The Triangle of Life
Hello guys and welcome back to ShowMe.Fit! My name is Dan, I’m from the Accountability Academy and today I want to talk about something that I call the “triangle of life”. That sounds really, really cheesy, I know it does. It sounds really, really, painfully cheesy but I work with this with all of our clients. The way I describe this triangle is that at the top of this triangle we might have our professional life, at the bottom left hand corner we might have our social life/personal relationships, and at the bottom right hand corner we might have our health and fitness personal goals we set for ourselves.
What I think a lot of people tend to do is they chase perfection in all of these areas. They want to have an amazing career, and they want the best social life, and they want to be in absolutely the best shape of their life with their health and fitness where they can run marathons, and they track their food every single day, and they are amazing. We all chase this idealistic version of ourselves that we create in our head. I’m here to tell you that I’m afraid perfection does not exist… I’m not perfect, maybe you are but I’d imagine you’re probably not. The reality is, it is very, very difficult to chase perfection and that’s why I come back this triangle of life.
“No-one is 100% perfect – and if they tell you so then I suspect they are lying (or very boring). The opposite of success is not failure. Failure is just a step to learn from. Dust yourself off, learn from the experience and move on.”
Katharine Bright – ShowMe.Fit Nutritionist
So, what do I mean by this?
At different times in a life, different things are going to take away from different aspects of our triangle. For example: there might be really, really busy times at work where you’re staying late or having to get in really, really early. I’m going to imagine that at that time, your social life probably isn’t popping off, you’re probably not going out and seeing friends and family and going on date nights or other stuff when you’re staying at work late a lot. That’s what I’m just going to guestimate. The same goes from when maybe your social life is starting to pop off, it’s the summer holidays or it’s Christmas and we’re all starting to go out and see friends and celebrate, but then our health and fitness goals you set yourself over here might start to fall off as well. Perfection doesn’t exist in all these areas and we need to go into these things understanding that things are going to adjust as we go along. I’m going to put my hands up and say for last couple of weeks I’ve been away in Spain, I’ve been with family, with friends and at times my health and fitness and my diet has definitely not been a priority. However, I know that it’s just a small chunk of time where my priority lays in my social relationships. There will be times like now, when I’m back in the gym, I’m eating the right foods, I’m tracking my food, I’m doing all the right things. Now that all my friends have left Spain, I can start to focus on my business and my health.
Don’t chase perfection because perfection does not exist and don’t get demotivated when you don’t live up to this idealistic version of yourself that you have in your head, where you have this all or nothing. That if you can’t be perfect, then you can’t do it at all. That’s a really, really negative way to do it because it’s going to be really hard to maintain this level of success that we set for ourselves.
That’s what I’m going to leave you with today… don’t get demotivated if you drop off in certain areas at certain times, that is very, very normal. You have to balance your social life with your health and fitness. It’s going to be very, very normal that different things are going to take priority at different times. So, don’t get demotivated, make sure you set times to prioritise when each one is the most important and go from there. Guys, I’ll leave you with that today have a great rest of your night and I’ll see you soon, bye.