We’d like to start off by saying that we don’t hold any qualifications in counselling nor psychology, our knowledge comes from our clients and their experiences. Having said that, we’d say that much of what you’re going to read here is information that you’ve already gathered yourself over time.
Sitting down talking to a client the other day about their running and all round training experiences it became clear that they were comparing themselves to others and this was impacting their results. Whilst this has been a big issue for them, it’s most certainly not uncommon.
How would comparing yourself have an effect on your results? Trying to lose weight and you’re comparing yourself to your partner or even a friend who’s losing weight at a much quicker rate to you could be disheartening, it could knock your confidence about and completely take away your drive! Before you know it, you’ve thrown in the towel because it’s all just too hard now!
Even after 6 years as a professional athlete I was letting my opponents get in my head and affecting my results. In fact I believe that had I been stronger mentally, I would’ve been winning tournaments and who knows, potentially still playing today!
Hindsight is an amazing thing and we’re constantly learning and passing information onto our clients like that we’ve put together below.
The key is to only ever compete with yourself. We’re all different and we’re all chasing different goals. Some of us are married, others dating or even single. Some of us work full time, others part time and others are unemployed. Then you have family commitments to factor in on top of all of that and when you put it all together, we’re rarely comparing apples with apples when we compare ourselves with anyone but ourselves.
We’ve found that clients who learn from their mistakes, rather than punishing themselves for them see the best results. Those who continue to achieve their own health and fitness ambitions, rather than focusing on others around them are those that relish the challenge of self-improvement that exercise provides. We’ve found that clients who get distracted by others collapse under the pressure of comparing themselves to others who may be more successful in that one department of their life.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on this and if you yourselves struggle/ have struggled with this in the past and the techniques you’ve used to overcome it.
Justin Beard Pn1
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