Tomorrow

You made the decision yesterday that today was the day you would begin a healthy lifestyle.

You woke up with a headache though, a coffee usually helps.

The coffee is gone. You were so excited to start your new fitness routine that you forgot to stop on your way home from work. That's okay, you'll stop at the gas station and get an energy drink.

It's time to get dressed in your new gym outfit. There's a stain. You'll have to dress down in your old attire. It's been years, hopefully it fits. Just barely, it's a size too small.

At this point you are frustrated and late to the gym, the minutes before work slowly slipping away. You rush out the door and realize you left your headphones on the counter, just as you arrive at the temporarily closed gas station.

Enough.

The doubt sets in.

This isn't what you signed up for. You were supposed to start your fitness journey today and change your life, but everything is going against you.

Headache.

Poor-fitting clothes.

No headphones.

Who would want to work out like this? You're late, so you’d miss part of the routine anyway. Tomorrow is Saturday, which is much better for you. That'll give you time to clean your stained clothes too.

Tomorrow sounds good.

You drive home satisfied and looking forward to the start of your fitness journey, tomorrow. Distracted, you forget the coffee.

You wake up with a headache...

A Mind and Its Barrier

There will never be a perfect time.

Your mind excels at spotting flaws, and the universe excels at presenting unexpected challenges. Even when you get everything lined up, bad stuff can happen.

The only certainty is that things will not go as planned.

Your mind can either be your greatest weapon or greatest barrier. A mind that is trained and sharpened to navigate the chaotic nature of life, will help you identify solutions and answers to the obstacles you come across.

A weak and untrained mind will help you find excuses and reasons to put a hold on your dreams.

You must take care of your mental health and teach your mind how to:

• Have the willpower to start towards your goals.

• Find the consistency to realize your goals.

• Forge the discipline to maintain indefinitely.

A health and fitness journey will only ever be as successful as your ability to learn these three mental skills.

Willpower to Act

Willpower is a fickle mental structure. It appears quickly and can vanish just as fast. Willpower is that powerful urge you occasionally feel to stop a bad habit or start a good one. It’s the ability to resist instant gratification and focus on building a better future for yourself.

You’ll likely recognize willpower as fleeting because it often dissipates within a day. You might experience a burst of energy that pushes you to start thinking about what you need to change and how to change it. What you do in the hours following this surge determines whether you can harness it effectively and express willpower.

Having willpower requires action. You must set yourself in motion to maintain it. The more you act during moments of motivation, the more you strengthen and express your willpower.

You must act to express willpower.

If you decide to eat healthy, immediately dispose of all junk food.

If you want to go to the gym, drop everything and go.

If you want to meditate, start right away.

Anything less than action will inhibit your willpower, because your mind will very quickly begin finding reasons why you shouldn’t change. You've likely seen this in yourself and others, when they get a spark of genius and become excited for their new and elaborate lifestyle, only to be in the same spot a week later, having lost the spark and willpower to proceed.

Fortunately, this becomes easier with practice. Every time you act towards your long-term goals, you develop more willpower. All you need to do is act.

Initially, your willpower will be limited, and you may find that you cannot achieve as much as you originally anticipated. That's okay. It takes time to fill up your willpower tank. As you become more comfortable at starting, you will find that you have more and more willpower to spread around. Things that were once incredibly difficult for you to begin, will become easy and habitual (clearing the way for discipline).

You have to start.

Consistency to Change

Starting is one thing, and continuing is another. You can develop a deep well of willpower, but without the consistency of actions, you will eventually run dry on motivation.

Consistency is the focus required to change your life in a meaningful way.

For virtually every action worth taking, there is a non-zero amount of time before you reap the benefit of doing that action.

Eating one healthy meal won't make you healthy, but consistently eating healthy once a day will.

Exercising once won't make you fit, but consistently exercising at least once a week will.

Meditating one time will not sharpen your mind, but consistently meditating once a day will.

To reap the continued benefits of any action you must consistently act until you start getting the benefit. Too often, people apply short-term expectations to long-term goals and get demotivated when they aren't fitness models after eight weeks of exercise.

Fitness, nutrition, and mentality do not have a completion date. Eight weeks of eating nutritious food, means you are healthier than before, but it only matters if you continue. Health and fitness are a lifestyle. One that requires consistent actions throughout your life to maintain.

Once you start, keep going.

Discipline to Persist

The final key mental skill required for lifelong success in fitness and nutrition is Discipline. Individual discipline is applied structure that helps to maintain momentum toward your goals in good times and bad.

A common issue with fitness and nutrition is that they fall to the wayside and are easily forgotten when life gets hard. These hard times are when fitness and nutrition are most critical to ensure you keep a healthy body and mind!

Enter discipline.

When you apply discipline to your life, you remove the option to skip out on the fundamentally necessary things. You find the time to eat healthy, nutritious food, even when your schedule is busy. You discover energy to exercise, even when you are tired from work. You remember to meditate, even when all you want to do is escape.

Discipline is forged by making things that seem optional on the surface, a core part of who you are.

To be healthy you must become a healthy person, which means finding time to consume nutritious food, every day. To be a fit person, you should find time to exercise, every week. To have a powerful mind, you must find time to train your mind every day. These actions are what make up a healthy, fit, mindful person.

Having discipline is doing the actions required to be the person you want to be, regardless of the current state of your life.

Once you start, keep going until it becomes who you are.

Bringing It All Together

Willpower to act.

Consistency to change.

Discipline to persist.

All three are required to mold yourself into someone drastically better than you are today. Like most skills, they must be practiced to become powerful. Once you practice long enough, things that other people see as incredibly difficult will only be a matter of time for you. Possibilities you never knew existed will open up, and you will see how anything you want to do is possible.

To practice willpower, do the following:

1. When you get the urge to do something, immediately do an action, however small, to move towards that something. For example, if you get the urge to go to the gym, immediately start looking at gyms near you.

2. Once you start moving towards something, don't let up. Starting is the hardest part, so don't stop, and let the momentum of willpower carry you.

3. When you reach a point where you cannot progress further in acquiring your goal, because time must pass, immediately start on something relevant. For example, if you have signed up for a gym from home, but cannot go until tomorrow, research routines that you can do tomorrow. The goal is to continue using your willpower to get more done.

 To practice consistency, do the following:

1. Every single day, good or bad, do a little something more towards reaching your goal. It does not have to be a big action, but it has to be something. This is training you to progress even when busy or don't want to.

2. On days you feel very motivated, get a lot done. This is critical to maintaining consistency, because it makes the low-motivation days more bearable and gives you more momentum going into them. A super hard Saturday workout will make a mediocre Sunday workout less likely to mess with your consistency.

To practice discipline, do the following:

1. Decide who you want to be then do the things that a person like that would do, every day. You must become the person of your dreams.

2. Force yourself to eat healthy, exercise regularly, and train your mind even when you don't feel like it. Discipline is difficult to develop if you cannot force yourself to do actions that you don't feel like doing. To be truly disciplined, you must transcend your feelings. Greatness is made when you proceed whether you feel like it or not.

3. Push the boundaries of what you can get done in the day. The more positive actions you complete, the more likely they will become habits. Each maintained positive action forges more discipline and creates energy for more actions. This will start a positive feedback loop. Once set in motion, discipline becomes a self-replicating mental skill.

Summary

• Without building up your mind with willpower, consistency, and discipline you may never reach your goals.

• Willpower gets you started.

• Consistency keeps you focused on the change.

• Discipline keeps you persisting, regardless of what life throws at you.

• By practicing these skills, your goals are only a matter of time.