Are you an all-or-nothing kind of person? If things aren’t perfect, you give up?

I’ve seen this far too often and the biggest problem is that nothing should never be an option for reaching your goals. When you set a goal that is meaningful to you, the pursuit of that goal is going to be challenging and you are inevitably going to be faced with situations that are going to make you want to give up. This is where grace and grit come in.

First and foremost, give yourself grace – no one on this planet is perfect and not doing everything you had planned to do perfectly doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with you. Rather than let yourself feel guilt, shame, or remorse when an issue arises – for example, you hit snooze on that alarm clock and missed your morning workout – forgive yourself and redirect your mental energy towards problem solving for now and for the future. How might you be able to rearrange your plans that day to get your workout in? What happened that you missed that workout in the first place? This would be an excellent time to reach out to your coach. Perhaps you can swap your workout for another day and maybe you can work on getting to bed earlier so you are less likely to hit that snooze button in the morning. Working through it together with your coach can be an incredible and constructive way to ensure whatever happened is a mere bump in the road.

Second, apply grit to your goals. Grit means you have both passion and perseverance. You know how important that goal is to you, so use that to fuel your motivation each day of working towards your goal. If you’re beginning to feel like you are losing interest, talk to your coach about why that may be – you might need something more challenging in your plan or even to reset your goal. Realize that all big goals take time – especially when it comes to your fitness. Successfully making your goals happen takes persevering through ups and downs of the journey is what will get you to your goal.

Always give yourself grace, and develop the grit you need to make your goals a reality!