3 Ways Busy People Can Prioritize Consistency Over Perfection When Starting (or restarting) their Exercise Journey
“Perfection” is the enemy of “good enough”.
Pursuing perfection is useless. What we all need is a bias to action. Perfection implies constant, and endless, planning. If we’re too busy planning, we’re not acting.
Do yourself a favor (btw, I’m talking to myself as well): ditch the perfectionist mindset.
Why We Gravitate Towards Perfectionism
We falsely attribute success to being perfect.
We’ve thrown the word around for so long. We jokingly put people on pedestals for being perfectionist. They were just OCD. No judgment with people who are OCD, but you should know that it adversely affects progress in most of us.
Success happens from constant action. Action and feedback.
Plan-Do-Check-Act. The Deming cycle. Move through this cycle without hanging out too long in any one area. If you must hang out somewhere, it should be checking and acting.
The Effects of Perfectionism on Diet and Exercise
It will wreck any chance of progress with diet or exercise.
Perfectionism will keep us from ever starting. I used to always say “okay, diet starts tomorrow” before I went on a cheat day splurge. What I intended to be a cheat meal turned into a cheat day. And then onto the downward spiral of missed workouts and endless streaks of cheat meals.
That was the perfectionist mindset at work. And it was unproductive to say the least.
3 Tips to Get Yourself out of the Perfection Mindset and Acting
- The 5 minute rule. Commit to exercising just 5-minutes (or some short time frame). Chances are, you’ll continue passed the committed time frame and keep working out. But at least you’ll have a dignified way out of the session (you’re only committing to 5 minutes).
- Commit to a Cheat Day. This will get you out of the self-defeating cycle of perfectionism. You MUST cheat on this day. This is deliberately practicing “good enough” behavior. Reduce this cheat day to a few cheat meals limited to one day. Then whittle it down to one per day. Take your time on that.
- Practice gratitude. Write, or say, something nice about yourself. Picture yourself as a coach. You’re coaching a client who, like you, has that perfectionist mindset. What would you say to encourage this person? I’m almost certain you’ll say something kind and encouraging. Do that, but to yourself.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of “good enough.”
An 80% plan that you can do every single day is infinitely better than a 100% plan that you never get started on.
