Ep. 012 - 5 Steps to Get Back on Track

SHOW NOTES

When you stumble and fall in life you always have a choice. In this episode Craig outlines 5 steps (choices) you can make to get back on track.  Whether you are trying to lose weight, find a new career, improve a relationship, you will want to listen to this episode.

TRANSCRIPT

When you stumble and fall in life, you always have choices. In this episode, I define the five choices you can make to get back on track.

Welcome to Man in the Arena, your go-to podcast for all things related to health and weight loss for men over 40. Here we discuss strategies that will get you off the sidelines and into the game so you can achieve your optimal health. It's time to lead a legacy of longevity. Hey guys, welcome back to Man in the Arena.

I'm so excited about this episode because we're talking about getting back on track after we fail or fall. For you, this might look like eating poorly, an attempt to lose weight, or it might look like missing workouts even though you're trying to exercise more consistently. Or it might be related to you growing a business or working on a relationship that you have with your partner.

Either way, in this episode, I'm gonna cover the five steps to help you get back on track. Now, when I say steps, what I actually mean is choices. Because when you fall off track, we often think that we don't have a choice, that we've failed and it's all over and there's no chance at recovering. But that couldn't be further from the truth.

In fact, I'm not a fan at all of this. Get back on track mentality. I think it's all part of the process. We have to have this growth mindset and believe that we're going to fail and we're gonna face challenges. Including challenges that are self-imposed. So remember, when you're down, you have choices to make, and here are the choices.

Choice number one, you have the choice to focus on what happened or what's going to happen next. So I was talking to a client a couple weeks ago and he had fallen off. He had seemingly fell off the wagon. That was the term, and I knew that he played hockey. And I knew his son played hockey, and they're both goalies.

And so I said to him, all right, what happens when you let in an easy goal? And he says, well, what I say to my son is, you can either focus on the last shot or you can focus on the next shot. And I love that mentality. And in fact, this shows up a lot in sports where a guy will fail. You know, quarterback will throw an interception, a receiver will drop the ball.

In fact, just this past weekend was the masters and the eventual winner was John Rob. And I'm watching the tournament and he double bogeyed the first hole and then he went on to shoot seven under that round, and then he actually went on to win the tournament. So you can either focus on what happened, you know, I overate, or I skipped meals, or I didn't eat my protocol, or I missed the workouts.

You can really focus on that. Or you can choose to focus on what's going to happen next. And when the interviewer, Scott Pelt was asking John Rom how was he able to maintain his belief in himself and his game, he said, you know what? I didn't focus on what happened. The double bogey, I actually focused on what I was doing.

And what he did was he said, you know, I knew I made good contact with the ball. I knew that it wasn't a mental error. It wasn't something wrong with his technique, so he took a lot of confidence going forward and then he just went on a roll. So you have this choice to focus on what happened or you can focus on what's next.

The next choice that you have, and this is kind of something that I've been working on, is this idea that you have this choice in where you get your dopamine from. So there's a, a researcher outta Stanford, and his name is Andrew Huberman. And he talks about how dopamine is not a bad thing, right? It's got this bad rap nowadays because dopamine is really associated with different addictions and whatnot.

But he talks about how it's important to earn your dopamine rather than get it from easy sources where there's no effort to attain it. So an easy way to kind of attain dopamine would be through eating junk food, or drinking alcohol, or doing drugs, or picking up your phone or watching tv. So there's no effort needed to get the dopamine response comes along with that activity, and so when you screw up or you fail, or you fall, you stumble.

I want you to make a conscious effort at that point to earn your next hit of dopamine. And there's a number of ways you can do this. You can create a task list, a simple five tasks that you're gonna do, and then just get them done. Every time you get them done, you're putting an effort. And when you scratch those things off, You're receiving heto, dopamine, getting in a workout, going to bed early, doing a cold plunge.

These are all examples of earning your dopamine, so you have a choice there rather than choosing to go. You know what often happens when we fall off is we go to easy sources of dopamine to feel better, so we overeat even more. We over drink even more. So you have a choice there. That's choice number two.

Choice number three is you can either choose to win. Or continue to lose. And what I mean by this is when you fall off, I want you to create small wins. I want you to find something, and this is very much related to choice number two is earning that dopamine, but create small wins. And I see this happen again a lot in sports where let's say a receiver drops the ball, a really important catch that he was supposed to make.

What will often happen is on the next offensive series is the coach will say to the quarterback, Let's throw the ball back to that receiver. Let's give him an easy completion, an easy catch. And then that just gives him confidence. It helps him realize that he still has the ability to perform well. Same with a QB who throws interception.

They'll say, okay, let's just do a quick hitch route or a quick slant and give that QB a quick completion. So what I want you to do is just focus on doing something that creates a small win. You missed a workout. Get in three sets of 10 pushups. If you ate poorly the day before, just make your next meal a healthier option.

If you've had this string of nights where you haven't been able to get to sleep on time and get a good sleep, just get to bed at a decent hour and focus on that. Create small wins because those wins will add up to big wins. That's how close you are to success. Choice number four. I love this one. Okay, and this one is to choose your mantra.

We know that we're going to fail. We're going to stumble in pursuit of difficult goals. It's part of the process. So I want you to have a mantra. Some of mine are, I can do hard things or this is all part of the process. Okay. Think back to all the times in your life where you've been successful and you've overcome a challenge or challenges.

Find proof, find the evidence that you can do this, and then relate that back to a mantra. You know, you can do hard things, you've done hard things before. Okay. In growing my own coaching business, there's been many periods of limited leads of slow growth, of slow months, and when this has happened. I have a choice to make, and I often choose to remind myself I can do hard things.

And this is all part of the process. I've been here before. I've grown businesses, I've had slow months, and I know that as I continue to take action and believe in myself, I'm gonna work through it. So that's choice number four. And finally, choice number five is to choose your people. Now, as a coach, I gotta tell you that I see a lot of guys.

Who siloed themselves, whether they lose a job, they go through divorce, they, you know, put on weight, they tend to internalize all of that in themselves and they silo themselves. They cut themselves off from their friends and their family, and then they go through this suffering unnecessarily. So it's so important to choose your people, to find people who are going to lift you up to connect with people.

Who are going to pat you on the back and who are going to cheer you on and remind you of what you're capable of. Cause a lot of times when we fall off track, we can spiral into negative thinking. Now I remember my first game ever in the CFL is with the Hamilton Tigercat, and I was playing receiver, and my first play was to run this crossing row, which was underneath the linebackers in front of the quarterback.

I'm running the route and the quarterback gets pressure in his face. So he rolls out to his right and I'm coming into his view from the left, and so he's on the run. So he kind of throws a higher pass that's just outta my reach and I put my left hand up and I tip the ball so I'm not able to get my full hand on it and catch it, and the ball ends up being tipped into a defender's hands and it gets intercepted.

So it was my very first C F L play that ended at an interception. And as I'm running off the field, the quarterback at the time, he's just laying into me. He's just yelling at me like, you know, you should have caught that. Why did you tip that? Come on. Like, he's just really blaming me and yelling at me.

And in that moment, what I needed was someone to lift me up, someone to really kind of say, Hey, it was a bad throw, or, you know, we're gonna get them on the next play. And so that's an example of what happens when you don't have people in your corner. Now, I had a lot of other experiences where I messed up and I had people and teammates who cheered me on, and I gotta tell you that that made the world of difference for me.

Being able to bounce back and get back on track and play well. Okay? So it's not always on us. Sometimes we need to lean on other people, whether it's coaches, friends and colleagues, people who are going to cheer you on. So if you find yourself isolating yourself, It's gonna feel difficult, but reach out to people.

Connect with people who are going to cheer you on and lift you up. So when you stumble or fail, just remember that you have five choices. You can focus on what's next. You can disrupt your dopamine. You can create small wins, which lead to big wins. You can have that mantra. Remember that you can do hard things.

And then most importantly, You can choose who you surround yourself with to lift yourself up. So that's what I have for you today. Remember, you can reach out to me anytime. Head on over to the spear method.com. Schedule your free consult call. Visit my website. Let's connect. Let's talk about where you are now, where you want to get to, and then I'm gonna offer you a wave of how you can actually get there.

Thank you so much for listening. I look forward to next week, episode 13. And in the meantime, keep leading a legacy of good health and longevity.

If you're ready to step inside the arena and change the trajectory of your health, head on over to the spear method.com and download by free guide to learn simple and effective strategies on how to optimize your health today.