Surrendering to the Process
In professional sports, there’s a philosophy known as “tanking for the draft.” The core of this philosophy is looking towards the future. Self-aware teams who know they don’t have a chance to win a championship do something unthinkable: they intentionally lose games. This seems counterintuitive for these teams. After all, isn’t winning the goal?
Tanking for the draft is an example of surrendering to the process. By losing games, these teams increase their chances of picking a new star player in the draft. The losing isn’t permanent. Eventually, teams get their star and start to get better.
Living a healthy lifestyle is not unlike this. You have goals, right? There’s a process to achieving those, too, and it can get tough. You aren’t going to like every second of it. You might even hate some of it. The key here is learning to give up your inhibitions and grind through them. To accomplish anything great, there are going to be hardships. There are going to be times when you want to give up. These are the moments when you find out how bad you want to get to those goals you set for yourself.
Hopefully, you can dig deep and find that power within to keep going. However, maybe you find that your goal is not worth the struggle you’re going through. Great. Now you have time to go for another goal. Either way, you’ve learned, you’ve become a BETTER YOU.
That’s what life is all about, right? When you aren’t getting better, you’re getting worse. Yes, surrendering to the process is hard. But you can do it. If you need some help, here are a few things to keep in mind:
Celebrate Along the Way
Sometimes, the light at the end of the tunnel is a little too far away. You can, and you should celebrate smaller accomplishments you see on your path to the big one. There is no shame in being happy about anything you succeed in.
Trying to increase your bench press? Celebrate every time you can increase the weight or squeak out another rep.
Training for a marathon? Celebrate your first mile, your first 5k, your first half marathon.
Giving time to congratulate yourself for these milestones help ground you in the process and motivates you to move toward the next one. Be excited, be happy. Not everything has to be a grind. Just remember you aren’t finished yet, and the best is yet to come.
Pace Yourself
One of the worst things you can do during the process is push yourself past your limits. It’s one thing to get out of your comfort zone; it’s another thing to push so hard that you hurt yourself and have to start over.
If you need a day off, take a day off. Listen to what your body is telling you. If you’re thirsty, stop and drink some water. If you feel like you have no energy, take a look at your diet.
If you can barely get out of bed, maybe you need a day off the weights to stretch and do some yoga. Perhaps you even need a day off entirely to sit down and remember why you want what you want.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how long the process takes. What matters is that you’re in it and that, eventually, you’re going to get through it. That’s when you start the next process.
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