There are plenty of areas in my life where I struggle to do what I say I want to do. Exercise isn’t one of them.
My fiancée and I recently started going to a new gym together. She has a long history with sports – basketball, soccer, tennis. I’m something of a gym rat.
What’s new isn’t fitness itself, but doing it together. And watching our two approaches side by side has made something obvious: our cultural approach to fitness is backwards.
Most people evaluate themselves against where they want to be, not where they are.
Do you want to lose 10 pounds?
Want to be able to do 10 pull-ups?
Those are fine goals, but terrible motivators because the only question you end up asking is “Am I there yet?”
If the answer is no – and it usually is – your motivation becomes self-criticism.
A better approach is to evaluate only one thing: What did you do today?
Outcomes like weight loss or pull-ups are what James Clear calls lagging indicators. What actually drives progress are the leading indicators – the tiny actions that move you in the right direction.
The process is simple:
- Don’t measure yourself against the future.
- Only measure yourself against what you’ve done today.
- If you’ve taken even one small step towards the outcome you want, celebrate that success.
If your goal is to lose weight, did you eat a little better than yesterday? Did you exercise today?
If your goal is to do pull-ups, did you hang from the bar? Did you try for one?
If the answer is yes, celebrate!
At the gym, everything counts as success for me. Showing up is a success. Falling out of a handstand is success. Being sore the next day is success.
My bar for winning is so low that I always win, and that framing makes consistency inevitable.
I was talking about this recently with my friend M’Gilvry — a professional musician who will be performing at the Snafu Conference in March — and we noticed the same pattern across disciplines.
For M’Gilvry, a missed note doesn’t register as failure. It’s part of practicing and practicing is the win.
But we were relating that in other disciplines like writing or sales, we both move the goalposts impossibly far away.
If I don’t write 1,000 words, it wasn’t a good writing day.
If M’Gilvry doesn’t close a sale, the effort leading up to that feels wasted.
Same work. Different definition of success.
As we head into the busiest fitness month of the year, my advice is simple: set your goalposts closer.
Measure yourself against what you did today, not the outcome you hope to achieve.