I know what you’re expecting me to say.  You think I’m going to say something like, “You need exercise and proper nutrition to lose weight”… right?

Well you’re in for a treat.

Those things are needed, but you probably don’t want to read another article about that stuff right now.  In fact, you’re probably tired of the same old articles that you read about online – that’s why you read my stuff  J

Thank you for reading, by the way!

Here are 2 lesser-known things that you need to lose weight.

  • The mindset that failure is NOT possible. I’ve worked with a lot of clients over the years and one thing I regularly hear is how they’ve failed in the past.  I completely understand what they’re saying and I get the sentiment. They set a goal and didn’t reach it and that equals failure.

But failure feels absolute. It feels like a giant period at the end of long run on sentence.  It feels permanent.  It makes me feel that the journey I was on is now impossible.  Done.  Over. Pack up my suitcase and head home.

However, over time I have come to think of failure as part of the journey – not the end.  I like to think of it as something we all MUST go through in order to succeed.

I also like to deflate its ego a bit.  Failure is not some big massive concrete barrier that cannot be overcome.  While it is an obstacle, it’s more like a river in the woods that we have to cross in order to continue on the trail. It’s temporary.

It’s hard to figure out how to safely cross, but it’s possible and well worth the effort it takes. However most important are the lessons we learn as we try to cross.  What works, what doesn’t, how we felt, what emotions popped up, and so on.  It’s this stuff that makes the next river easier to cross.

  • The mindset that success is NOT the end point. This one always takes people for a loop.  After all, we spend our entire lives being told that we must have a goal – that we need to work towards a specific point in the future and when we reach that point we will achieve success.

But I’ve come to learn that in this process we have also come to identify success as some mystical and magical place that when reached… solves all of our problems.

Success, just like failure, is not a permanent or immovable object.  When we reach our goal we may have a temporary feeling of success, but it is just temporary.  We spend a bit of time here celebrating our victory and our accomplishment, but then something funny happens – we start to wonder what’s next.  We set a new goal.

Success is not the end point, but instead it is an indicator.  It’s simply a lighthouse that guides us.  When the light house allows us to reach safe shores, we may rest for a bit of time and revel in the journey thus far, but we also pick up our bags and move towards our next destination – or our next goal.