5 Things Holding You Back

Kettlebell Drengir Rating Season will commence next year on October 14th. We will be once again at the Athlete Lab in Little Canada, Minnesota for the third annual Twin Cities Kettlebell Open. Registration is now available. The lowest price it will be $60 until December 31st. For those of you brave enough to sign up now you will be rewarded. Raffle prizes will once again be given to all participants and there will be a cash prize for those who wield the steel with great vigor. Come, fight for your clan, fight for yourself, and may your name forever ring out in the hall of champions. Welcome to the platform podcast where we talk to coaches, athletes, experts, and real people to learn about their approaches to training, nutrition, mindset, and much more. I am your host, Jordan Kunde-Wright, founder and head coach of the Twin Cities Kettlebell Club. And I'm on a mission to help others build sustainable, healthy lifestyles. Before we jump into the episode, I want to remind you that registration is live for the third annual Twin Cities Kettlebell Open on October 14th hosted by our friends at the Athlete Lab in Little Canada, Minnesota. And right now the price is as low as it will be, just $60 for super early bird registration from now until January 1st. Just go to our website, twincitieskettlebellclub.com, slash TCKBOpen2023 to register. I am also incredibly grateful that you listen to this podcast. The best way you could support me is to go sign up for the Twin Cities Kettlebell Open and bring your team, Telefinder 2. Just go to our website, twincitieskettleclub.com for details. And if you haven't already, be sure to leave a rating and review of the platform podcast in your app of choice and support my work by supporting our sponsors whose affiliate links you'll find in the episode notes. And if you want help reaching your goals without wasting time, please fill out the coaching interest form linked in the show notes. I help athletes of all levels using my integrated coaching approach. Follow me on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube at twincitieskettlebellclub. Or email me at twincitieskettlebellclub at gmail.com. Now, without further ado, let's step on to the platform to discuss five things that could be holding you back. All right, welcome into this week's episode of the platform podcast. I'm your host, Jordan Kunde-Wright. And if you're hearing this on time as it's scheduled to be released, happy Thanksgiving. And if you are not hearing it on Thanksgiving, I hope you had an excellent Thanksgiving. I hope it was full of food and family and friends, gratitude. Thanksgiving is honestly my favorite holiday because of that. It's all about being thankful for what you already have in your life. It's not religious. It's not based in any religious ceremony. So it goes for everyone. I don't have any problem with religious holidays. They don't always apply. So you tell somebody, Mary Christmas, and they're like, well, I'm Jewish or I'm Muslim. Okay, well, you know, that then they celebrate different holidays. But Thanksgiving in America at least is generally celebrated by everyone. And obviously my friends in Canada have already had their Thanksgiving celebration. But it is my favorite holiday because there aren't the trappings of Christmas with the commercialism, consumerism, which I have my own struggles with. And I just I love there's something I have always loved about Thanksgiving. It is food centric which goes really well for me being being a former fat kid. And I love that it's about food and being around the table with your family. I love that there's football on, you know, throughout the day as a former football player and former football coach. I still love the game. I love watching it. So that's always a big part of it for me. But then the family component of it. I love watching football with my family, particularly my brother JJ, my brother Jason, my dad. But we we have a good time watching football. Sadly, this year, I'm not going to be with my extended family. I've been fighting some illness around the house. So my poor daughter has had a fever for like a week straight. And she's finally starting to feel better that the flu is going around. RSV is going around. It's been a lot. I hope y'all are healthy. There's been a ton of stuff going around right now. So take care of yourself. Wash your hands. Wear your masks in public if you can. Take your supplements. And yeah, I hope you I hope you're healthy. But most of all, I hope that this Thanksgiving, you are surrounded with those that you love and that you have a full table, a full plate, a full heart, a full cup. All of those things we have so much to be grateful for. And I hope that you are happy and healthy and well and have a lot to be grateful for as well. So cheers to that. And with that said, let's talk about the topic of today's podcast. Five things holding you back. And I guess I should equivocate that a little bit because maybe there's nothing holding you back. Maybe everything that you want in life is happening for you. And if that is the case, then you are definitely having a great Thanksgiving. And you have plenty of things to be thankful for. So if everything is going great for you, then nothing is holding you back. Then this podcast is not for you. But cheers to you and everything going wonderfully in your life. But even if everything is going wonderfully in your life, you can probably relate to at least one of the things that I'm going to talk about in this podcast. Probably because you overcame them if everything is going great. And if not, these things might be holding you back. And they might be holding you back from achieving your goals. Or they could just be holding you back from optimizing. This isn't necessarily saying that you're not being successful or that things aren't going well. But if they're not going as quite as well as you want, or you're not quite where you think you should be, you feel like maybe you're languishing a little bit or just, or even just that it's harder than it should be. These are five things that I think could be holding you back. These are five, five things. So they may be holding you back. All right, and we will do this one in descending order in what I think are probably the most likely reasons. What I think is the most important. So we're going to go from least important to most important. Maybe that's not even the case. It will really depend on the person, but this is my order of importance. So maybe you'll disagree with me. We'll start with number five. Not having a plan. Now this may seem really simple or really straightforward, but to look at a pretty clear example in pop culture right now, Twitter was bought by Elon Musk in case you hadn't heard. There is a whole website dedicated to tracking the shit show that is the Elon Musk takeover of Twitter. It's called Twitter is going great.com. In case you don't know, it is facetious because Twitter is not going so great. There is the appearance of the absence of a plan. As the primary cause, it seems like Elon Musk is the dog who caught a car. He's not quite sure what to do with it now that he has it. So he's thrashing around doing a lot of different things, failing, changing course, adjusting, etc. Some people will say, well, he's just being agile. As an agile practitioner by trade and training, I will say no, fuck off. That is not agile. Agile is not the absence of a plan and just pivoting over and over and over again until you're spinning in circles. Agile is having a plan, implementing that plan, measuring the results and then adapting that plan over and over and over again in cycles, in very specific cycles. That is not agile. Not having a plan is not agile and not having a plan is probably the simplest way people can derail themselves. It seems so obvious, right? If you want a thing, you should probably have a plan for how you're going to get that thing. It'd be like going on vacation where you're going to drive across country without a map. Sure, you might get where you want to go if your goal is just to get from one side of the country to the other. But, say you want to get from Los Angeles to Boston, Massachusetts in the shortest time possible by driving, then you probably want to have a plan. You probably want to take a little bit of time ahead of time to decide what route am I going to take? Where am I going to stay? How often am I going to stop? Who's driving with me or who's riding with me? What supplies do I need along the way? What are some potential pitfalls that I might need to avoid in order to get where I'm going as quickly as possible? Having a plan is the shortest way to minimize the number of disruptions that are going to get you where you need to go. Where you want to go and get you there in the most efficient way possible. You should always make sure that you have a plan and I'm not saying that you have to plan every single thing down to the most minute detail. There is benefit to having a good enough plan and getting started because a lot of times getting where you want to go as quickly as possible is predicated on starting as soon as possible. Getting started is sometimes the biggest barrier to getting where you want to go. Don't hear what I'm not saying. I'm not saying that you shouldn't start until you have the perfect plan. That is the death knell for many, many projects. So many people don't start in only plan. I would not have this podcast out at all. I wouldn't have a single episode out if I focused on having the perfect plan for launching this podcast. It still wouldn't be started. At a certain point, I just had to decide I was going to do it and get started. Now, I had a plan. I had to answer some basic questions. How am I going to record it? How am I going to distribute it? What channels are I'm going to use for distribution? How does an RSS feed work? Things that I had to know in order to be able to put this podcast together and get it out. But I have learned a ton over the course of 97-98 episodes at this point. I hope that it has gotten better and that the quality is better than it was. And I learned a lot in the process and I plan more efficiently now for my episodes than I did before. But I had a plan and I got started. Figure out what you need. Answer some basic questions and create a roadmap for how you want to get where you want to go. And if you need help with that, that's where having a coach comes in handy. One of the best life hacks I can give you is to hire people who have gotten to where you want to go. Because in all likelihood, they either hired someone who helped them get where they wanted to go or if they didn't and they got where they wanted to go by virtue of their own experience, they probably took a lot of wrong turns and learned a lot of lessons along the way. And can show you a clearer path or a shorter path to get you where you want to go. So have a plan, leverage other people, leverage the internet. It's wonderful how much information you can get on the internet, right? Leverage other people, leverage experts in particular and figure out how to get where you want to go by leveraging people who are already there. Come up with your plan and get started, right? So not having a plan, that's number five, not having a plan. Number four is having unrealistic goals. So I'll go back to our driving across the country example. If you said, I'm going to drive from LA to Boston and I'm going to do it in one sitting, I'm not going to stop. I'm not going to sleep. I'm just going to do it straight through. Well, that's unrealistic for a number of reasons. You're driving and you're going to need fuel. So I don't know of any vehicle that can go from the left coast to the right coast without needing to fuel up. So if your plan was to do it without stopping, that's already an unrealistic goal. If your plan was to do it, okay, you say, okay, well, I'm going to stop, but only for gas and to go to the bathroom. Okay, great. You are probably not accounting appropriately for the need for sleep and the need for rest, because it's, you know, even if you drive it straight through, it's like three or four days across country, depending on how fast you go and you're out and all that stuff. But can you stay awake for three or four days? Yes, in theory, how realistic is that? Right. So you need to, as part of the planning phase, assess how realistic is your goal. People so often, especially in the health and wellness space, come into a transformation, for example, where they're like, I need to lose 100 pounds. And I want to do it as quickly as possible. So I know I can lose, I've done it before, I can lose 20 pounds in a month. So if I can just lose 20 pounds in a month, then if I, and I'll take me five months to get where I want to go, like, okay, that's not realistic. The rate of change will not consistently be 20 pounds. And if it was 20 pounds, 20 pounds of what? Right. So you have to, you have to understand what the realistic constraints on your goals are. And really think about your timeframe. I see this even in business and technology, you know, very often the executive stakeholders want to do a project in a timeframe that serves their needs as far as promotion or quarterly earnings or annual earnings fiscal years. They want to have a certain, they want to have a digital transformation done in the fiscal year, but they don't accurately assess their current state and then create a plan to get to their ideal state and then assess how long it takes by leveraging experts for that input. They just think that because they want it done in a year and they need it done in a year that they can make that happen and they'll just throw money at the problem or throw bodies at the problem or whatever and then suddenly they're over budget and they still can't deliver on time or on their timeline, it's because their timeline was never realistic or their goal was never realistic. It's not a matter of time and time and money are infinite, right? Time is not infinite, at least not for humans. And money usually is not an infinite resources are typically finite and you need to understand those constraints and take a systems approach to thinking about how you're going to go about changing from current state to desired state. So if we go back to our transformation example, if somebody wants to lose 100 pounds, one of the first questions I would ask them is how long did it take you to reach your current weight because in all likelihood as the most typical answer is, well, you know, I put on 5 pounds here, 10 pounds there, you know, typically people gain weight slowly over time. And very rarely is it like, well, I got divorced and then I put on 60 pounds in the next three months, like it's very rarely that rapid, it's typically a slow erosion of health and a slow adding on of weight over time. That gives you a frame of reference for how long does it then take to take that weight off if it went on slowly or it went on over the course of five years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, how realistic is it to think that you can take it off in half a quarter, a tenth of the time that it went on your body and have it be sustainable. You don't just want to get the result, you want to keep the result, you don't, you want to be able to sustain what it is that you've built or achieved. That means that you need to have periods of evaluation within the plan, within the journey, right. So you need to, you need to, again, as part of the plan, have periods of introspection and reflection, right, we call them retrospectives and agile, right. You need to have periods of self-examination where you're looking at how well am I doing relative to what I planned, what's going well, what's not going well and how can I improve, where should I focus. And again, consulting with experts to determine how realistic your goals are, how realistic your timeframes are. If you want to lose 100 pounds and it took you five years to put it on, I'm not saying that it should take five years to take it off, but what I would say is I wouldn't consider it having been a successful transformation, unless at the end of five years from when you decide that you want to change, you are still 100 pounds lighter or within a margin of error of that, whatever's acceptable for you from, from that change point, but it's going to take you time and you're going to need to have periods of maintenance in there, right. You might be able to lose 20 pounds in the first few months, but then you need to sustain for a while, otherwise you're going to have metabolic adaptation, your rate of change is going to get slower and slower until your body just stalls, you hit a plateau, you can't do what you need to do, you can't cut calories anymore and you get frustrated and then you say, fuck it, it's not working and you abandoned the plan, right. Or you're like, I'm going to do it and you go gung-hole balls to the wall and you do everything you can and say you hit that goal, you're like, I'm going to do everything I need to do to lose 100 pounds, no matter the cost, and you do everything that you need to do and you hit that 100 pounds, you hit it and then what happens, you put it back on, or maybe you put 40 pounds back on. And then you put another 20 pounds back on and before you know it, you're back where you started, I cannot tell you the number of people that I've worked with that have told me they have gained and lost the same 20, 30, 40, 50, even 100 pounds, multiple times, right. There are people that I have talked to that have gained and lost 100 pounds over three times, which is impressive, but also depressing, right. Because they did it in unrealistic ways, unsustainable ways. And even people that have done it and that many times, the one person in particular that I'm thinking of told me, yeah, it takes me, it takes me like six months, it takes me like six months to lose 100 pounds, bigger guy, you know, what comes from military background has pretty rigid discipline when he needs to, but has never been able to sustain it, because he's never gone about it in a realistic fashion. It's always been, I want to do it as fast as possible, and it's never been about embracing the timeframe necessary for it to be a lasting change. That brings me to number three, impatience, that is the number three thing that I find that holds most people back. I'm going to pivot away from the weight loss example, and I'm going to talk about kettlebell sport specifically, a number of people, a lot of people come into this sport and they go, I want to hit master of sport because that's the, that's the rank. It's a, once you achieve it, it's a lifetime rank and it's the, it's the goal, you know, that, that most people end up landing on it, you know, especially early they, they get the bug and they, they find this sport and they're like, yeah, I want to be the best, I want to be the best can be, I want to get the highest rank I can get. They look at it and they go, okay, I could do this number of reps in my first competition with this weight, okay, I need to do that many reps with this weight to get to master sport, that'll take me like two years, no, no, probably a year. I want to get them, they don't want to, they want to get to master sport as quickly as possible. Again, not realistic, they don't know that it's not realistic, but having the time frame always be as quickly as possible is not the right framework, because if you try and do it as fast as possible, what will the consequences of that be. And how much will you need to sacrifice in order to get where you want to go. And the example of kettlebell sport, achieving master of sport is a lifetime rank. So once you hit it, it never goes away. So I can understand the appeal of achieving master sport as a rank and doing that as quickly as possible as a goal. However, with that said, if you don't put a realistic time frame on it, you're much more likely to get hurt because you're going to spike your acute volume too quickly, or you're going to spike your cumulative volume over time too quickly and you're going to suffer a major injury. No, that's not guaranteed. I just know that it's a nonlinear increase in risk. The shorter the time frame is for increase in load. Right. There's a reason that almost all of the strongest lifters in the world when it comes to powerlifting. When you look at the guys who can bench squat or deadlift world record setting numbers, we're talking in the thousand pound range for all three lifts, right, bench squat and deadlift. There's a reason all of those guys that have done that are in their 30s and 40s. And it's not old man strength. That's the people people love to people love to joke about old man strength or they reference old man strength as as if we get stronger in our 30s than when we were in our 20s. No, I mean, yes, in that guys that reached their 30s and are still lifting are stronger than they were in their 20s because they they built the strength over time, but that's the difference. Is it's time and consistency in order to build that loading pattern in a way that doesn't break your body? Right. And a lot of those guys do get hurt along the way from trying to go too fast and they have to learn patience because there are certain adaptations within your body that take time. Not only the building the rigidity of the skeleton in the spine in particular to be able to sustain those types of loads, but then also the ligaments and tendons, right, surrounding the joints also need time to adapt. And if you build that acute training volume too quickly, you're likely to injure soft tissue and if you build the cumulative volume too quickly, you're more likely to injure joints. Right. Well, you can also end your joints in acute spikes because, you know, elbows snap shoulder snap, you know, bone snap when you're talking about those levels of load, but more likely when you're impatient and you and you don't sustainably build your loading over time, you're going to tear a ligament or a tendon or something like that and that's going to hold you back. The rate of change gets slower and slower and slower, the more advanced you are and the further along the adaptation path you are, the rate of change decays, which means you actually have to get more and more patience, the higher up on the level of achievement you go towards. Kettlebell Drenge. Thank you for rating with me. You wielded the steel with honor, grit, determination and bravery. Thank you to everyone who participated in this year's Twin Cities Kettlebell Open. Thank you again to our sponsors, Barefoot Athletics, Pro Kettlebell, Kettlebell Kings, Living.fit, Sorenson Strong, CK Maceworks, Belovator and Verizon Home Internet. Prepare yourselves for rating season to come again in 2023, keep your steel sharp, keep your body fit and your mind ready and I will be back to tell you when it is time for rating to commence. Chris Duffin is a great example. He has a framework called Grand Goals and if you're not familiar with Chris Duffin, I fanboy on him a lot because he's some of the things that he's accomplished are incredible to me. He's one of the most accomplished powerlifters in the history of powerlifting. He's the only person to ever squat a thousand pounds for multiple reps and deadlift a thousand pounds for multiple reps. Now, he didn't do either of those things close to each other. It took him multiple years to build up to and this is with the background of having already been a world record setting powerlifter in his own right when he retired from competitive powerlifting where you have to do all three lifts. He started just focusing on doing these feats of strength within the individual lifts and so he spent three years building up to the ability to squat a thousand pounds for multiple reps. And then he spent another two years and you would think that the strength required to squat would translate fairly well to deadlift because they're both similar movements, they're both lower body driven movements etc but they are different movement patterns. And then he had to do a two year record load on the spine with the squat indirect load and you need the ability to pull that load for deadlift so it took him three years to build up to be able to do the squat. And then he had to pivot and do another two years of planning and building in order to be able to do the deadlift right so and that's a world record hold a world record holding powerlifter and he had to take a really long time frame build his plan and be really patient and really diligent with following his plan for all of those years in order to achieve his plan. To achieve his grand goals so the bigger the goal is the more patient you need to be because the rate of change will slow down as you get closer and closer to high achievement right and the more adapted and evolved you become so you need to be patient. Being impatient is one of the biggest things that hold people back and I would actually argue that going as fast as possible is completely the wrong approach because going as fast as possible is usually the surest way to ensure you never get to where you want to go. Right it's it's to me it's like trying to drive a formula one car at its highest speed at all times yeah might be able to go 250 miles an hour but if you try and take it if you try and take a hairpin turn going as fast as it can go you're going to crash and you'll never get where you want to go. Right so impatience is like flooring NF one and NF one car all the time right you need to be patient i'm not saying you need to go slow and I would argue that going at the appropriate speed is actually the fastest way to get to where you want to go. It's a little counter intuitive but you know as they say slow as smooth and smooth as fast right efficiency is the name of the game going at the appropriate speed going as quickly only as quickly as you can control and as quickly as you can only as quickly as allows you to adjust and change course when things are not going the right direction because if you move too quickly in the wrong direction you're actually moving further away from the goal. Right so going at the appropriate speed being patient enough. And understanding that faster rate of travel is not always the fastest way to get where you want to go. Number two relying on motivation now this one might seem counter intuitive but motivation is only what gets you started. Right it's consistency and discipline that gets you where you want to go if you are waiting to get started because you're just not motivated right now you're probably going to be waiting a long time. Because if you're waiting for everything to be perfect or you're trying to make the perfect plan and that's what's going to motivate you then you're probably not going to get started and if you're motivated right now and you get started but you don't take the time to plan you're probably not going to be able to sustain it right and at some point even if you're very successful in the early phases. The motivation will wane motivation will fall off it's just normal human psychology we all we have finite levels of motivation and will power right so. You really need to focus on the falling in love with the process and really enjoying what you do because the only way to to make motivation sustainable is to focus on making it enjoyable because eventually the motivation will wane and you will need to. rely on something other than motivation so making it enjoyable but also understanding going into it that your motivation will wane if you expect that your motivation is never going to diminish that's like going into a marriage expecting that it's always going to be like the honeymoon or it's always going to be like it was when you were dating you are setting unrealistic. expectations and you're setting yourself up for failure and disillusionment if that is your approach right so don't rely on motivation leverage motivation when you are motivated that is the time to really focus on building an appropriate plan ensuring you have the right supports in place making realistic goals. And then reframing that this even though you might be on fire right now to get started and lift all of the weight or start on the project or whatever it is understanding that that psychological energy that comes from the novelty of something new or a new pursuit is fleeting and it is going to go away. Right that's the difference between highly successful people and people who bounce around from thing to think to think to think to think to think who start a ton of things but never finish anything they rely on motivation people who focus on input rely on motivation the people who are successful at throughput. And leverage motivation to build the habits and sustainable practices and discipline necessary to see things through when the motivation wanes that is a huge difference and that has been a big learning for me over my years is I get excited about things I'm an excitable dude right I tend to start things I'm really good at starting. I had to learn the skills of planning habit formation reflection right these are all things that I added to my toolkit over the years because I realized fairly early on that motivation was only going to get me so far. It wasn't motivation that got me out of bed at 5 30 in the morning when I was in high school to go lift weights right it wasn't that excitement I wasn't excited to get up and go to school two hours early to get to the gym to lift weights before school. But I had built the necessary structures my I had leaned on my coaches on my teammates and on my parents I had told them this is what I want to achieve I have a goal that I want to achieve at the end of high school my goal was to get a football scholarship right and I knew that in order to do that there were certain things I needed to do there were measurable boxes that I needed to check I needed to hit certain weightlifting numbers in the gym in order for any big programs to even look at me I knew that I needed to get better at certain things on the football field I knew that there were things that I needed to do. And I built the plan on what I thought it was that I needed to do and then I asked for help I leaned on my strength and conditioning coach I leaned on my parents I leaned on my teammates because I knew at a certain point getting up at 5 30 in the morning to go work out in the off season was not going to be something that I wanted to do especially in you know December in January in Illinois when it's cold and dark and you know getting to school before the sun is going to be great. So I was up is not something most 16 17 year olds will do right but I understood even at that age that my motivation was only going to get me so far now there are things that you can do to replenish your motivation such as setting incremental goals setting process goals right process goals I think are actually are really the the linchpin between the pivot between motivation and habit form. Using motivation to form habits is a great approach that's when you're excited about something you really focus on what are the what are the things I need to do daily or weekly and small increments that are going to get me to my longer term goal right and really leveraging your motivation to really enforce those habits so that when you're no longer motivated you're not excited excited about what you're trying to pursue but you just getting up and going to the gym it's just something that you do prepping your food is just something that you do keeping your gratitude journal is just the thing that you do it's just part of your routine right because in the period of motivation of high motivation you leveraged that to build habits and you were going to get you in the direction that you wanted to go right leveraging motivation to build habits to build sustainable process and then trying to really reinforce enjoyment of that process by assessing what are the things that I really like what's working and what is not you keep what's working you change what is not and you try and experiment you test and iterate and hopefully time the process gets more and more enjoyable which then it becomes a virtuous cycle the process becomes more enjoyable you have better success in achieving your results achievement of the results is reinforcing which increases your motivation which then allows you to go to the next phase of improvement on your process resetting the next phase of your goals that's what perpetuates the flywheel of improvement continuous improvement right continuous improvement is predicated on leveraging motivation not relying on it understanding that it ebbs and flows and leveraging it when you have it to build sustainable habits that is key and last but not least the number one thing that I see holding people back is all or nothing thinking it is the light switch mentality the cognitive thought distortion of well I had pizza for lunch at work today is wasted I may as well just insert counterproductive behavior self destructive behavior whatever it is there is a common theme among addicts and people who have self destructive tendencies this all or nothing thought distortion right I'm not saying that if you tend to be an all or nothing thinker that you are you know at your core an addict or that you're going to become an addict or anything stupid like that I wouldn't say that but all or nothing thinking is something that underlies a lot of issues that people have I call it getting the fuck it's with my clients it's like well it wasn't perfect so fuck it I'm going to do X Y R Z and then they feel shame for not being perfect or for going off the rails and then they over correct and they're like okay I'm going to I went off the rails on Tuesday so now I'm going to do it all right I'm gonna fast for 24 hours and then after I'm done with my fast then I'm going to eat an egg white omelet and get back on track and then go to the gym and then one thing goes wrong they break their fast early or I'm not saying you should do that but whatever in there list of things something goes off track and then I like fuck I fucked it up I've had two drinks, Mayas will drink, until I pass out. I've had two slices of pizza, Mayas will finish the pizza. I didn't get my workout in yesterday, so this week is screwed. I went over my calories the last two days, so the rest of the week. I know I'm going to be over for the week, so it's a waste. All or nothing thinking. If it's not perfect, it's shit. I've got a whole podcast episode about that. I come back to this theme a lot because it is one of the most counterproductive thought patterns that I see regularly. To be totally transparent, it's still a thought pattern that I struggle with. I've been very open and honest on this podcast. I have a history of anorexia and bulimia. Eating disordered thinking is very much predicated on perfectionism. It highly correlates with perfectionistic tendencies. Perfectionistic tendencies and asceticism where you're going to punish yourself if you're not perfect. Think of the monk flogging himself from the Da Vinci code. I still joke with J. Shout out to J. We often joke with each other about flogging ourselves because it's something we both have a tendency to want to do when we feel like we messed up. You're going to punish yourself. I messed up so now I need to be punished. I need to purify myself. The only way to purify myself is through pain or withholding or purging. I hope you can see the thread there. All or nothing thinking is very self-destructive. It's dangerous. It can take you down a slippery slope very, very quickly. Instead of all or nothing thinking, focus on harm reduction when you go off track. Or planning for those times when you know that you may go off track. Thanksgiving is a great example. You don't have to go into it being like, well, I know that it's Thanksgiving. So today is the day that I am going to eat an entire pie, drink an entire bottle of wine, eat 10,000 extra calories. That's an all or nothing approach to Thanksgiving. A moderation approach to Thanksgiving would be, man, I love Thanksgiving. I can't wait to go enjoy my time. I'm going to eat whatever I want. I'm going to stop when I'm full. I'm limiting myself to two glasses of wine. And then if you go deviate from that plan, it doesn't go, well, shit, I had three glasses of wine. I may as well finish the bottle. No. That's a thought distortion. Even if there's only one glass of wine left in the bottle, because there's typically four to six glasses in a bottle of wine depending on how heavy you pour. But that doesn't mean you have to finish the bottle. You can leave the rest of it in there. You can let somebody else have it. Just because you had three glasses doesn't mean you need to have another. And just because you went off of your plan in one area doesn't mean that the entire plan is scrapped, harm reduced. You went off your plan on alcohol. That doesn't mean that you need to eat the entire pumpkin pie. You can still stick to your plan in every other area. Your plan maybe I'm going to get a workout in before I have my feast. I'm going to focus on protein first. I'm going to eat three of the five sides or I'm going to eat a small portion of all of the sides and have one plate and a glass of wine. And then wait for five minutes before I have anything else. Well, maybe you had two glasses of wine. But you stayed on track with all of those other pieces. You could just say, okay, I hit most of the things I was planning on. I went a little over on wine. All in all, still pretty good, sticking with my plan. If you hit nine out of ten, it's 90%. But if you fixate on the fact that you missed one, and then that allows you to spiral into missing five other things. Because then you're like, oh, well, I already had two glasses of wine. So I'm going to have a third glass of wine. And then you have your third glass of wine. You're like, oh, fuck it. I'm going to eat more pie. I'm going to eat more mashed potatoes. I'm going to eat whatever. Now you're letting the problem snowball. Now you're going, oh, instead of being nine of ten, now I'm eight of ten, nope, seven of ten, six of ten, wait five of ten. Right? Whatever. Allowing all or nothing thinking to poison your approach to moderation or control. Right. And that is not to say that you can't have an unstructured day or an untracked day with Thanksgiving. Thanks, success on holidays is very individual. For some people, eating a slice of pie without guilt is success. So for some people, eating the things, allowing themselves the things are success. And for some people, limiting it to only one slice of pie or not eating pie is success. Right? So you define what it is to be successful for you, but don't allow one slip up to determine that nothing, none of the rest of it counts. Right? Don't allow one mistake to compound into or one, I won't even call it a mistake. Don't allow one miss to turn into more. Right? That is the biggest thing. All or nothing thinking. Very insidious, slippery, but recognize it and be prepared to deal with it. It's okay to tell yourself, like, no, just because I missed in one area doesn't mean I need to miss in all of these other areas. Right? And it seems really simple when you step back from it. One of the things I like to do is cognitive disassociation. So I treat myself as though I'm a third party observing myself. And if I was a third party observing myself, would I think that because I had two slices of pumpkin pie as opposed to just the one I had planned, am I a fat pig? Right? Which might be something that I would think in my head. Right? Would a third party, an unbiased third party think, oh, that guy had two slices of pie. What a fat ass. No, probably not. Very few people would think that. Maybe some judgment and super judgmental people who have their own issues might think that. But my friends and family would not think that because I had two slices of pie. My wife's grandma would be like, oh, good, you like it. Oh, have another. Because for her, that's her love language, making sure that you have all the food and you never leave hungry. That's a whole other thing. That's probably a topic of a whole other podcast. But I like to do some cognitive disassociation where I give advice to myself or observe myself as though I'm not myself trying to disassociate and see how would I assess that behavior if it was one of my clients or if it was a friend or if it was my wife or whatever, right? And that's the pause that I try and give myself when I'm having these all or nothing cognitive thought distortions. Right? Assess the behavior as though it's not you and see. That's one strategy for managing it. Having a plan going in is another, right? And giving yourself the target of not being perfect is another really helpful one. So, you know, you have your plan and you think about what are the, what are the, you know, again, I'll say ten things that you want to focus on. And being like, yeah, my goal is, my goal is to hit seven of those ten or eight of those ten. Anything eight of the ten is a success, right? Or maybe you don't want to have that many. Maybe it's just three things. And you're like, you know, I only want to focus on three things. And if I'm successful at two of them, it was a success, right? You got to assess where you're at and go from there. But trying not to set yourself up for the expectation of perfection is part of the ways, one of the ways to avoid all or nothing thinking. So, anyways, I hope this was helpful for you to recap the five things that I think might be holding you back. Number five, not having a plan. Number four, having unrealistic goals set. Number three is being impatient with your goal approach. Number two is relying on motivation instead of leveraging motivation to build habits. Number one is all or nothing thinking. Avoid the fuckets. Don't set yourself up before failure by saying that if it's not perfect, it's shit, right? Those are the top five things that I think might be holding you back. If you found this helpful, let me know. If you think I'm wrong, let me know. If there's something you think I missed, or you have a different perspective on any of these things, let me know. I love hearing from people that actually listen to this podcast. And I would love to hear about it. So tag me in social media or reach out to me directly. I do respond to my DMs at Twin Cities Cannibal Club. So come at me, bra. Tell me what your thoughts are. And I hope that you have a wonderful Thanksgiving that it is happy, healthy, your family as well. And as I said before, that your table is full, your glass is full, and your heart is full. And thank you for listening. Thank you for being a part of my life, a part of my existence here on this little blue dot that we spent around on. I really appreciate it. And I hope that this is a great, great weekend, a great holiday for those of you on holiday. And I will see you next time on the platform podcast. Thank you for listening to this episode of the platform podcast. We'll be back with a new episode soon. Please be sure to leave a rating and review of the platform podcast in your app of choice, support our work by supporting our affiliates. And of course, if you have questions or you want help reaching your goals, reach out to me. Until next time, thanks for listening.