them. It's hard to conquer an enemy you can't see. The good news is, you don't have to identify and replace all of your problem beliefs and behaviors. All you really need to do is correct enough of them to tip the balance scale in your favor. You only need to achieve what I call a "critical mass" of self-supportive beliefs and attitudes. Once you have that, it's a simple matter of statistics. In any given circumstance, you will now be more likely to make a healthy decision and a healthy choice than an unhealthy one. Does that make sense? Success Roadblock Number Eight: An Inadequate Sense Of Self-Worth As you may have guessed, the previous roadblock related to Success Factor One, and this one relates to another Success Factor. Based on my own experience, I have never met a coaching client who didn't have some self-worth / self-esteem / deservability issues. As resilient as we human beings are, most of us have still been beaten up enough in childhood -- either physically, psychologically, or perhaps both -- that our sense of value as a person is nowhere near what it could or should be. And that's truly tragic, because low self-esteem most often keeps us from claiming or even acknowledging the good things that are rightfully ours. One reason I prefer to the term "deservability" over "self-esteem" is because the psychological community has tended to look upon the latter as a single, measurable factor. Then they have traditionally tended to label people as either having high self-esteem, low self-esteem, or something in between. The truth, however, is that we all have areas of good self-esteem and not so good self-esteem. We all have what I call "cavities" in our self-esteem. It is the presence or absence of these cavities that ultimately determines what we do and do not believe we deserve in life -- even including good health, fitness, and happiness. Until we fully understand the consequences of having low deservability, we probably won't take any serious steps to fix it, which means we probably won't end up getting the good things that we should be getting and enjoying in life. Success Roadblock Number Nine: A Habitually Poor Self-Image As with a low sense of deservability, a poor self-image is almost invariably the product of our early childhood experiences. What sets our self-image apart from our self-esteem is that it is primarily a visual thing as opposed to a psychological thing. If you close your eyes and visualize yourself in the buff, it's pretty hard to avoid discovering what your true self-image is. And if visualizing yourself naked causes negative feelings in you, then you can be sure you have some work to do in this area. This brings us to another pitfall to be especially careful of. Almost without exception, people believe that they will feel better about themselves when they look better. But this is exactly backwards. The truth is, you will begin to look better only when you feel better about yourself. Now, obviously, if you woke up tomorrow morning perfectly fit and trim and at your ideal weight, you'd feel pretty good about that. But if you didn't also learn to feel good about you, then you would almost certainly gain back your weight and get sloppy again pretty soon. On the other hand, once you develop a true, deep-down affection and appreciation for who you are, then you will naturally and automatically move in the direction of healthier behaviors, with the inevitable result being a healthier body and a happier life. The roadblocks you've just read about were excerpted from my new ebook, "Ultimate Fitness Secrets: Revealed!" To learn how to blast all 20 roadblocks out of your way, and discover the secrets of lifelong, struggle-free fitness, bulletproof health, and low-stress living, please visit the UltimateFitnessRevealed.com web site and get the whole story! Please stay tuned for Part Four! |
