To live a better life, we want to be better, do better, and act better, and when it comes to becoming better, waiting is not easy. But if we focus on the right things and do it the right way, it pays off.
25 Pounds and No Time to Change
Five years ago I was in the best shape of my life. I had just finished presenting a health and wellness seminar and I was living it. I was down to a very lean weight, eating healthy foods, and exercising regularly. I seemed unstoppable.
Until I stopped.
Within the next year and a half my weight started to drift. My focus as a speaker changed from health and wellness to corporate presentations, and my weight seemed to change with it. I gained a dozen pounds and it didn’t seem to stop.
I still exercised and ate moderately well, but I was doing the bare minimum. And with all the pressure of other things, the bare minimum was all I could seem to do. Within around three years I reached a peak nearly twenty five pounds above where I was and there seemed to be no time to buckle down.
I decided that I would continue to maintain: to exercise, eat five servings of fruits and vegetables daily, employ a few other food restrictions, but then worry about the rest another day. It’s not that I was giving up on being healthy: it’s that I was focusing on doing the bare minimum to be healthy enough, until I could deal with the more pressing things in my life. Waiting is not easy when you know you aren’t where you want to be, but, with perseverance, it can pay off.
Back on Track
Here I am five and a half years later and I finished last year with my lowest weigh in I’ve had in almost five years. Because I had set things aside for a time, I was able to focus on clearing up other, more pressing issues before circling back. If I could have advised myself back then on anything in this area, I think I probably would have just said that waiting is not easy, but it pays off.
We are all juggling so many things at any given time. It’s next to impossible to keep them all at their optimum and if one falls, it only makes it that much harder to deal with the rest.
That’s why sometimes we have to focus on key things and put everything else in maintenance mode. We don’t give up on them, but we do give them only the basic amount of attention to keep them healthy and nothing more. I definitely wanted to be healthier, but it wasn’t time to give it anything more than the minimum. Sometimes waiting is not easy, but if we keep our focus, it pays off.
If you are struggling with too many things going on in your life, maybe it’s time to wait on some of them. Here are some tips to determine what’s best for you.
Waiting Well
If you are in a period of your life where you need to wait on something, here are a few tips to do it in the best way.
- Build Your Focus: Adult relationships, kids, work, health, purpose, spirituality, and more are all looking for our time and attention. When all of them are screaming for us to pay attention to them, we need to gain focus. Pick one or two of them to maximize your time on.
- Dedicated Effort: When you focus on one or two, that means you need to maximize your time with them. Do what it takes to make that time valuable. Read books, come up with new ideas, watch videos, spend time with the right people. Do what it takes to make this time important to improve these areas of your life which will allow you to start putting more attention in other areas later.
- Baseline the Rest: While you are focused on one or two things, bring the other items into baseline mode. That doesn’t mean you ignore them completely. It means that you do the bare minimum to keep them healthy. When I was focused on other things, I didn’t stop exercising or eating my servings of fruits and vegetables each day. Although I could have eaten better and been more active, I still did the bare minimum.
Although I had to put being at my ideal weight on hold, I didn’t give up on it. I just held off on it. I kept believing and always expected to come back to it. I simply put the goal in limbo. In times like that waiting is not easy, but I’m glad it pays off.
