New Year Motivation

It being the new year, social media posts have been awash with various motivational images, sayings and pearls of wisdom. But I read a statistic that 97% would have given up on their new year's resolutions by the end of January - pretty depressing stuff huh?

We live in the information age (some would say over-information) so it can't be that people don't know what to do - lift heavy stuff from time to time, move a lot and eat an un-processed diet. Seems pretty simple to me.

So what's going wrong?

I'd say this is almost entirely due to one thing - failure. More specifically, fear of failure. How many people will say "this year is different!" or "nothing is going to stop me this time!"

I actually think that this is the problem. We, as a society, seem to be fearful of failure - it's like a black mark on our record. But is this really true? Look at some examples of true failures:

• For decades, the legendary Babe Ruth held the record for most strikeouts in Baseball
• Albert Einstein did not learn to read until he was 7 years old
• Michael Jordan was cut from his high school Basketball team

And the list goes on.

We tend not to remember these people for their failures because they managed to succeed - they stuck at it and kept going no matter what happened. And, perhaps, in spite of what happened.

Most people, when faced with failure, give up straight away. And this is particularly true of health and fitness.

So, my advice to you, is to embrace failure. It's one step closer to success. Learn from it and move forwards. You'll probably not achieve exactly what you want to during January (and that's ok), but you've got another 11 months in which to keep working hard.

And remember, the biggest failure is to never have tried.