Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray
When it comes to going after big goals like losing weight and keeping it off or running a faster marathon, it is pretty much a guarantee that you will experience setbacks, failures and …
Continue Reading about 240. How to Handle Setbacks, Failures, and Disappointments →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 240 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today how to handle setbacks, failures and disappointments.
Look, when it comes to going after big goals like losing weight and keeping it off or running your fastest marathon, it’s pretty much a guarantee that you will experience some form of setbacks, failures and disappointments.
There’s no such thing as success without some level of setbacks and challenges along the way. The problem is that when most people experience setbacks, failures, disappointments, they tend to see them as insurmountable obstacles, and oftentimes they lead to them just giving up altogether. Okay, so today, how to handle setbacks, failures and disappointments, so you can get back on track and actually accomplish all of those goals.
But first, if you’re interested in getting stronger, running faster, running longer, losing some weight, and getting leaner, you need to change the things that you are doing, because whatever you’re doing is probably not working for you. Nothing changes if nothing changes, right?
The secret though to all of this is doing these new things, making these changes and doing them consistently. So this is where coaching really helps, because trying to stay on track by yourself is very difficult.
It’s very challenging. I’ve done this a million times, and it’s very challenging, and I always slid back into old behaviors until I got a coach and I had somebody there, guiding me every step of the way, holding me accountable, calling me out when I started slipping back into those old behaviors, and, most importantly, never letting me quit.
So if you’re ready to start doing new things and you’re ready to, you know, make sure that you never quit. Let’s work on getting you there. Just go to my website, runningleancoaching.com, click on work with me, and I will show you exactly how to become the most badass version of yourself, yet cool.
Okay, so here’s the topic of the day, how to handle setbacks, failures and disappointments. So the reason I wanted to bring this up today is because I work with a lot of different types of clients, all going through a lot of different stuff. They all have different goals, but a few things happened recently where several people had some failures, disappointments or setbacks, and I talked them through how to deal with that stuff, but I thought we could all learn from this here today.
So one of my clients was training for a marathon, and had some personal stuff come up in her life, some stuff she had to deal with that’s going to take time and she needed to just drop out of training for this marathon altogether.
She was going to run a fall marathon, and made a decision. It was a tough decision to make, but she made this decision that she had to stop training for the marathon because it just didn’t work with the things that are going on in her life. And so she’s very disappointed with this.
It’s that’s a tough thing to do, to basically say, hey, I’ve got this goal. I’ve been working on this for a while now. You know, I’ve only got a couple of months now to go before my race, and to just say I can’t do it. I just can’t do it because these other things are more important.
Somebody else I talked to recently had been doing amazing in her training, amazing, and showed up for her race and for the first 16 miles, was on track for her marathon, PR, and then all of a sudden, experienced some weird cramping issue in her quads. You know, this is a very strange thing, and honestly, you know, we talked about all the things she was doing.
She was doing everything right, sticking with her electrolytes. She had been training properly, strength training, doing all the things. All her training runs have been great, and then this day shows up, and she ends up having this cramping issue, and ends up, you know, completely missing her PR. Okay, that’s very disappointing, right?
Somebody else I talked to recently just was diagnosed with covid, and so has to take time off. Has to, you know, cannot exercise at all, because it just does not have the energy for it’s going to take a little bit of time to come back from that, you know, she’s worried that it’s going to impact her marathon training, and it will set her back a little bit, you know, set her back a couple of weeks.
So all of these different things that have been kind of happening with people all recently. So I thought, you know, this is probably a good time for us to talk about when we have these setbacks, these failures, these disappointments, and how to handle them. And I’ll share my own story.
You know, recently I have been, I’m training for a faster half marathon to run a faster half marathon in the fall, and I’ve got, you know, a few months of training still to go, but I ended up with a weird like, uh, glute tendon, uh, issue that has set me back a little bit, and then when that started to get better, I ended up having this adductor pain that has really impacted my running, like running at all hurts a lot, and especially doing the faster training that I have been doing, like in, you know, high speed intervals, that kind of stuff, really makes that flare up.
And so I’ve had to take a little bit of time off, right? So I’m experiencing a little bit of a setback as well. And we look at these things a lot of times. A lot of people look at these setbacks, these failures, these disappointing things that happen, and they look at them as the end and a like the end of everything, like, you know, I’m never going to run again. This is the worst thing that could ever happen.
And I just want to share with you that it doesn’t have to be that way. We can learn how to handle these things and learn from them and actually come out the other side of these things better than where we are today, or even before we experience these setbacks or failures.
So the first thing I want you to understand is that failures, setbacks, disappointments, they are to be expected. So this is one of those things where people wish they didn’t happen, but honestly, life does not work that way. Have you ever had anything long term go perfectly well, like with no issues whatsoever? No, there’s always bumps along the road, always, always, always.
And so you have to expect that these things are going to happen. You know, I have this expectation that my training was going to go perfectly and there was going to be no issues whatsoever. And as soon as I had these little injuries flare up, I was reminded that we can never expect things to go perfectly, perfectly smoothly, right?
It’s kind of like the weight loss journey. You know, people think there should be this straight line from where your weight is today to where it should be, you know, six months from now, and it should just go down perfectly at a perfect angle, and there’s no bumps along that path, it’s just a straight line. And you know what? That is not reality.
The reality is is that line goes up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down, and does that forever, and hopefully it’s trending in the right direction. But you have to understand that there’s no such thing as just like smooth sailing when you’re talking about these big, complicated, long term goals.
You know, training for a marathon, right there? You’re talking about four months, five months, depending on the plan you’re on or just the running part, you know, just the training part, not to mention the time that goes into building the base and everything else.
Do you really think you’re never going to have a bad workout, or never going to have a failure, or never going to have any kind of setback? It’s just got to be something that we expect. It is part of the process.
So as soon as you accept this and you understand that failure, setbacks, disappointments, are going to happen, it makes it much easier to deal with them when they do happen, and we don’t tend to see them as the end of the world like this is not the end of anything. It’s just part of the process. You know, you have to fail in order to succeed, you know.
So, it’s one of those things where once you understand this, and once you accept the fact that they are going to happen, then it makes everything a lot easier. And you know, it’s one of those concepts where once we have acceptance of the way things are, like when you have an injury or, you know, something happens, and, you know, you get a cramp and you don’t your race doesn’t go the way you want it to, then once we have acceptance of that, it it eases the tension within us, like the inner turmoil that we experience.
We experience that inner turmoil because we think things should be different than they are. Right? I’m going to say that again, we experience inner turmoil because we think things should be different than they are. What if we just accepted that this is the way things are and it’s okay?
It’s okay that I have an injury right now. It’s okay that, you know, there’s a little bit of a, you know, setback in my training. It’s okay that I may not hit this goal that I have for my half marathon in November. It’s all okay.
The important thing is that I’m going to continue to show up for myself every single day no matter what. I’m going to continue to do what I need to do to stay on track, even though we have these disappointments. Okay.
The next thing I want to explain to you is that you need to learn how to increase your failure tolerance. So failure tolerance is where you learn how to fail with some toughness. You know, you learn how to tolerate failure and stop looking at it as the end of the world. You know?
So you when we fail, often we get good at failing. I know it sounds really weird to say that. It sounds kind of counterintuitive, but it’s actually a really good thing to learn how to be a good failure, you need to learn how to fail.
Well, you know, because, listen, if failure is part of the process, and we expect ourselves to fail, and we know that we might have to fail 10 times before we succeed, then every time you fail, it’s like, hey, I failed.
There’s one step closer to my goal because I had this setback or this disappointment or I failed. So, you know, we just have to understand that failure is part of the process, accept it and then learn how to get good at failing. You know, develop a little bit of a tougher skin around this, because when we have more failure tolerance, when we’re better at failing, failure or setbacks or disappointments or challenges are no longer the end all. It’s just part of the process, right?
We develop strength, we develop mental toughness, we develop resilience. You know, you become unstoppable when you develop failure tolerance, because there’s really no such thing as failure. You know, there’s only feedback. You know, there’s either you, you fail and you, you know, keep going, you fail, you keep going. You fail, you keep going, or you just quit. That’s the only way you can really fail is if you give up, right?
So it’s either succeed or quit. Which do you want for yourself? So you may not have hit your marathon PR. Big whoop, guess what? Try it next time there’s another marathon in a few months, there’s another marathon next spring, there’s another marathon next fall.
It took me a long time to, you know, reach certain goals for myself and in running, and I ran with some friends who, one friend in particular, who really struggled for years to break four hours in a marathon, that was her goal, and she couldn’t do it, couldn’t do it, couldn’t do it.
And then all of a sudden, like she’s one of the fastest people I know now, she stuck with it. She eventually, you know, hit that goal, and then just kept surpassing it and surpassing it. So the only way you can fail is if you give up. So don’t ever give up, right?
Increase your failure tolerance. Good. Get good at failing. The next thing that I want you to understand here is that you’re gonna have to learn from your failures. You have to learn what works and what doesn’t, and then you’re gonna have to course correct when you need to, like, sometimes you’re gonna learn some things and you need to make some changes.
Great, make the changes, and then try again, make the changes, and then keep moving forward. Life is a learning process, and it’s completely different for each one of us. So just keep that in mind that nobody you know does all of this stuff exactly the same way.
We all have to learn on our own. We all have to learn our own way of getting through these failures, setbacks and disappointments. So you gotta try something, and it may not work for you, that’s okay, you know, it’s like when it comes to, you know, learning what foods to eat that help you to, you know, get fat, adapted, lose weight, you know, have all the energy you need for running that is not something that is a one size fits all.
I’m just going to tell you that it is very different for each person that I work with. And so each person, they have to learn what works for them and what doesn’t. And the only way you can learn is to try some things, and sometimes they don’t work. Big whoop. So they don’t work. Okay, try something else.
And you know, one of these things is that people think that you know, that the first thing they try should work, or else they’re gonna quit. And if you have that attitude, that’s the wrong attitude to have. We’ll just say it that way.
Okay, the right attitude is that you have to try some things, and then some of these things will work and some of them won’t work, but you always have to learn from your failures, from your setbacks, you’re going to have some things happen, like, you know, cramping during a marathon.
It’s kind of a weird situation. What causes that? Is it a lack of electrolytes? Is it, you know, the way you’re training? Is it that you ran too hard the first half? Like, there’s a lot of factors to consider here, so you have to look at all those different things and then determine, like, yeah, maybe I could have done a better job with the electrolytes, or maybe I just went out too hard for the first 13 or 14 miles. You never know.
And then, like, you got to practice this stuff in your training, you know, make sure that you’re making some minor changes and seeing how they work for you. And then you got to try again next time. And there’s no guarantee that the next time you try something that that’s going to work either.
So I know it’s a tough thing to accept, but we have to accept that this is all a learning process, and as long as you’re learning from these setbacks, failures, disappointments, that’s the key right here. You have to learn from these things, because listen, these things all cause you to grow.
Every challenge is a chance for you to level up. It’s a chance for you to learn something new. It’s a chance for you to grow, to evolve, to become more. It’s these challenges that change us. You don’t grow by, say, staying safe and small and never trying anything big or never failing.
You grow by pushing yourself out of your comfort zone by going for those big goals. It’s only through facing and enduring failures that you become the person that you want to become the most badass version of you is out there on the other side of failures and setbacks and disappointments and challenges. You just got to get there.
You got to get through all that stuff in order to get to the other side. So don’t look at these failures and stuff as the end. Look at it as a springboard to growth for you, okay, and listen through this whole process, you have to have your own back.
You cannot succeed in running your fastest marathon, losing weight and keeping it off, training for an ultra marathon, if you’re constantly beating yourself up every time you go off your food plan, or every time you have a bad training run, or every time you don’t hit a PR in a race, you cannot beat yourself up over this stuff. You have to you can’t hate yourself to your goals like you have to love yourself through this whole process, even when you do something dumb and you cheat, or you get lazy, or you don’t show up for yourself, you know, or you stay on the couch and binge watch Netflix instead of training like you’re supposed, who cares?
None of that stuff matters. We all do stuff like that sometimes, but you have to learn how to build trust in yourself and build a strong relationship with yourself and build confidence in yourself. So that’s why I always talk about making a plan, and it’s so important that we make a solid plan and then we stick to that plan.
We make a plan and we stick to the plan. That’s how you build trust in yourself. That’s how you build confidence in yourself. That’s how you make progress, and when you’re beating yourself up constantly, you’re just grinding yourself down. You’re not building trust in yourself. You’re breaking down the trust in yourself.
You’re not building a strong relationship with yourself. You’re breaking that relationship down. You’re not building confidence. You’re losing confidence. Sense. So you got to have your own back. Gotta love yourself through this whole process. Yeah, learn from your mistakes.
Okay, listen, what did I do that I could have done better, you know, and then go from there. But don’t beat yourself up about it. It’s great that you are introspective and you want to learn and stuff like that, but don’t, you know, beat yourself up and hate on yourself through this process. That doesn’t work.
And this might sound a little counterintuitive, but stop focusing on the end result. Instead focus on the process of change. Because when you commit to the process, and this is different for each person, whatever that looks like for you.
But you have to commit to what you need to do each day. So if that’s, you know, okay, I’m gonna run my fastest marathon instead of, you know, focusing on the end result. This is the time I need to see on the clock. Focus on what you need to do every single day to get you there because when you commit to the work, and you’ll fail along the way, and that’s okay, all of that stuff is expected.
It’s normal, right? It’s part of the process. We’re going to learn from all that stuff, but when we commit to doing the daily work, we will eventually get there. Yeah, it’s important to have that goal out there in the future, but commit to what you’re doing each and every day. That’s what’s going to get you there. That’s what’s going to help you to stay on track. Okay?
And then the last bit of this is that you really need to work on reframing these things, these setbacks, these failures, these disappointments. You got to stop looking at them as the end or as the worst thing that could possibly happen, you know. And one way of reframing is to stop asking yourself terrible questions and start asking yourself more positive questions. And I’ll give you an example here. So terrible questions are questions like this.
Why does this always happen to me? Why am I such a failure? Why can I ever do anything right? How come I never stick to my plan? Why is this so hard for me? Why can’t I ever catch a break? Okay, I’ll tell you why these are terrible questions.
When you ask yourself a question, your brain will go to work to find answers for those questions. Your brain immediately goes to work when you ask yourself a question inside your own brain, your brain says, Ah, let me go find an answer to that. So when you say, Why am I such a failure, your brain will go to work and find all kinds of reasons why you are such a failure. Does this help you at all? No, it does not.
Spoiler alert, it does not help you at all. You’re just beating yourself up when you ask yourself, like, why is this so hard for me? Your brain is going to go to work finding the answer. Why is this so hard? Well, here’s all the reasons why this is so hard for you Patrick, right. This is not helpful at all. Do not ask these dumb questions. All right, these are disempowering questions.
They relinquish you of your power. They caused you to play the victim, like you’re just looking for someone or something to blame. And so you go outside yourself, and you’re looking for answers like, you know, why is this so hard? How come I can never catch a break? And this is just negativity, negativity multiplied and disempowering. It doesn’t help you at all. Don’t ask dumb questions like that of yourself.
Instead, we want to look at how we can reframe our setbacks, our failures, our disappointments. And so I want you to ask yourself better questions. Here are some better questions you can start asking yourself, why am I making this mean about me? Like, what’s the story I’m telling myself about this setback or failure or disappointment? What’s good about this problem?
This is one of my favorite questions. You can ask yourself, What’s good about this problem? Because it’s something that sounds pretty counterintuitive, like it’s a problem. Of course, there’s nothing good, but there’s always ways that you can reframe a problem and start to look at it in the positive, and you can actually look at the silver lining.
Stop focusing on the cloud, and start focusing on the silver lining. What is good about this problem? There’s always something you can find. What can I learn from this? You know? What can I do to change this conversation.
What’s another way of looking at this failure, this setback, this disappointment, what am I willing to do or not do in order to make this work, in order to get through this? What can I do to turn this around? What can I do to get back on track right away? What’s my very next step towards improving this? What am I going to do differently next time? These are powerful questions.
These are empowering questions, because when you start to ask yourself stuff like, what’s good about this problem, your brain goes to work looking for answers. What can I learn about this? How can I change this? What am I going to do differently next time? What’s my next step towards improving this situation?
These are amazing questions to ask yourself. What’s another way of looking at this? Great questions, because you’re going to start to look at things much differently. You’re going to start to be able to reframe failure setbacks, you’re going to start to look at these disappointments not as the end of the world, but it’s just part of the process, and something that you can actually learn from and grow from.
You can become more, you can absolutely still crush your goals. These setbacks are usually just small little moments in time. You know, this injury that I’m dealing with right now, it’s getting better. You know, it’s been a couple of weeks where I’ve had to take time off of running. I’ve run, like, once in two weeks, and I gotta tell you, not super stoked about that, like, I’m not super happy that I’m not running right now.
I love running. It’s my happy place. It feels good. You know? And I know that my training has taken a little bit of a step back, and it’s okay. It’s a small amount of time, really, a few weeks, in the grand scheme of things, not a big deal. You know, when I look at how many years I’ve been running, and all the marathons I’ve run, over 20 marathons. I don’t know how many halves and Ultras and all these other events that I’ve done.
And I look at all of this stuff, and I’ve, I’ve dealt with knee injuries and other types of injuries that had me dropping out of races. You know, or not being able to run them, or not being able to run a marathon that season because of an injury. I’ve had all that stuff happen to me, and I’m still at it, I’m still running, and I’m still healthy, and I still feel amazing, and I still love running.
So look at these things as you know, just minor, little setbacks, little blips on the radar, that when you look back on them, they’re no big, they’re not a big deal. They’re not that big of a deal, you know, and sometimes they are a little bit of a bigger deal, and that’s okay too, you know, if you got to take a few months off or whatever, like, all of this stuff is fine, like it is all fine, just think about it that way. Okay, start reframing what this stuff means to you. And I know, as always, that you absolutely got this. Right? Love you all, keep on Running Lean and I’ll talk to you soon.
So many people I talk to about losing weight or running faster tell me they just can’t seem to make any progress because they feel stuck. This is a really tough place to be because when you feel …
Continue Reading about 237. What to Do When You Feel Stuck →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there and welcome to episode 237 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, what to do when you feel stuck. So many people I talk to about losing weight or running faster tell me they just can’t seem to make any progress because they feel stuck, and this is a really tough place to be, because when you feel stuck.
It’s like there’s nothing you can do to get out of it. You feel like nothing’s ever gonna work. You get discouraged. You feel defeated. And what do you do when you feel defeated? You give up, you quit. Why bother eating right? If you’re never going to lose weight, why bother doing the speed work, if I’m never gonna break four hours in the marathon?
But listen, there’s a better way to approach these things. So today, what to do when you feel stuck so that you can get back on track, making progress toward your goals. But first, if you want to get leaner or stronger or run faster or longer, you need to change what you do. Doing the same things will not get you new results. Nothing changes. If nothing changes, right?
The real secret, though, is doing these new things consistently. You know, if you decide you want to get stronger so you go to the gym once a month, that’s not going to get you very far. You need to adopt new behaviors and start doing them consistently. And this is where coaching really helps, trying to stay on track yourself.
It can be difficult, I know, because I’ve tried it like a million times, it never worked for me. You know, I’d start something, I’d do it for a bit, I’d go right back to doing the same old stuff, and I never really made any progress. But once I got a coach, everything changed. I had somebody there guiding me every step of the way, holding me accountable, calling me out when I started slipping back into old behaviors.
Most importantly, I had someone there that was in my corner that was never, ever, ever going to let me quit. So if you’re ready to start doing some new things, and you want to make sure you’re doing them consistently, and you want somebody there to make sure you never quit, let’s do this. Let’s get this done together. We can do it together.
It’s hard to do it on your own, but we can do it together. So just go to my website, runningleancoaching.com, click on Work With Me, and I’ll show exactly how to become the most badass version of yourself, yet cool. Okay, what to do when you feel stuck.
So the reason I want to talk about this today is because so many people that I talk to, they tell me that they feel stuck, that being stuck is why they aren’t making any progress towards their goals. You know, being stuck, I’m stuck, so this is never going to work for me, or they feel stuck, and so they don’t even feel like starting something new, especially, right? It’s a huge problem. And I mean, we’ve all felt like this at some point in our lives, right? We felt stuck.
For me, a time that I remember feeling stuck is when I was trying to lose weight some years ago, and nothing was working for me, and I was running a bunch at the time, I was training for some ultra marathons that year, so I was running a ton, and I was following, you know, some advice from whatever professionals, elite runners, whatever it was, it wasn’t working for me. Whatever I tried didn’t work.
And I was actually gaining weight in the process, right? This is what it felt like to feel stuck. Because I was gaining weight, I was doing all these things, they weren’t working, and I felt stuck. So maybe you’ve felt stuck at some point. Maybe you felt stuck trying to run faster. You know you’re not making any progress. You’re not getting faster.
Let’s say you want to run a sub four marathon, or a sub two half marathon, or whatever. It doesn’t matter. But season after season, you keep trying. You sign up for races, you do the work, and then you can’t get there, right? You just keep coming up short. You know?
You train, and then you show up for this race, and you’re okay, this is going to be the time, and you’re like a 4:04, or something like that, right? It’s disappointing, you know? So you decide that you’re just stuck and you’re just never going to get faster. You have to understand something though, that like these things are going to take time, right?
The reality is that things like losing weight or running faster. They do not happen overnight. It is a long process, and progress can be slow or seem slow. So you have to commit to this process. You have to show up for yourself every single day and commit to the process of change every single day. It’s like a recommitment every day you wake up and you have to go, okay, I’m committed to staying on track again today, no matter what.
And listen, it may take months or years to reach these kinds of goals. Are you okay with that? Because guess what, you have to be, because if you’re not okay with that, you’re going to give up. At some point, you’re going to quit. If you’re not committed to the process of change, you will eventually feel stuck, and you will quit.
You will give in, and you definitely will not reach your goals at that point. So here’s what feeling stuck is, it’s really that it’s a feeling, right? You’re never actually stuck. This is really important. The feeling of being stuck, it’s an emotional state that you’re in.
And if you feel stuck, it’s because you put yourself into that emotional state you got into this emotional state of feeling stuck. That’s all it is. And listen, what I’m about to talk about is going to help you a lot, because once you understand how you got there, the feeling of stuck, stuckness, feeling stuck, once you understand how you got there, it’s then you can see the path out of it. Okay?
So there’s a couple of ways that we get ourselves into this emotional state of feeling stuck, and there’s three that come to mind. The first one is this, you continually let yourself down. So listen, in order to accomplish any big goal, it takes consistency, right you have to continually do the right things over and over and over and over and over again, like sticking with your meal plan, you have to do that every day no matter what, until you reach your goal.
I talk a lot about planning ahead, and this is on a recent episode I did, number 233, the Power of Planning Ahead. Definitely listen to that one if you haven’t checked it out yet. But the the way we do this is you plan ahead, and then so you make a plan for what you’re going to eat.
Let’s say you you do this 24 hours in advance, and then you follow through with that plan tomorrow. That’s it. That’s how you do it. And you rinse and repeat that every single day. This is how you’re going to eventually reach your goal. It’s in these tiny little moments of decision that you make every single day for a long, long time, tiny little moments of decision that add up to big change to big results. Okay, so that’s the way we do it.
But here’s what most people do. They make a plan, and then they don’t follow through with that plan. And so in that situation, what are you doing? You are letting yourself down. And when you do this over and over again, you start to really break down the trust that you’re trying to build in yourself, because you don’t trust yourself anymore.
Like, I can’t trust myself to stick to my plan. Look at me, I failed again. You know, I didn’t do what I said I was going to do again. And that really like, shakes your confidence. You lose tons of confidence when you do that. And then you begin to think, this is never gonna work for me, but you know what that is? Just a lie that you keep telling yourself because you’re full of guilt and shame and remorse over not doing what you said you would do.
You’re not in integrity with yourself, so you have to stop doing this. This is a vicious cycle to be in, and this is what leads to feeling stuck and giving up on yourself. So when you constantly let yourself down, you break confidence and trust in yourself.
You lose confidence, then you feel stuck and you feel like there’s nothing you can do to get out of it, so why bother? And this is what why people quit. And when you’re feeling that way, when you’re feeling defeated, and you know you don’t trust yourself anymore, you lack confidence, you’re definitely not doing the right things. You’re not taking aligned action, those are the things that are going to get you to your goals right.
So if your progress grinds to a halt, and yeah, you’re gonna you’re gonna be stuck, and you actually will feel stuck, and you will actually not be making progress, and most people at that point will quit. All right, so you have to stop letting yourself down, stay in integrity with yourself. Say you’re gonna do something, then do it. Make a plan, follow through with the plan, and show up for yourself every single day.
So that’s number one. Number two is that for a lot of people, progress can be slow, and this is another way that we tell ourselves we’re stuck when we’re really not. So remember what I said earlier about like losing weight or running faster? These things take time. They take a long time.
Most people are not okay with this. They say they’re okay with this. They’re like, oh yeah, I get it, Patrick, I know it’s gonna take a while, but when we actually get into doing the work, so maybe I’m working with somebody, and at the beginning of the process, I say, listen, you know, it’s a little bit different for each person. This is gonna take a while.
I don’t know how long it’s gonna take for you, three months, six months a year. I don’t know. You know, let’s say you have 50 pounds to lose. I don’t know how long that’s going to take. Everybody’s so different, different metabolisms, different lifestyles, different people’s, you know, stick to things differently. You know, different people are more committed than others, whatever, more people, some people are more disciplined than others.
But anyway, I’ll get them on a meal plan, and they might doing they might start doing that pretty regularly, and they’re doing okay, and they might see some results, but then, if they don’t see results fast enough, you know, or immediately, then things aren’t changing. They’re like, I’m stuck, and you know what? I get it.
It’s a tough thing to accept that you got to do all this hard work every single day, but the payoff is like way later. That’s tough for us, especially in the world we live in today. You know, waiting for results. You know, waiting committing to something and knowing that the results are going to be way off in the distance.
That’s a tough sell for a lot of people, because we’re a society that’s been trained to expect things now. You know, Amazon has same day delivery. UberEATS delivers food to your couch in minutes. You know, sometimes every movie or song you’ve ever wanted to watch or listen to, it’s instantly downloadable to your phone wherever you are, right?
So we are not a society that likes to wait for things, you know, like, for me, if I’m buying something online and the shipping is like, oh, this is gonna take, like, a week or 10 days, I’m like, I don’t know if I really want that, right? I mean, it’s ridiculous to think that way.
Funny, recently I bought a couch. I can’t remember last time I bought a couch. I think it was in 2010 was the last time I bought a couch, right? So I think I was due for a new couch. And I love this couch. It’s beautiful. And I went into the store and I saw it, and I sat in it and all that good stuff. And I’m like, Okay, I want this couch. And this was back in May. It was like, May the 11th, is the day that I ordered this couch.
And they’re like, you know, I sign all these papers and pay for it and everything. And they’re like, okay, let’s kind of talk about the shipping. I’m like, cool, you know, I’m available this weekend or whatever. They’re like, oh no, it’s not going to be ready until the middle of July. And I was like, Wait a minute. What now? I had to wait two months for this couch. Actually, I haven’t even got it yet today as I’m recording this.
It’s July 11, so it’s been exactly two months since I ordered this couch. Still not here. I’ll keep you posted on that. I’ll tell you when I get the couch. But I had to really think about this. After I did all this stuff and I signed the papers and I paid for it and everything, I was like, I don’t know if I want this now, because it’s gonna take so long to get here.
And in the grand scheme of things, is two months, really that big of a deal? No, but I’ve been sitting on this jinky old couch forever, and I’m like, I just want this new couch. Like, it’s ridiculous, but this is anyway, this is the world we live in right now. Right? Everything we want it now, right?
So when it comes to things like losing weight, it takes time if you want to run a faster marathon or qualify for Boston or, you know, break two hours and a half, whatever it is, it’s gonna take some time. How much time? Well, that’s the cool part, because we don’t know. That’s the fun part. It’s different for everyone. Nobody really knows.
So this goes back to what I said earlier, about committing to the process of change. So so many people I talk to will say, oh, yeah, I want to lose 30 pounds by, you know, September 1 or whatever. I’m like, okay, let’s just take that date off the table right now, because I we don’t know is how long it’s going to take. Now we can make some progress between now and then, absolutely, but I don’t think, I don’t know if you’re going to get to that goal in that amount of time. Like, who knows?
So we’ve got to come into the process of change, and it doesn’t matter how long it takes, six months a year, three years. Does not matter. What matters is that you’ve chosen to live your life in a healthy way. You’re always improving little by little, day by day. And remember, it’s in these tiny, little moments of progress every single day that add up to really big change. Okay? So we have to understand that progress can be slow. Don’t take that as a sign that you’re stuck, because you’re not stuck. Just accept the fact that progress is slow and commit to the process.
The third way that we can really feel like we’re stuck is that we misunderstand failure. So one of the things I talk a lot about with clients is that we have to change our definition of failure if you want to avoid feeling stuck. So let me ask you this, what do you think of when you think of failure? It’s like the end, right? Like you failed and so you’re done.
That’s what most people think of failure as, or they think of it as, like, I am a failure, like I did not succeed at this. So I am a failure like this is never going to work. I’m always going to fail. And we look at failure as such a huge negative thing. We look at it as like the worst thing, really?
Oh, and there’s a big reason why a lot of people will not even start stuff because they’re afraid of failing, right? That’s crazy, because, listen, failing is just part of the process. It’s part of the process of succeeding, right? So when I was in junior high, it was like ninth grade. I was not the best student. I effed off a bunch. I really didn’t care.
All I cared about was dorking around with my friends and girls like, that’s all I really cared about. And I got, like, mostly C’s, a few D’s, and then in one class at the end of the year, I ended up getting an F in algebra, ninth grade algebra, I got an F, and I was like, oh, my God. I was devastated, and I felt like such a huge loser, so I kind of deemed myself as a failure.
I figured my parents were going to kill me. First of all, I’m never going to graduate from high school. I’m a stupid, dumb loser. And listen, is any of that stuff true? No. But does thinking these terrible things help us at all? No. So how do you think I felt with that kind of a mindset? Well, I felt like I was completely stuck, like I can’t do math. I’m never going to be good at math. I can never get it. Why bother trying?
By the way, happy ending to that story, I took summer school that year. I got my grade up to where I needed to be, so I didn’t have to retake that the next year or whatever. I did graduate from high school. My parents did, in fact, not kill me, which is awesome. And I ended up not being a stupid, dumb loser. I’m actually, I’ve turned out to be pretty awesome and smart.
Okay, so failure is part of the process. It’s never the end. We have to just accept this, right? Failure never means the end, and it never, ever means that you are a failure. It just means you tried something and didn’t work. Okay, so try something else or try that again. Failing is part of the process, and you have to commit to failing if you eventually want to succeed.
Failure is inevitable. It will happen. You will go off your food plan. You’ll have a terrible workout. You won’t PR that marathon that you’ve been training for. Your progress might go in the wrong direction. You might gain weight. You might actually get slower. You know what? It’s all okay. Embrace failure for what it is. It’s part of the learning process. Every success is built upon a big old pile of failures.
All right, so stop seeing failure as the end. Stop seeing failure as I’m stuck. Start seeing it as just another step towards success. That’s it. That’s all it is. So the bottom line here, with all this today, you are never stuck. Being stuck is just an emotional state that you are putting yourself into. And so what do you do when you feel stuck? The way out is to stop letting yourself down.
You’ve got to start building trust and integrity with yourself instead. And when you do that, when you do what you say you’re going to do, you build confidence in yourself. You make progress. And then you you want to keep doing that. Get out of that vicious cycle of letting yourself down and feeling terrible.
Get into the cycle of building that trust and integrity with yourself doing what you said you’re going to do, and building that motivation to keep going. Number two, accept the fact that progress will be slow. That’s okay. Progress can be slow. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. The important thing is that you are committed to the process of change and that you’re in this right? There’s no finish line to being healthy. It’s not a destination we’re trying to get to. It’s how we live our life. Period, okay? And then, number three, you got to reframe failure, stop seeing it as the end, and just start seeing it as just one more thing that you learned that maybe didn’t work on the road to eventually reaching your big goals and eventually being successful. Okay, you got this. Love you all, keep on Running Lean and I will talk to you soon.
When it comes to creating healthy habits that last, the real key is consistency. You have to take consistent, aligned action if you want to create behavior patterns that get you results. And the …
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 233 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners and today, The Power of Planning Ahead. So when it comes to creating healthy habits that actually last, the real key is going to be consistency.
You have to take consistent aligned action if you want to create new behavior patterns that get you new results, and the key to taking consistent, aligned action is planning ahead. So in this episode of the podcast, you’re going to learn the power of planning ahead and why you need to be practicing this right now.
But first, if you’ve been thinking about improving your health, losing some weight, improving your running getting stronger, and you want some help, some guidance, some support to help get you there, consider coaching.
The fact is, coaching works where a lot of these other methods fail because it’s not about some particular method. It’s about figuring out what works for you as an individual and teaching you how to do this stuff on your own.
You have to be able to know what to eat and know intuitively how to do all this stuff on your own. At some point, you shouldn’t need a coach. You should be able to do it on your own. If you’ve worked with a coach in the past, and at the end of that coaching relationship, you had no idea what to do, then that wasn’t a good coaching relationship. That’s not the way I do things.
The way I do things is I teach you how to make good decisions. Understand why you’re doing what you’re doing, and then teach you how to make this sustainable for you. It has to be sustainable for you.
So if you want to just hit the easy button on all this stuff you want help, the support, the guidance, the knowledge, all of that stuff. Consider coaching. Go to my website, runningleancoaching.com, click on Work With Me, and I will show you exactly how to become the most badass version of yourself to date. Cool.
Okay, so today I’m talking about the power of planning ahead. And I’m actually going to share something with you guys. I don’t know that I’ve ever done this before, but I’m going to share with you a group coaching call that we did this week.
So a couple times a week, we hold a group coaching call, and each month we pick a topic, and the month of June here in 2024 we are talking about building and maintaining healthy habits. And everything that goes into creating habits, everything that goes into practicing good habits, you know, kind of getting rid of old habits and replacing those with new habits.
And one of the keys to creating good habits is the topic we’re talking about here tonight, which is the power of planning ahead. And I really liked our call the other night, and so I’m going to share with you my teaching portion of that call, and then, so this is, like, the first half, I do some teaching, and then the second half we, everybody gets a chance to kind of share and talk about things.
I’m not going to play that part of it for you guys, but I definitely want to play the first part of this where I talk about planning ahead. So you’ll get a little bit of a look behind the curtain, so to speak, of how we, you know, we do our group coaching calls and what at least the teaching portion would look like. So I hope you enjoy this one. If you have any questions about anything, reach out to me. I’m always here for you. Okay, enjoy.
Okay, so let’s get into planning ahead. So this is something that we talk about a lot, and I know that we have all talked about this before, and that’s okay. We’re going to keep talking about it because it is one of the core tenants of what makes this work, what makes any kind of long-term change work.
So habits are all about consistency. You know, doing things consistently. And so planning ahead is one of the best things that you could do, one of the most powerful things that you can do to start practicing consistency. How many of you guys have a workout schedule that is planned in advance? And you stick to it every day. Yeah, most of us do, right? How many people here? I hope everybody raised their hand on this one.
Have a food plan that’s planned ahead and you stick to it every day. Okay, good, good. So, okay, that’s because we talk about it a lot, but it is one of the most powerful ways of building good habits. Okay? And most people, believe it or not, they don’t do that. They don’t practice the consistency with the food part of things.
They’re really good with the workouts, you know, the running, whatever. Oh yeah, I got my strength sessions. I go to this gym class. I go and do my speed work. I know when I’m doing my long run. I know all that ahead of time. I’ve got my whole training schedule planned out until the the half marathon I’m training for, like, you know in advance what you’re doing.
And the reason we plan all that stuff in advance is because it works, and it’s how you stay on track with those things, you know, and so when it comes to changing our habits around food, it’s especially important to plan ahead. Now this does not mean you have to plan months in advance.
I did work with one person who loved to plan like a month of food at a time, like she planned every meal for a month at a time. Don’t recommend doing that, but if you want to, that’s perfectly fine, if that’s what floats your boat. I love the 24-hour rule, which is just saying we need to plan at least 24 hours in advance, but you know, a few days, or even if you’re somebody that likes to plan a week at a time from a meal perspective, that’s fine, whatever works for you, whatever feels manageable for you.
Remember the key to all of this, the key to long-term change, is to do these things that are sustainable for you. You know you got to get into practicing things that are sustainable for you. And if planning out a week’s of worth of meals at a time, or meal prepping is too overwhelming for you, like, I don’t really do that.
I kind of know what I’m doing most days and so and then those days where I where I don’t have a set plan, I know kind of what I’m doing. Like, you know we might be going out to dinner or something like that, and I know where we’re going, and so that I do kind of know what I’m doing in those days too, but usually I know a couple of days in advance what I’m doing, and I don’t plan a whole week at a time, and I certainly don’t do much in the way of meal prepping ahead of time, because I don’t, I just, I just never done that, you know.
And so that works for me. You need to figure out what works for you, and that’s what we’re going to be talking about here. But listen, the planning ahead thing is very important, and I’m going to explain why it works, because this is one of the keys that we’re going to be working with here, which is, you know, we have this part of our brain that is called the amygdala that is like our fight or flight center. It’s our fear center.
It’s one of the most primitive parts of our brain, a lot of times jokingly, but kind of seriously. We call it the lizard brain. So that’s that unevolved part of our brain that is reactionary, and it is a part of our brain that is responsible for our primal drives. You know, we just that part of our brain just wants whatever feels good in the moment.
You know, it’s responsible for our drive and for, you know, eating junk food and, you know, whatever like, we just want to feel good. Now, that’s the part of our brain that’s driving that. And it’s, you know, it’s interesting, because as human beings, you know, we needed to find things that were pleasurable, like we needed to procreate in order to, you know, to evolve and to maintain our status as a as a species.
And so that was something that was important to us. We had to find somebody to procreate with, right? And the same thing goes for calories and certain types of carbohydrates and things like that, where we needed those things in order to survive, we needed to remember where those things were, and they had to bring us pleasure, you know, so food is one of those things that we evolved to find and enjoy, and it brings us a lot of pleasure because of that amygdala.
Okay, well, the amygdala is also responsible. You know when put it in today’s terms for impulse decisions. You know where you’re maybe your impulse buying. You know, they put that stuff at the grocery store that’s right by the checkout. So when you’re standing there looking over, you’re like, oh, that looks really good. I’m just going to buy that thing right there. You had no intention of getting that until you saw it. That’s your amygdala at work, just wanting to feel good right now.
So the amygdala is responsible for you chasing pleasure, wanting to feel good, avoiding pain, avoiding discomfort, chasing comfort, seeking the familiar, all of those things. So we don’t want to rely on our amygdala it to make our decisions around food, because if we do, we are in trouble, because we’re just going to be going for whatever looks good in the moment.
Instead, we want to use that different part of our brain, that more evolved part of our brain called the prefrontal cortex. And that is that part of our brain that is responsible for, you know, organized thought, for planning ahead, for making decisions ahead of time, for, you know, being logical and rational.
So when you sit down, for example, one of the things I recommend is that you guys take pen to paper, and you can do this in the evening. You can write your food plan down the night before. That’s an easy way to do it, it’ll take you five minutes, but when you sit down and you start thinking about what you’re going to do tomorrow, you’re not using your amygdala.
You are using your prefrontal cortex in that moment when you do that, you are making good decisions. You’re making decisions based on your long term goals. You’re making decisions that you know are good for you. So we’re like in a much more clear headed space when we’re using our prefrontal cortex to make our decisions.
So that’s why we want to do these things ahead of time. When we make a decision ahead of time, when we write down our plan in advance, and we take pen to paper and physically write it down, we’re kind of cementing that into our subconscious, that that idea that tomorrow I’m eating, you know, eggs for breakfast, I’m having, you know, chicken and broccoli for dinner tomorrow. Like it can be that simple.
You can just write something down like that, but when you do that, you’re thinking ahead of time. You are making good decisions. You’re making decisions that are based on your long term goals, and then you’re also much more likely to stick to that plan because you have thought about it ahead of time you have committed it to paper, so you wrote it down yourself.
You’re writing with your hand. You’re looking at the words with your eyes, so you’re thinking about it, you’re seeing it, you’re writing it out, and all of those things just cement that idea into your subconscious mind.
So really, any habit that you want to create for yourself, this is how you do it. You need to, you know, create a plan ahead of time. You need to write it down, and then you need to just execute that plan the next day. Okay, so that’s the gist of all this. This is why this is so important. This is why we we do it this way.
So when it comes to your running schedule, you’ve kind of already done that, I would assume. I would encourage you to do the same thing for your weight training sessions and for your food, because those are the areas where we need to focus on consistency.
And I talk to a lot of people who say things like, oh, I just haven’t been really consistent with my weight training, for example. Okay, well, you know, well, are you consistent with your running? Oh, yeah, I’ve got a plan. It’s all written down. And I just, you know, do that every week, and I stick to those training plans, no matter what.
Okay, well, just do the same thing for your workouts. You know, do the same thing for your strength training. It’s that simple. Do the same thing for your food. Just make it that important to you.
You know, we prioritize things. Sometimes we say, like, oh, training for my marathon is important. So that’s like, number one. And the strength training, I’ll just kind of put, you know, down here, like number six, you know. And the food can be like, I don’t know, five, whatever. Like, we’re not making a priority.
But if this is what you want for yourself, if you really want to change, and you really want to, you know, lose the weight and get healthy and make these long term changes, these lifestyle changes, then commit ahead of time to doing these things. Because when you commit to doing them, and you fulfill that commitment, you start to build a lot of trust in yourself.
This is another part of this that is really important, because every time you say you’re going to do something, and then you don’t do it. What happens? You feel like you let yourself down. You kind of break down that trust in yourself, because you made this promise to yourself and then you broke the promise to yourself. Yeah, and you can justify it, you know, we’ve got all kinds of stories and reasons why, you know it didn’t work out, or why I didn’t, but you know what?
Think about it this way, would you let down your partner or your kids or your best friend? Would you want to break a promise that you made to those people in your life. Chances are no and chances are you don’t do that, unless it’s, you know, there’s really some sort of an emergency or something like that. But when you do let somebody down like that, it doesn’t feel good.
You know, when you do say you’re going to do something and you aren’t able to do that, or you you don’t follow through with that, it doesn’t feel good. And so we do the same thing to ourselves, though all the time. We’re constantly letting ourselves down. We’re constantly making promises to ourselves and then not fulfilling those promises.
And every time you do that, you break a little bit of trust with yourself, and you start to lose confidence in yourself. This is where it gets a little bit you go into a little bit of a decline. You go into a little bit of a spiral, because you start to lose confidence, you start to feel bad about yourself because you keep letting yourself down, you’re unmotivated, and you just don’t feel like doing it anymore.
Anybody been there before? We all have it’s normal. We’ve all been there. So the alternative is like, you gotta not get into that spiral. You can’t get into that spiral. So we plan ahead, we stick to the plan. We plan ahead, we stick to the plan. When you do that, you start to build trust in yourself. You start to create more confidence. You start getting results too. You start to see, like, Oh, this is actually working, because I’m sticking with it. I’m doing these things consistently. And then you start to be more motivated to want to keep going. And then you get into that cycle.
You get into that spiral of like, that’s an upward spiral right where you building more and more confidence, more and more trust in yourself. You’re getting better and better results. You’re feeling more and more motivated. You’re more much more likely to stick with it. And all it takes is that, planning ahead, sticking to the plan. Plan ahead and stick to the plan. You guys with me on this so far? Yeah, it’s important.
Okay, so how do we do it? Just write down what you’re doing tomorrow. Make sure it’s at least 24 hours in advance, if you can. Or you know, if you do it the night before, and you know it’s you’re going to go to sleep and then you wake that’s fine. If it’s, you know, whatever, 12 hours or whatever. We just want to make sure that you are doing these things ahead of time and not in the moment. We’re not making decisions in the moment. We want to make our decisions ahead of time.
So write down what you’re doing, okay? And I just, I make a little check, check box on my on my notebook here, I just, you know, make a little I make circles like a little bubble, right? And I and I write what I’m doing next to it, and then that little circle that I made is where I check it off after I’ve done it. So I make a little circle and I say, here’s what I’m eating for lunch tomorrow. Here’s what I’m eating for dinner. Here’s what my run looks like tomorrow, here’s what my workout is tomorrow.
And then I’ve usually got a couple other things I add on there that I want to get done. Could be work related stuff, you know, I got to pay this bill, or, you know, pay these taxes, or whatever it is, like, I’ll put down, you know, a couple things like that too. So I’m thinking about, okay, what do I want to do tomorrow? And I’m writing down those things that are important to me that I want to get done.
And then the food thing is very important part of that. And then what I do is I wake up in the morning and I have a look at what I wrote down the night before, and I just kind of commit that to memory. Okay, here’s what I’m doing today. Oh yeah, oh yeah, I forgot. I needed to pay that bill. Okay, I’ll take care of that today.
And so I just take a look at what I’m doing. I’m like, okay, cool, I’ve got this plan, and this is what I’m doing today, and then I just do it. I execute. And then that night, you know, after I’ve done all those things, I open up my notebook again, and I start to write down my stuff for that I’m going to do tomorrow. And at the same time, I kind of check off the things that I did today. Okay, yes, I paid that bill. Yes, I did that strength workout I said I was going to do, yes, I did the what I said I was going to eat for lunch. This is what I said I was going to do for dinner. Yes, I did that.
Sometimes there are things that I don’t do, you know, I didn’t get to that, paid that bill, or whatever it was, and then I have to, you know, add it to the next day, and I have to say, like, okay, I have to think about this. Like, why didn’t I do that? Oh, it’s because I got sidetracked and I got, you know, had this other meeting that I had to go to, or whatever. Like, I, you know, sometimes it’s stuff that I really don’t have control over.
Sometimes I’m just like, oh, I totally forgot to do that or whatever. So we want to pay attention to what we’re doing. We want to make this little list ahead of time. We want to review that list in the morning, and then at night.
We want to, like, kind of review our day and then give yourself some kudos for doing these things right. It’s like, celebrate the win, celebrate the things that you’re doing well, kind of like we do here on these calls.
You know, we always want to talk about wins, what’s working, what’s going well. We do that because it helps us to feel like things are going well, and we want to pay attention to that stuff. So take a moment and just kind of check off the things you did. Well, give yourself a little gold star.
Somebody in this group was putting, actually bought a bunch of gold stars, and they were putting them on their notebook, which I thought was amazing, and then that’s what we do. So that is a very simple process that you can do, but you gotta do it and listen anytime somebody tells me, well, you know, the weight loss has sort of stalled for me a little bit.
The first question I asked him is, like, are you planning ahead? Oh, no, I sort of got out of the habit of doing that. Okay, do it again. Like, get back into the habit of doing that. It’s like the foundation. It’s the fundamental thing to do. When you’re doing that, things are going to start working for you, but you got to do it consistently.
Like that is like the the trigger, that trigger, that’s like a domino effect. You know, you you make that plan ahead of time, you’re much more likely to stack, stick to that plan. You’re much more likely to have consistency. You’re much more likely to keep the motivation going. You’re much more likely to continue getting results when you don’t, you know, topple that first domino when you don’t make your plan, a lot of other stuff doesn’t happen, right?
So get into the habit of doing this now. I will say this also, when I did this journey, like five years ago, I was very adamant about making a plan every single day. I think maybe we talked about this last week, I don’t know, but for like, eight months, I wrote my plan out every single day. I was logging everything. I was eating. I was, like, being very meticulous about it, because I was like, if I stop doing this, it’s going to stop working for me. You know, I was a little paranoid about that.
But after about eight months of being really strict about this, I started to ease up on myself, and I got to a place where I was comfortable enough doing this, where I didn’t need to make that plan every day. I want you all to get to that place eventually.
And I don’t know how long it’s going to take for you. It might be three months or six months or five months. It doesn’t really matter, but you got to have that consistency, and you’ve got to be so confident in yourself that you can do this that, you know, you don’t need to write that plan every day, but you can always go back to doing it.
I went back to doing my daily plan a couple of months ago because I was starting to see some, you know, negative results, you know. And I was like, wait a minute, I’m being a little too loosey goosey with the food thing here. I need to get back into just planning and sticking to the plant. And I did that, and everything is turned around, and I’m feeling amazing, and everything’s going really well.
My running has been really much better, too, because I’m planning the runs and things like that ahead of time. So we can always go back to this planning strategy, because it’s a it’s a very simple tactic that works really well. It’s very effective.
Okay, so I want everybody to commit to making that daily plan. Make your plan for at least tomorrow, and if you want to plan a couple days in advance, totally fine, to do that. Okay, one more thing I wanted to add to this before we move on is that some people like to use a food tracker, like a food tracking app, to track all your food because you want to pay attention to calories and macros, and you don’t have to do that.
But if you’re doing it right now because you just want to gather some data and understand what you’re doing that is perfectly fine. Or if you enjoy doing that, that’s perfectly fine. One pro tip I’ll give you, if you are somebody that wants to put your food into MyFitnessPal or Lose It, or CarB Manager or something like that, is to add your food to the app ahead of time.
It’s the same principle so you can write it down. I think that’s a good thing to do. But also on your phone, just write it, put those things, enter the food into your phone the day before. So instead of tracking after the fact, put it all in your phone the day before and get all your macros where you want them to be.
Because now you have control, because you get to decide what you’re going to do. So what I would do is I would just get all my food in the app, and then I would go, like, oh, I’m over with my carbs, so I’m going to adjust a little bit. And I would, you know, dork around with a little bit and play with like, oh, I’m going to take off two strawberries, or, you know, add some of this.
Whatever I would, you know, play around with the numbers until I got to the point where I was happy with the macros for the day, and then the next day, I could just look at the app and say, What am I eating today? Oh, I’m eating this for lunch. I’m eating this for dinner, and it’s good to go.
And I, you know, I, I’m not one that likes to measure stuff or, like, weigh my food, but I was like, eyeballing it, and I could go, that’s like two cups of broccoli and that’s like a eight ounces of chicken or whatever. Like, I just kind of knew what I was getting into from that standpoint. But if you want to weigh your food, that’s completely fine too. If you want to measure perfectly, fine.
But if you’re adding food to an app, do it ahead of time, get your numbers right, and then just work that plant. It’s very easy to do it that way, because a lot of times what happens is, you get to the end of the day and you’re like, oh, I better put my food in my app, and you start putting it in there, like, oh, I’m way over in this or I didn’t get enough of that, and now what are you going to do? Like, it because you can’t undo that, right?
Or you find yourself like, I’m kind of full, but I didn’t eat enough calories today. I better go eat some food. Like, don’t do that. We don’t want to get into this place where we’re overeating. Just to hit some number on your app, you never want to do that. But that’s just a little pro tip for you guys.
Okay, any questions about planning ahead? This is key. Okay, it’s one of the most important things you guys are going to do. It’s one of the most powerful things you’re going to do. Get into the habit. If I can say anything, I’m going to stress, especially for you guys, get into the habit of making that plan every single day. It takes five minutes if that write it down every single day. Get into that habit. Okay, cool, and that’s all I got for you today. Love you all. Keep on Running Lean and I will talk to you soon.
One of the big keys to achieving anything significant in your life - losing weight and keeping it off, running a marathon - is confidence. Being confident that you can accomplish something big will …
Continue Reading about 229. How to Have More Confidence Now →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 229 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners and today, How To Have More Confidence Now. So one of the biggest keys to achieving anything significant in your life, like losing weight and keeping it off, or running your first marathon is confidence.
Being confident that you can accomplish something will make that accomplishment practically inevitable. However, the opposite is also true, a severe lack of confidence will basically make it impossible for you to reach that big goal. So how do you get more confidence?
Well, you know, you are in luck, because that’s what’s on the agenda here today. In this episode, I’m going to explain what confidence is how it might just be the game changer that you’re looking for, and how to have more confidence now.
But first, if you’ve been thinking about improving your health, your fitness, losing some weight, improving your running, and you want some guidance and support to help you get there, I want you to consider coaching, coaching works where other methods don’t, because it’s not about a diet. It’s not about a premade exercise program.
It’s about understanding what works for you as an individual, and then learning how to do it on your own. That’s you learning how to do this on your own at one point, in our coaching relationship, I want you to say Patrick, I don’t need you anymore. That’s then my job is done.
You have to be able to do this stuff on your own. It has to be something that is sustainable for you long term because you know, there is no finish line. Being healthy, losing weight, improving your running, improving your fitness, your health. It’s not a destination you’re trying to get to it is how you live your life from here on out. And I want to teach you how to live your life that way.
Okay, we want this stuff to become easy and effortless for you long term. And I can help you get there. If you want to hit the easy button on all this stuff on your weight loss goals, your running goals, we can work together, just go to my website runningleancoaching.com, click on work with me. And we will work together and I’ll show you how to become the healthiest and most badass version of yourself yet. Cool.
Okay, let’s get into this topic today how to have more confidence now. So confidence is one of those things that can be a real game changer for you. And if you’ve ever set out to do something, maybe that you’ve never done before, you’ve probably lacked confidence at the beginning of that process.
And as you have accomplished things in your life, as you have gotten out of your comfort zone, and you’ve done things you might think well, that’s how you build more confidence. And that’s part of it. You have to understand something though that confidence comes from within. It is something that is created by you. It doesn’t come from anybody else. It doesn’t come from out there nobody bestows confidence upon you, you have to create it.
So confidence, if you look up the definition, it says it’s a feeling of self assurance arising from one’s appreciation of one’s own abilities or qualities, a feeling of self assurance. Confidence is a feeling. And what do we know about feelings? Well, feelings are created by your thoughts. feelings don’t come from out there. Feelings are created by the thoughts that you think.
So if you want to create more of a certain feeling, then you need to think certain thoughts. You need to change your thinking perhaps here’s a little experiment that you can do. You want to start feeling a little bit more confident right now. Just think about a time where you were extremely confident to think about that time a specific point in time in your life, where you are so freaking confident about something.
Go back there right now in your mind. What was the situation you’re at? What were you thinking? What were you doing? What were you seeing what were you hearing? What are you saying, you know, what were you feeling internally, and feel that feeling of confidence.
And you can feel confident right now, when you do this, it’s kind of interesting, right? By the way, you can do the same thing with all kinds of emotions, you want to feel angry, just think about something that pisses you off, you’re gonna feel really angry right now, don’t do that. But this is what we do.
A lot of times, we feel hurt by someone. And we keep replaying that over and over in our minds. And we just continue to feel hurt and hurt and hurt, even though that thing happened years ago, decades ago. So anyway, feelings are created by your thoughts. So you have to start looking at the way you’re thinking about things.
So one thing that I like to say is that if you, if you think that you can do something, then you probably have the confidence that you can do it. If you feel like, or I’m sorry, if you think that you cannot do something, then you’re going to feel like you can’t do it.
So our thoughts will have a big role to play in how we accomplish things. And thoughts create those feelings. So we got to look at the thoughts that are creating the feelings of confidence. So for example, if you have confidence that you can stick to your diet, plan and lose weight, and you think to yourself, here’s the thoughts you thinking, I can do this, I can stick to my plan, I’ve got this, I’ve done hard things before, then you are far more likely to stick to that plan and lose the weight.
On the other hand, if you firmly believe that this is never gonna work for you, because you know what, nothing ever works for me, I’ve tried everything, nothing works. It’s never worked before I always fail, I always fail, I always give up, I always quit. How is your confidence? Zero, it’s, it’s 0.0, you are very likely to give up and quit. And those thoughts that you’re thinking are going to become true for you. Those thoughts that you’re thinking, when you feel really confident and you think this might work for me, I’m going to I think I can do this, those will become true for you as well.
Another good example is if you are somebody who has run some half marathons, right, and you’re thinking about running a full marathon, but you lack so much confidence that you can run a full marathon that you will probably never even sign up for that race, because you just don’t have the confidence that you can do it. You don’t believe in yourself, you don’t believe that you can do it. Zero confidence.
So running a full marathon is probably never going to happen for you. Even though in your mind, you might think that is something I really want for myself at some point. So we need to we need to change our thinking, okay.
Henry Ford, I love this quote one of my favorite quotes ever. He said, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.” Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.
So what that says to me is that it’s all in your mind. It’s all in your mind, whatever you want to accomplish, we got to look at those thoughts that are creating the feelings. And confidence is one of the keys to helping you achieve anything of importance in your life, anything big especially.
But when it comes to achieving bigger goals, running a full marathon losing weight, losing like 40 pounds, if you want to lose 40 pounds, that’s going to require some work and some time, and you have to keep your head in the game. And you have to have the confidence to get you there.
Running a full marathon is going to require some confidence for you to get there. lacking confidence is going to keep you stuck. It’s going to keep you thinking small. When you don’t have any confidence, you’re not going to venture out of your comfort zone, you’re not going to try to push yourself to do something that’s hard. Because you don’t have the confidence that you can do it.
But when you build the confidence over time, you will see that your comfort zone will begin to grow. You can keep pushing past your comfort zone, you keep taking action even when things get hard. You still take the action that you need to take you show up for yourself in a much different way.
You’re no longer stuck, you’re free. You’re not thinking small, you’re thinking big. So these are all the reasons why we want to work on our confidence. We want to build our confidence.
So some of the ways we do this. Number one, we want to focus on how far we have come. So everything that you’ve already accomplished in your life needs to be on a list somewhere everything hard you have ever done that you maybe didn’t think you could do, but you did. Or you surprised yourself, or something that you’re proud of anything that you’ve accomplished in your life, just put it on a list somewhere.
And every now and then you need to take that list out and read it. Because we want to be focusing on where we have come, we want to focus on how far we have come not on where we are not.
We spend too much time focusing on the gap, the gap between where we are today and where we want to be in the future. And there’s a gap there, I want to lose 40 pounds. So the gap is the 40 pounds, the gap is running a full marathon, I’ve never done that before. And we focus on the gap. And it’s a negative place to focus on because it’s where you are not, you’re not there yet.
And if all your focus is on where you are not, it can feel incredibly frustrating. And it will kind of strip away your confidence. Instead, you want to focus on the gains, not the gap, focus on the gains, what have you done? What have you already accomplished? Write that stuff down, you want to make sure that this is something that you are constantly focusing on.
And then as you accomplish new things celebrate those wins, we celebrate wins in our coaching group all the time, we always want to talk about wins. Because it’s important to give equal airtime to the things that are going well in our lives and the problems.
A lot of times, we just want to focus on the promise, well, here’s what’s not working. Okay, that stuff is fine. But what is working, let’s talk about that as well. It shifts the conversation, I’m telling you, and I see it in people, it shifts their whole posture, their personality shifts a little bit when they start talking about everything that’s going well. So focus on how far you have come this right here.
If you just did this one thing, this would be enough to help you to start building all the confidence that you need. Okay, but we’re going to do more number two is to take aligned action, even when you don’t feel like it. So confidence comes from taking action and getting results. Because when you take aligned action, and you get results, you start to see that ha this might actually work for me.
Oh, I was able to stick to my food plan over the last two weeks. Great. And I lost a pound. That’s interesting. So you’ve taken aligned action, you’re seeing some results. And you’re like, hmm, actually maybe this will work for me. And so you start to feel more confident, because you’re taking action.
Even sometimes when you don’t feel like it, sometimes you don’t feel like sticking your food plan, I get it. Sometimes you don’t feel like going for a run, I get it. But if you stick to the plan, you’re going to get the results when you get the results, you feel more confident that you can keep going and you want to stay in that cycle.
You want to stay in the cycle of small actions, giving you small results, tiny little actions that you’re taking every single day that are gonna give you tiny little results. And those Tyler results deliver a little bit of confidence. Okay, so confidence is something that builds slowly over time. It does not happen all at once.
People think that it’s like flipping a light switch, like all of a sudden, you’re gonna get confident, and you’re going to be able to do everything and it doesn’t work that way. You have to create it. And it takes time you build confidence slowly, over time, like a habit, you know, habits take a long time, some people will say 30 days, some people say 90 days.
You know what? I just was doing a little bit of research on this. And then the experts out there really say that habits take as much time as they take. And it’s different for each person. And it depends on the habit and all these other factors. So there’s no number, but it takes time.
Let’s just all agree to that. Like it takes time to build a good habit. Just like that it takes time to build confidence, right? It’s not a light switch, you’re not just flipping on confidence and like then then you’re good to go.
So it looks like this, it looks like you keep showing up for yourself. You keep taking the action and you start getting little results. And this builds a little bit of confidence with each little win. And we acknowledge those wins. Sometimes they’re pretty small. That’s okay.
Feeling more confident, though, will actually make it easier for you then to take more aligned action. This is how we start to build a ton of confidence. We do it slowly over time, little by little when over when day after day, week after week, month after month. And then eventually you’re gonna get to this place where you just have all the confidence that If you need to achieve anything that you want.
Think about it like this. This is exactly what we do when we’re training for a marathon. So if you’ve only run a half marathon, the farthest you’ve ever run is 13.1 miles, and you start getting into marathon training, you’re probably going to feel pretty confident until you get to mile 14. You know, when you see that number 14 on the calendar, you’re like, oh, my long run is 14 off, I’ve never run that far before, that might feel a little daunting.
But you know, it’s pretty close to 13. So it may not be that bad. And then you do it. And then the next time it’s going to be 15. And then 16, 18, 20 miles, 22 miles. Like that’s where things start to get real for you. You know, how confident are you in week one of your marathon training? My guess is not very confident.
How confident are you by week number 16? After doing all the work, though, so you show up, week after week, you do the work, you do those long runs, you show up even though it’s hard. But you show up for yourself, you keep taking the aligned action, and you start getting the results. You’re hitting all these runs, you’re doing fine.
So how confident are you in week 16? I’m gonna say probably very much confident in week number 16. Right? It’s a game-changer. And listen, you guys with the running, you got this part down, you do. But when it comes to the food, people are like, well, it’s different. It’s not different.
Listen, think about losing 40 pounds as your marathon, okay? You’re not ready. In week number one, like you’re not going to have the confidence you need in week number one of your new food plan, right? You have to show up for yourself daily, stick to the plan, every day, even on the weekends, even on vacation.
Okay, maybe you indulge a little bit on vacation, I’ll give you that. That’s cool. But then you get back on track again. And you start to see the weight dropping, you lose a pound every week or so maybe more, maybe less, whatever. But you’re seeing results, because you’re showing up for yourself and you’re doing the work day after day, week after week, just like you do with your marathon training, it’s no different.
And then by week number 16, or 18, whatever of your new nutrition regimen, you know, you’re like, this is actually totally working for me, I’ve lost 20 pounds already, I’m feeling amazing. Running is better than ever, you’ll eventually get there, you’ll get to that 40 pound weight loss goal, if you don’t quit.
If you keep showing up for yourself, if you keep celebrating the wins. That’s that just take that same approach that we take to marathon training, copy, paste that over here to your food plan, and boom, you’re good to go. That’s how you do it. That’s how you build confidence. Okay.
The last part of this is that we will experience failures in our journey. Whether you’re training for a marathon or trying to lose 40 pounds, I’m telling you right now you’re going to experience some failures along the way.
We have to rethink failure. Because past failures can strip away your confidence that can erode your confidence if you continue to think about them as failures, or if you continue to think about yourself as a failure. Right? So for example, you know, you don’t stick to your food plan. Maybe this goes on for a few days, right? Big shocker.
Listen, everybody does this at some point. Maybe you just had a stressful week of work, whatever you there’s all kinds of excuses you can use. I always tell people that we don’t use those as excuses. But I’m just telling you, this is what people tell me.
Oh, I had a really stressful week of work. And so I couldn’t stick to my food plan. Yeah, you could have stuck to your food plan, but you chose not to because you were stressed out. And that’s how you deal with stress. You use food to deal with stress. Okay, that’s what’s really going on there.
But anyway, end of sidebar. So everybody does this. At some point, you gain a few pounds. This is just normal. It’s part of the process, right? But here’s what happens. A lot of you, you beat yourselves up. You feel like a failure. You say things like, this is never going to work for me.
I always do this. It’s too hard. I can’t do this. You’re thinking these things. You’re believing that this is never going to work for you. That is just a confidence killer right there. Okay, you didn’t fail. You learned what not to do. You learned that doing it this way doesn’t work for me. Stress eating does not work for me. How do I get through that?
You look at your little failures as learning opportunities. If you don’t, you’re never going to improve. You’re never going to get there. You’re never going to lose the weight and be able to keep it off, we have to look at our failures as learning opportunities. What’s the lesson to learn from that situation you’re in?
You have to learn how to persevere. Because listen, you are not a failure. You failed at that one thing that one time. Okay, big deal. Let’s learn our lesson, we get over it and we move on. Eyes forward, we don’t look back, we look forward. Every single success that has ever happened in the history of the world has been built upon a huge pile of failures.
What that says to me is that you cannot succeed without failure, you have to fail, failure is part of the process. And failures are never the end. So many people think, oh, I failed. So that’s the end, I’m going to quit no failures, just one more step on the path of success. It’s like one more rung on the ladder, that eventually leads to the top.
You have to climb all the rungs, you can’t skip any. So there’s going to be more failures ahead, by the way, so buckle up. Okay, so just to recap here, today, confidence, it’s a feeling that’s created by your thoughts, you got to work on your thoughts. We’ve got to stop thinking things like I can’t do this is never gonna work for me, this is too hard. I always stop all that.
Change your thinking, right? Start taking aligned action. Start doing things that are going to move you towards your goals. Aligned action means action that is in alignment with your long term goals. Start taking that action every single day, focus on everything you’ve achieved so far. Make a list of everything you’ve ever accomplished in your life that was hard, and go over that list regularly.
Remember that confidence builds over time. And we have to allow time for this process to take place. It’s not like flipping a light switch. Okay, and then anytime we do experience failure, and you will, you got to reframe that you got to look at it as a learning experience and not the end.
I have failed at so many things. So many times in my life. It’s ridiculous. And I keep showing up and I still fail at stuff. And I keep showing up for myself and I keep learning from those experiences and I keep moving on. Okay, and that is how you build confidence. And that is how you can create more confidence starting right now is just do the things I outlined in this podcast today. Cool. That’s your work this week. You got this. That’s all I got for you today. Love you all. Keep on Running Lean and I will talk to you soon.
