Perfect Isn't The Point

We’re done worshipping perfect weeks and we're going to start building discipline that holds up when life gets busy, messy, and unpredictable.

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Transcript

Spitfire Start And Core Message

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, hello. Welcome back to the podcast. Let's just jump right in today because I am full of spitfire today.

Perfect Is Not The Goal

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Today I want to talk about how perfect is not the point. And I did a community call last night with those in my community because I had seen just some things coming up with a lot of my clients in their check-ins of like, I want to give up. Summer's so busy, there's so much going on. I feel like I'm not able to stay on track. Just like so many little things that they were saying or coming up with. And so I really wanted to hit home, hit it hard on the head that being perfect is not the goal. That is not what we want to strive for. And just something that I wanted to reiterate to them is that literally anybody can show up for their health whenever life is calm, whenever life is chill, whenever your schedule's completely clear this week. You don't have to take your kids to church camp. You don't have to work overtime because somebody quit. You slept a perfect eight hours. Your kids slept through the night. Nothing's on fire. Everybody in your home is great. No one's sick. That is not discipline, whenever you can show up, whenever none of those things are happening. That is just convenience. And anybody can do that. Anybody can follow a plan, can follow a certain thing whenever life is sunshine and rainbows and butterflies. I don't care about whenever life is easy. I care about whenever life throws you curveballs. How are you going to adapt in the situation? This doesn't mean you have to be perfect. This doesn't mean you have to hit your plan 100%, but it does mean that you do still have to give effort. Discipline shows up in the other 80% of your life. If, say, something happened at work, you still show up for work. So why is it any difference whenever you think that you can just throw everything away when it comes to taking care of your body? The messy week, the sick kid, the deadline, the trip you didn't plan for, the week that everything hits at once. This is the actual test of okay, am I actually disciplined? Can I actually do what I say I'm going

Summer Chaos And Setting A Floor

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to do? So today I'm gonna walk through kind of the framework that I taught on my community call, plus just some wisdom and things that I have grasped from some books, some people, because it turns out that there is a lot of a lot of people that back this up with what they've learned, what they've done. This is not just something that I'm just like trying to shove down your throat. This is a legitimate thing. So it is normal that summer, parties, travel, more social eating, all of these things are so common, especially because it is summer. A lot of people have off. I have so many clients who are teachers, or they have a job where they don't have to work during the summer, and so their schedule gets completely thrown off, or there's just so many like travel celebrations, parties, and it's just a season. And I think that I mean, I can just name one of my clients, not name her, but kind of share her similar situation. She came to me and she was like, I feel like I want to give up. She's like, I've had a birthday, a celebration. I don't even know. She told me like all these different little things that she's had in the past two weeks. And then she turned around to say, but I went to the gym three times. I went or four times, I still did my cardio, like all these things. And I was like, Why are you upset? She's like, Because my nutrition was off, because I maybe snacked a little more here and there than I should have. And I think a lot of it comes down to so many of us really, really are really, really, really, really, are really hard on ourselves. And we have this like high achieving mindset that if everything is not perfect, then I will not progress. I'm supposed to be. My progression will slow down. It's gonna take me longer to get there. And it's almost like that's the point. The point is that we do have seasons where maybe we're not locked in as much, but yet we're still being able to hit some small bare minimum things, like setting a floor level for yourself of what are the floor level things I can do. Maybe I am gonna be going to these celebrations and birthday parties and all of these things. What can I still do? What is in my control? It's not like I want to preface that this is not a necessarily a discipline problem in this instance of like what's actually happening. It's more of this is just a season, and nobody's being handed a life with unlimited calm weeks at a time. The job was to never eliminate the amount of hard seasons that you have or to never go through the hard seasons, but the job itself is learning to move through them without giving in, without throwing in the towel, without quitting, without having this all or nothing mindset and this all or nothing thinking of just black and white is lying

Stop The Spiral After A Miss

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to you. You think that you need to be okay, hit macros 100, go to the gym four days a week, make sure I get my 10,000 steps, drink my water, eight hours of sleep, digestion perfect. You think that all of these things need to happen in order for you to make progress. But I'm here to tell you that the progress is gonna happen in those messy moments. The one-off meal, the missed workout, the one bad day does not have to mean that the whole thing is ruined. It is not true. And it may feel true to you in the moment, and that's kind of what makes it feel so suffocating and dangerous because you get into your head, then you start to spiral. I don't know if any of you have ever read the book Atomic Habits, but he talks about that he makes the point that missing once is an accident, missing twice is a start of a new habit. So one skipped workout in itself is not going to undo the progress, even one or two. But what happens is the spiral after it that makes it feel so big when it really doesn't need to be like that. The meal itself, the meal itself or the missed workout itself does not ruin your week specifically. It's the story that you're telling yourself about the meal is what ruins your week. It's this story that you keep ruminating in it over and over and over again. That's what's keeping it feeling like it's ruining your week, like you're stuck, like you want to give up, like you want to quit. So, one thing that I taught last night was this like 50-50 reframe. So instead of asking yourself, did I do this perfectly? Or did I hit myself 100%? Ask, did I do this about half right? Have I been half right for repeated amount of time? This is going to be four perfect days and then just quitting and throwing in the towel for the next three. Like, have I at least sprinkled in some of these bare minimum non-negotiables every single day rather than being perfect spot on for three days? And then by the time Wednesday, Thursday, Friday hits, or by the time you're traveling, every single little thing falls through the cracks. There is, there's some other research that is found on the highest performers, and the highest performers are not the most talented, but they are the ones who keep showing up, who kept showing up even after things got difficult for the same goal over a long stretch of time. Effort counted twice. Once for turning the talent into skill and again for turning skill into achievement. So I just want to just want to re-reiterate that the 50-50 week that I mentioned still counts as effort. It's not, it's it's the actual thing that progress runs on, not just you being 100% two days and then 0% the rest of the days. That's not how this works. And I will I will slam this into heads so many times, but consistency matters so much more than your ability to be this like perfect, perfect thing all of the time. And you're just setting such unrealistic

The 50-50 Reframe For Consistency

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expectations on yourself. And I think why most actually get upset is because they're like, Well, I'm I'm not perfect, or I haven't been as quote unquote perfect. I'm not seeing progress. Okay, that's the point. The point is you're not perfect, so you shouldn't see progress. You're setting an unrealistic expectation of, oh, because I've just been meh, just been meh going through the motions that I should be seeing progress. Eliminate that from your head. You know the things you need to do consistently in order to make the progress happen. And if you do slip up for a couple days, you can't be upset that you haven't seen progress. You have to go in and say, okay, how can I change my actions moving forward? I know I have this travel coming up. I know I have these celebrations. This does not mean that I have to stuff my face and be the one that's continually snacking and grazing and eating. You get to make that choice when you decide to go into it. So just remember that as well is everything that you decide is a choice. So you cannot be mad if you are making the choice. All right, going into the next little thing that I want to kind of just kind of jumping around at different little things. So another thing in the presentation that I kind of mentioned is that all of these things, like the inconvenience of you missing a workout, the celebration, all of these things, this can trigger like a full stress freeze where you just stop doing anything, anything for the rest of the day or the rest of the week. And I don't know if you've are into any like stoicism, but Marcus Aurelius wrote about the obstacle becoming the way forward instead of it being the thing that stands in the way. Ryan Holliday, the guy who writes um what are the books that he writes? Uh The Daily Stoic, I think. Let me see, just to make sure I'm backing myself up. Let me make sure. Uh, yeah, like the Daily Stoic, Ego is the enemy, obstacle is the way. Um these books are the books that he writes. But the obstacle the way is it's not that the chaos itself is blocking the goal, but it's working through the chaos imperfectly. That is the goal. So pick one thing. It's not like you have to do, oh my gosh, one day or I messed up now, I just have to freeze and I can't do anything. Pick one thing because picking one thing is better than doing nothing. The next meal, the next walk, the next glass of water. It's one decision, not just a full reset. Oh my gosh, I gotta do all these different things, yada, yada, yada, yada. That's catastrophizing it once again. So another

One Small Choice Beats Freezing

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thing we talked about as well is like emotional regulation and some somatic tools that we talked about. So, first thing being, name the emotion out loud. Okay, what's this exact emotion that's coming up for me that I'm feeling? And this kind of goes more on like the emotional eating side of things, but really naming that, and then maybe it's just okay, a few minutes of just sitting in whatever that emotion is without having to make a decision. This is huge. It's not to like fix the stress or whatever feeling that you're feeling and try to mute it out. It's just to create the space and be able to sit in and feel what you're feeling so that you don't stress eat or shut down before you've ever even had time to feel it and process it. So, some of just like some quick tools that I kind of went over with with them in the call was like the next meal rule. So you don't need a new day, like you don't need to wait till Monday or the next week to get back on track. You just need to wait till the next meal, like the next meal mindset. And it doesn't even just need to be like meal. This can be like the next workout, the next walk, the next five minutes that I just sit here and have some calm and stillness. That's what I'm talking about. And then environment design. So half of your discipline is not just relying on willpower. It's okay, what is my environment around me? Stock your kitchen with the version of you that is tired and stressed, not the version of you that feels motivated at 6 a.m. on a Monday morning. It needs to be your environment needs to set you up for success. If you have not meal prepped, if you don't have the foods in your pantry that are going to make life easier, then you're already fighting the battle halfway. Like just being prepared and having these things is already going to help you so much. And then obviously just like fixing your language. So instead of saying, Oh, I failed, I suck, I'm a piece of shit. No, I'm in the middle of it, or I ruined it. No, I made a choice, and this is what my next one is going to be. Not just sitting there ruminating on the fact, but your language, and I've talked about this so much, but how you speak to yourself shapes whether you keep going or whether you quit. And I am somebody, I do not put up with quitting. I do not put up with giving up. And I even talked about this on my call last night. I was like, you guys are not allowed to give up. Giving up should not be in your vocabulary. Quitting should not be in your vocabulary. It is not, should not be in your nature to even want to quit. Anyways, I'll get off my soapbox when it comes to that. Another thing,

Tools For Emotions And Better Defaults

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too, that I had been kind of working through in my in my Bible this week, and I just want to preface because I really want to start bringing my faith more into this, and so I'm gonna do that. So in Peter, no, not Peter, in the book of Corinthians, I believe is what I was reading. I think it's either first or second Corinthians, but Paul, it's not Peter. We're not talking about Peter, we're talking about Paul. Paul is talking about like all of these trials, like all of these things that he'd gone through, basically, all like his trials and tribulations and whatnot. And he was like basically like beat to death by a rod, almost stoned to death, like all of these things that happened to him. And then he was like, and yet, still through that, I still was seeking God. I was still seeking the growth, the strength, the things that I needed. And so it, I it's just a little reminder that hard seasons are not punishment, they are not to say you're failing, they are not to be there for you to ruminate on the fact that, oh my gosh, life sucks. Life's so hard for me. It's the fact that what can you do? How can you still show up in the face of adversity? How can you still be able to endure? I love the word endure, have endurance despite all of the things that have happened to you. And that will continue to happen to you because I think a lot of us think, well, life sucks. I mean, this is probably the worst thing that's ever happened to me, and I'll be good. Life will get easy again. Yeah, there is going to be periods of time where life will be easier than others, but the most challenging things you deal with in your life are there to help build your character, to help build your strength. And I think we we try to avoid discipline so much, but Paul was so disciplined in the fact that he was gonna tell everyone about God no matter all of the things that he had dealt with. He didn't blame any of that on God. He knew it was just a part of the process. And without, without him having those struggles, without him having, having had gone through all of these trials and tribulations, he would not have the strength that he has now. And he would not be able to preach on the good news of God because God has gotten him through each and every one of those things. And so even God himself is not like he knows perfect seasons are not going to be there, but he's just asking you to keep showing up, keep showing up, keep persevering, keep enduring in the one that you're actually in.

Endurance Through Hard Seasons

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So that's all I've got for you guys today. Just remember that anybody can show up when life is calm. The actual skill, the actual thing is showing up, learning up, learning how to show up when life isn't calm, when life actually sucks, when it's beating you down so hard. Reminder: you don't need a perfect week. You just need to make the next best choice. The version of you who keeps going messy is still going to get to the goal, even if it's messy. But the version of you who is waiting for perfect never will get there. And last thing, nobody is going to tell you that it's okay to be imperfect. So I'm telling you right now, it's okay to be imperfect. It's okay that things are not perfect and they're not always going to go your way. I love you guys, and I hope you guys appreciated this episode and got some good value and good wisdom out of it. I will see you in the next episode. Love ya. Bye.