How do you pick yourself back up?
Alright and good morning. Welcome! We are back on trainings after a day off. My name is Coach Jimmy and I’m excited to share with you today. First thing’s first, people are going to go, “Wow. Jimmy’s in his glasses. He’s got a hat on. He’s looking a little rough this morning with his coffee. Isn’t this guy usually a little more put together than this?”
And the answer is yes, but this is all going to go about what I’m talking about today. If you have ever stumbled, had a goal, and “fallen off the wagon” in fitness, in business, in life, in relationships, then you need to be here with us today for the next little bit. I also need you to share this video right now. Tag people in the comments that need to hear something like this. Maybe someone that’s been discouraged, maybe somebody you knew who had big dreams and big goals and have lost their way, they kind of lost their mojo, they’ve slipped a bit.
Those people right now, you need to tag. Do the right thing. Tag them here. Invite them to watch this with you because we’re going to discuss what happens when you get off of that track. What happens when you get off of that plan or that motivation or that momentum you had created.
What do you do?
Do you start over?
Do you go back to the drawing board?
What do you do?
It’s definitely something that happens and we have the best intentions and then it’s hard to get back rolling again.
For those of you that don’t know me, I’m Coach Jimmy, Jimmy Hays Nelson, and I’m coming to you live from Dallas, TX and before going into business, I was a 3 time college dropout. Found myself 100 lbs overweight, 3 time college dropout living back at home with my parents in my mid-twenties and had given up on my dreams of becoming a performer and didn’t have any sense of that I was going to be successful at anything that I was going to do in life because I had been a chronic quitter.
I don’t know if you have gone through that, but I know as a kid I quit many things. I quit soccer, I quit Karate, I quit band, I quit guitar, I quit saxaphone, I quit art lessons, any time things would get a little hard or it wasn’t fun anymore or any time that I stumbled and had a bad day, I had created this thing in my mind that I had to start all over again and that felt really daunting to me.
I didn’t have any sense of that I was going to be successful at anything that I was going to do in life because I had been a chronic quitter.
Obviously, finding myself 100lbs overweight at one time in my life, I had quit many, many, many, many diets and nutrition plans and workout regimens as well because I would get a couple days in or a couple lessons in, whatever you want to talk about that, and there was a point in there where it wasn’t fun or I had a bad lesson or had a bad day. I had built in my mind that the image is of a mountain and you’re trying to climb to the summit of this mountain and get to the top that failing, no matter how far up the mountain I had gotten meant that I had to start back from the very bottom of the mountain again and that seemed so daunting to me.
Which leads me to, “Jimmy, why are you looking pretty rough this morning in a hoodie, your pajamas, your glasses, and your oh so loud Crew hat?”
Well, normally, for those of you that have been following me for a little while know that my alarm goes off before 5 o’clock in the morning every day. I get up, I do some kind of personal development audio that feeds my brain and my spirit and gets me up and running, and then I get up and get ready to go work out. I get out the house and on Wednesdays, specifically, I have actually made a commitment to two of my buddies to meet them at a gym and do a 5:45am spin class followed by 30 minutes of some kind of BODY BEAST or P90X style lifting routine.
This morning, that didn’t happen.
I totally forgot to set my alarm. It’s been a full week. We’ve had family here visiting and we’ve been kind of go go go and I just got off my routine today. I’ll be honest, while it was nice to roll over and wake up at 7 instead of 5, I just felt a little off.
I was like, “Man…that’s a couple days now that I’ve been off my routine because I didn’t work out yesterday either!”
That’s very unlike me for any of you that know me because I’m very consistent when it comes to my workouts. I went out and celebrated on Monday night hitting a business goal and it became a late night so I was like, “I’m just going to take Tuesday off,” and Tuesday turned into Wednesday and that’s how it happens!
That’s where people go from just a stumble to completely losing motivation because they let a bad hour become a bad day which turned into a bad couple of days which became a bad week and all of a sudden they look up and it’s 6 weeks later or 3 months later and they put back on all that weight.
They’ve lost that momentum to start that business. They suffered the relationship that they were working on. It just starts to snowball like that so very easily. So, what do we do? What do we do when we “fall of the wagon”?
Stop blowing your setback out of proportion
First and foremost, stop using that phrase. It’s a phrase that really gets on my nerves because it makes it into this big dramatic thing and this is what happens to so many of us. We get off the routine and I saw someone on here earlier that said something about how they normally have done their Power Hour by now and I know a lot of people in home businesses run their businesses in what we like to call Power Hours. Well, I didn’t do it by now.
Just acknowledge that, “Hey. I messed up today, let me get back on these things.”
We create this big dramatic scenario where it’s a process of starting over and if every time I’m climbing a mountain, I’m halfway up the mountain and stumble and stub my toe or bruise my knee, I have the choice to stand back up at that point in the mountain and keep going. It’s not like a video game where you die and you have to go back to the first of the level. We’re not playing Super Mario Brothers here where you’re almost to the flag at the end and a turtle bites you and you have to go back to the beginning of the level.
Hopefully everybody gets that reference. I’m sure there’s some youngster that’s never played Super Mario Brothers and you need to correct that because that’s something that everybody should do at one time in their life.
That’s what happens. We create this big dramatic thing about falling off the wagon. We go out and have some beers with some buddies and we woke up the next day with a little bit of a hangover and feeling bloated and we’re like, “Ugh…I’ve got to start all over again,” because our body that morning in the mirror…it’s not that we’ve gained weight or that we put fat on, it’s literally inflammation of your body from the food or the booze that you had the night before and you look like a puffed up rat.
Just acknowledge that, “Hey. I messed up today, let me get back on these things.”
Trust me, I totally get it. I’ve been there a million times, but it looks like you put on 20 lbs in one night and you go, “Oh! I can never enjoy a meal again because my body puts on 100 lbs when I have one thing of french fries or when I have that pizza or when I go to that nice dinner and have that bottle of wine or whatever it is and that’s not the case!
There are so many things in life that are optical illusions. It’s the same thing with your business. It’s the same thing in anything that you’re creating momentum in what you’re trying to build. Life has a funny way of not wanting you to achieve something cool and bigger than yourself and a lot of times we call it resistance. I reference this book before, but this book called the Wart of Art and I’m not a big reader and it’s not a big book.
It talks about this very thing through and through it and anything you’re trying to create something, do something bigger than yourself, or really make a change that resistance is really going to test you. It’s going to say, “Do you really want to change? Do you really want to do this thing?”
You have to work for change
Change isn’t easy and you have to use twice as much energy to change something. We get stuck in ruts of habits and the other day I talked about Amateurs vs. Professionals and that the difference was in your mindset and in your habits. Doing something bigger than yourself, creating a real change in your life is creating new habits which requires extra energy to make that happen to push that along.
The world wants us to be in this kind of neutral, comfortable state and when we start trying to change things and have to use a lot of effort to do it, resistance is going to find a way to make you think that it’s harder than it really is, that you’ve stumbled more than you’ve really stumbled, and, golly, don’t we love to just feel sorry for ourselves and make a super dramatic situation out of nothing. Out of just a little stumble. We assume that everybody knows how bad we messed up and we start feeling guilty.
I talk to you guys because this is something that I struggle with. Anything that I teach, I teach out of the overflow of what I’m going through and so I went out and celebrated on Monday, got out of my routine, got off my food plan, and it’s affected business stuff. I’ve got things to do! Right now I’m struggling to get back into business mode.
September to December of 2015 may have been the most focused, hardworking four months of my entire 8+ year career and then my daughter was born and then I took a week off of working out and I decided to exhale, which I think it vital. You’ve got to celebrate the things that you do, but at the same time, you have to get back into it.
You have to set the next goal. You have to do the next thing and sometimes that’s challenging to go from exhaling and going work work work work work work, you celebrate, you exhale, and then you have to get that motor running again and a lot of us right now because it’s January, this is the challenge. It’s like driving a stick shift for the first time. There’s a lot of this going on and you have to keep at it until you get back into the flow.
The world wants us to be in this kind of neutral, comfortable state and when we start trying to change things and have to use a lot of effort to do it, resistance is going to find a way to make you think that it’s harder than it really is.
I’m dealing with that right now. I have a men’s event that I need to get up and running, get tickets re-sold, get speakers booked, and that thing is in May, but I have to get busy with it now and there’s work to be done so I don’t have a lot of time to sputter to get back into my zone because I know when I’m in my zone, watch out kids. There’s very few people that are more efficient and I think that you’re the same way.
Once you get in that zone and hit that sweet spot of I wake up in the morning. I put something in my brain that’s going to feed me and make me better and adjust my mindset. I’m going to get a good sweat on for 30 minutes to an hour or an hour and a half, whatever your jam is working out, and then I’m going to jump into what is that, is it building that business online? Is it creating that ebook? Is it writing that song? Is it doing that painting?
Whatever it is that’s in your gut that you know what you’re supposed to be doing right now, but resistance keeps telling you, “Oh, you got to start over. Oh, you’re not that good. Oh, you’re not that talented.” Maybe the thing you need to do first is go buy that course online so you can get better.
Stop waiting for motivation
“Okay, I don’t know how to write this ebook, but I know that I have this message in my gut.” Cool, then you go buy the ebook on a course about how to write that ebook. You buy the course about how to start that YouTube channel. You go sit in on that webinar about how to use streaming audio to build an audience or a business or whatever it is that you want to do, you’ve got to create your own momentum. You’ve got to quit waiting for external motivation to hit you.
It’s really become my mantra already for 2016 is that motivation is overrated. Everybody wants to be motivated and motivation Santa Claus to come down their chimney and leave them little gifts every day and it doesn’t happen that way. It happens from you starting to take action and then the momentum you create creates the motivation where you crave being in that zone.
You crave getting the engine running, but the hard part is the start that stops most people. It’s that first stub of the toe. It’s the first “falling off the wagon”. It’s that first, “Oh, I messed it up!” and then you feel like you have to start all the way over again and you have to shift that.
What I have learned in 8 years of studying with some of the greatest mentors in fitness and in business is that the only difference between a successful person and an unsuccessful person…it isn’t that the successful person doesn’t make mistakes, doesn’t fall off the wagon, doesn’t totally mess it up. A successful person just self-corrects faster. They identify where they mess up and they correct it faster.
If we’re on a train track and we get derailed off the track, instead of sitting off the track and sitting on the ground feeling guilty looking at the big mess that’s the train and feeling guilty about it and beating ourselves up, do you realize that it takes just as much energy to just flip the flipping train back on the tracks that it does to just sit there and feel bad about it and to feel guilty and to mope and to sob and to beat yourself up?
Complaining doesn’t solve anything
It’s the same energy. Literally. We’re given a finite amount of energy in a day, a life, mental energy, physical energy, and it takes energy to feel sorry for yourself. It takes energy to mope and whine and feel guilty. If I’m given the same amount of energy, what’s more productive with it? Correcting the thing and getting back on the track, standing up midway on the mountain and continuing or to make this big dramatic thing where I have to feel like I have to start all the way over?
Another way that this is really going to help you guys is…or something that will help with this is the fact that you need to surround yourself with some kind of support community. Somebody that when you mess up is going to come give you a hug around the neck and say, “You know what? You f’d up.” They’re going to smack you on the ass, tell you to get up, and get back on your way and they’re going to be a nice balance of telling you when you’re taking too much time to slack off and when you need to get going again. You just have to get back in the huddle.
You have to get back in the huddle, come back to the team, and you’re licking your wounds and you go, “Look, I cut my knee up. I bruised my knee.” and people will go, “Oh, that’s not…”
Oh my gosh, perfect example for those of you with kids. You know when your son or daughter are running through the house and they fall and they smack their knee. You would think that they lost a limb. It is just…all hell breaks loose until you stand them up and dust them off and you blow on it and you make them look at it and go, “Look, it’s not as bad as you thought it was.” and then they look at it and I’m like, “Does this hurt?” and they go, “No…”
Okay, you’re okay. My son did this last night and he got something in his eye. You’d think that he lost his eye and I empathized with him first, “Yes, I’m sure it hurts. Yes, I know that this was dramatic.” and then we started taking steps on how he could open his eye back up. Got a little wet washcloth, tapped it on there, every once in a while I’d say, “Okay, I need you to blink blink blink so the tears can wash that out. Okay, blink blink blink. Are you ready to open your eye yet?” No and he’d put the thing back on.
But little by little, we’d start moving in a direction to 30 minutes later, you’d never know he had anything in his eye and he was back up and running and to exactly where he was before.
It is no different with whatever it is you’re moving towards in life. It is absolutely no different on that fitness goal, on building that online business, on writing that ebook, on pursuing that artistic dream, whatever it is that you know you’re supposed to be doing right now that this morning you fell off the wagon and you’re feeling guilty about it.
Why am I telling you this?
Because I needed to come talk to you guys because I found myself falling into that exact same trap this morning. That exact same trap where it’s 9:20 in the morning and my schedule is just jacked.
Do you know what I did?
I took this morning, realized that I messed up, and I sat there and I grabbed my newborn daughter and I just held onto her and kind of just loved on my family for a little bit and instead of feeling guilty I went, “Okay. I’m off my normal path, what can I do that’s productive and that’s in this other alternate reality that I’m living in this morning? I have no momentum to go work right now, I’ve totally missed my workout window, then I’m going to use this time to spend quality time with my family.”
And I made sure that the TVs were off, we played some music, some puzzles, my in-laws are here, and they leave today. So I was like, “You know what? Instead of listing all the reasons why I messed up this morning, I’m going to make something positive out of this.”
For me, that something positive was a relaxing morning with a cup of coffee and my family holding on and just spending time with my newborn daughter. So I made something positive, something worthwhile of what could have been a real negative situation.
Stop waiting to have it all figured out
I don’t know what that is for you, but whatever it is that you’re beating yourself up about that you’ve lost weight and you put weight back on. Great. Well the cool thing is that if you’ve done it once, you can do it again. This time along you take people along with you on this journey and say, “Hey, I’ve been up this mountain before. I’ve stumbled a little. I’m going to get back to where I was. Who wants to come along with me?”
That’s exactly what I do in my business. My business and the people that I work with, it’s not about being fitness professionals or being super ripped all the time, it’s a series of ebbs and flows and going, “Hey, I put a little weight on over the holidays. I’m putting the stake in the ground and I’m going to go fix this. Does anybody want to come along with me?”
On the flip side, most people think, “Oh, I have to go take care of me first before I can coach somebody else before I can help somebody else,” and that’s just a big lie. That’s just a lie that keeps you from impacting somebody else’s life.
If we wait until we hit a level or hit perfection before we can turn and help somebody else along with it, we never help somebody else. You rob yourself of impacting somebody else’s life because you’ve told yourself a story that you can’t help anybody until you get it just right and that’s a lie.
If I’d have done that, the business that we’ve built over the last 8 years would never have started because I never did figure it out. There’s always ebbs and flows. There’s always things going on behind the scenes that you don’t know about that I struggle with, but I show up every day and invest in those people that I’m working with anyway.
You bring them along with you. People want to be a part of building something. They would rather come along with you on the journey than wait until you finish “perfection” and then turn around and tell them how to do this. I would rather somebody go, “Let’s link arms!” and you know what else? The minute I start encouraging and bringing somebody along with me in the middle of my struggle, it keeps me more accountable because those days that I may have slipped up in the future when I know that I’m in this with somebody else, I’m more likely to stay on the momentum because then it’s not just about me. If I don’t stay on this, not only do I let myself down, I let this other person that’s coming along on the ride with me down.
If we wait until we hit a level or hit perfection before we can turn and help somebody else along with it, we never help somebody else. You rob yourself of impacting somebody.
That’s harder to get off track than when it’s just you. It’s easy to mess up when the only person it affects is just yourself. So in the middle of what you’re doing, bring somebody along. You can learn together. You guys can encourage each other together. Find a support community. If you don’t have a support community, reach out to me. That’s what I do.
I create support communities in fitness, in business, in life, and family and relationships. Whatever that thing is, that’s what I want to help with. I’m just really passionate about helping people do things like that and get up and running.
Got to events that feed your motivation and skillset
Right now, specifically men. I know that there’s more women on this feed than guys, but we’re putting together an event in May called Training Camp. You can go to TrainingCampEvent.com, tickets are going really quickly right now and it’s really awesome. We’re adding speakers to the line up every day and I just want to help these guys get up and running. If you know a guy that would need to be at an event like this, give them that URL. Do the right thing. Put their name in the comments, tag them, put TrainingCampEvent.com and say, “Go get into this thing.”
I’m really excited about it and I’m really excited that I get to do it with friends of mine. Again, I’ve surrounded myself with a group of guys and because we all at different times are struggling with something, one of us is weak while somebody else is strong and somebody else pulls us up out of the mud and says, “Alright, buddy. You took the time to cry about it, let’s get back up and get running.”
It’s just such a better, easier way to do life. So TrainingCampEvent.com in May in Dallas, go check out the page. We’re actually creating another page that should be up in a day or so. We have 3 really killer keynote speakers. Gary Vaynerchuk, the author of Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook is our keynote speaker. We also have Bo Eason, storytelling master. Former NFL player. We have Scott Mann, former Green Beret that’s teaching about communication and trust.
This thing’s going to rock. It’s going to be absolutely amazing and I’m super excited and there’s going to be a litany of guys that are in my business that are going to be speaking as well. In fact, on my to do list today is to start reaching out to some of those guys and ask them to speak and to join us. That’s really exciting because it’s an event that I get to put on and I get to learn from these guys. I know that I’m going to sit and take notes when my buddies are up there talking as well because I learn from them all the time.
Thank you for popping in today, I love doing these. If you’ve found yourself fallen off the wagon, if you found yourself moping and feeling sorry for yourself now is the time to stop it. It’s time to get up. It’s time to dust yourself off. Swallow your pride a little. Ask somebody for help. Get plugged into a support community and quit being that, “I can do this all by myself,” person.
Because you’re going to make everything 300 times harder on yourself. You’re going to go through more of these ebbs and flows than if you plug into a support community. There are people that want to love on you, that want to help you, want to empower you, and they may even help you find ways to cut corners to get to where you’re going faster than if you did it all by yourself.
Do me a favor. If you found value in this, this is why that I love that it’s here, tag in the comments somebody that needs to watch it, click the share button and share it to somebody’s page, share it in messenger. That’s why I like that this is here. You can take this video and share it somewhere else.
So today’s your day to get up, dust yourself off, get back rolling, plug into a support community. If you don’t have one, please reach out to me because I would love to support you. We will talk to you very soon.
I’m Coach Jimmy. Make it a great day.