We all love hearing that we are great, but do we always believe it? Probably not. This is why it’s also likely that when someone challenges us to “do our best,” our reaction may not always be “why, yes… why not.” Most likely, our reaction is “I am,” and to that I say…
OK, maybe.
Best is not exactly the “best” metric to have to measure your daily success, your fitness journey, or perhaps even your habits. What best means to us one day will most likely not be our best the following day, nor was it our best 10 years ago. Looking back at some of the moments in my life that I considered my best – I now realize were not, even if they felt like it at the time. And surprisingly, some of the worst moments in my life, at the time, ended up being or leading to some of the best things I now have. It’s not just time that is relative, it is our perception of the meanings, values, and yes, even the “bests” of our lives. This is all to say that “best” is fluid, and when I say I want you to do your best when you show up to workout with me, I subscribe to the fluidity of that statement.
Let’s also take a minute to discuss how as a personal trainer, what I consider your best is going to vastly differ from what you consider your best, and how OK that really is.
My job as your personal trainer is to set an intention for you, your goals, and your wellness journey, no matter the expectation.
So this is the point in your regularly scheduled Rush Into Fitness blog where we really need to discuss the value in semantics, because on a very real, small, microscopic level, each time we work out, eat a healthy meal, or work through our fears and limitations, we are working with semantics. There is your best, and then there is my best, and these things, on paper, seem very, very similar, but semantics is what may create unrealistic expectations for you, while the same expectations may be very much reality for me. Whether we ever are capable of realizing these exceptions is altogether another blog post.
Some of you may now start arguing with me that semantics is no big deal and that I really need to understand where you are coming from, but here is the real kicker, with a splash of tough love – no I don’t. What I do need to do is hear you, hear your expectations, and then use semantics to create an intention for you, for your workout, for your mindset, for your food log… and then come back to that each. fucking. time. we show up. I’m here to challenge your expectations of what you best means, because research indicates, time and time again, that people are surprisingly inept at predicting how we will feel in various situations.
In case you are not sick of the word “best” yet, let me really emphasize it for you. On most days, what you feel is your best is not going to be your true best, and your past events, life, all that jazz, is going to create some heavy blind spots for you so that you don’t even see it. Blind spots are basically our own, carefully crafted biases (semantics….semantics) but most of them are subconscious. These bias blind spots include hindsight bias, the planning fallacy, and the self-serving bias. These biases can help you rationalize that your best today is a whole (yeah, the whole thing) chocolate cake (you just knew that if you bought the cake, you would eat it and you “deserve” to eat it, not like Karen next door, that bitch… and besides you underestimated how long work would go today, you are hungry, and of course, it’s chocolate cake 🙄😒). Unfortunately (or is it fortunately? semantics), I know that your best is a quick trip to the Greek restaurant next door, that has a fantastically fresh, whole food salad that tastes A-MAZING, and that this will not only satisfy you and your cravings, but I also know that eating the entire cake is not the best intention even if you expect to “work it off” in the next week (you won’t, because we can never outwork our nutrition).
Deep breaths, because this is all OK. It’s a feedback loop that is hardwired into our biology. What did you expect?
To Be Continued…
#wellness #expectations #SetGoals #ShowUpWorkOut #YesWeCan #DoYourBest #RushIntoFitnessIntention
