Change for life
Banks will often advertise promotions offering sizeable sums of money for opening an account. There are all sorts of conditions like, a minimum amount of money to be deposited each month, and keeping the account open for a certain number of months. How is this profitable though? It’s profitable because changing banks is something that most of us never do.
This isn’t the only activity seldom considered e.g. when was the last time you changed your brand of toothpaste? There are certain things we’re quite happy to try for a while and there are choices we made long ago and are now unconsidered defaults. Diets and fitness regimes, falling into the former category, are a shock to the system. They force us to endure gruelling mental and physical tests and bare rations. Humans can put up with a lot, especially if we believe it’s only temporary.
This is one of the key reasons why fitness instructors are not helping you. They are under pressure to prove their worth: if you turned up for your third, fourth, or fifth session and it was exactly the same as the first, you’d be asking yourself what you were paying for. Also, if you weren’t seeing immediate results or at least feeling physically destroyed by the end of the sessions you’d again be thinking that you could do this by yourself without someone barking, “C’mon, one more!” at you.
Fitness, in whatever form it takes, will not come as the result of a temporary change but rather a permanent one. As functioning humans there are fundamental things that we find time for regardless of the demands made on us by ourselves and others, namely sleep and food. I’m now adding a third to your list.
The first hurdle to overcome in achieving fitness is accepting two truths:
- fitness will not arrive quickly
- fitness will be a journey you’re on for life
While the first may dishearten, the second should inspire. Though life may be short, living it is still the longest activity any of us undertake – we have the rest of our lives to get fit, so there’s no rush.