Do you give yourself grace?
The all or nothing mentality. It can work sometimes, but seldom does when it comes to looking after ourselves.
Have you ever gone on a diet? (I actually don’t like to use that word!) And then one day on that diet you ‘messed up’? Had a Tim Tam, a Snickers, a few chips, or bikkies and dip? And then said ‘Ah!!! My diet is ruined!!’ And proceeded to go completely off task and eat everything and anything in your path!!
Or set a New Year’s resolution only to miss one morning, and then get all annoyed at yourself and think ‘Why can’t I just do it? Next year I will, this year is done!!!’
In times like these you need to reframe it and give yourself some grace.
Name an area of your life where you have been absolutely perfect in it your whole life, you have never made an error, never even slipped up slightly. I’ll wait.
There is likely no area of life where we never make an error or have a setback.
We have all messed up at work, performed not so well on an exam or assignment at school, were late to an appointment, let someone down in a friendship, relationship, etc. Yet we have made up for it, we didn’t just keep on with what we were doing by messing up or erring, we made adjustments and saw that the error may have been an opportunity to grow.
We can view a missed workout, or a Tim Tam as just that. So what if you one morning out of seven hit the snooze button because you needed an extra 30 mins sleep? This is an opportunity to look at your sleep habits, maybe you are also going to bed too late or using tech too close to bedtime. You can go to bed earlier that night, and then go for a run tomorrow morning!
So you had that Tim Tam at morning tea, maybe even three of them. You can just have the regular lunch you planned, a small treat here and there like that won’t derail all of your nutrition efforts. Maybe it is showing you you need to adjust how much you are actually eating. Is it really enough for what you are doing?
So, next time you ‘slip up’, miss a workout, sleep in, whatever, give yourself a little grace and see where the opportunity lies in learning from your efforts and behaviours.