Beating CBA

Or: Motivation for people with excuses.

It's not been a great week, exercise-wise. Having told you last week about setting those times to do things, and then sticking to them, this week just sortof slowly turned to custard.

CBA is short for Can't Be Arsed; if you get to CBF, it's all over. When I miss one bit of exercise in a plan, it seems so easy just to go, oh well, it's not working, I'll give up now. And that's when CBA kicks in, because it's much easier to not put yourself out than it is to make an effort to sort things.

On Tuesday I was sick, which was a legit reason for missing my fitness class. No matter, I'll get that run in later in the week and I'll be fine, I thought. But on Thursday the blue small person had an extra football game and on Friday (yesterday) I was too shattered to try and fit a run in between finishing work and going out to dinner with The Wine Ladies. Not so legit, but excuses. Which left me two out of three down for this week.

Saturday morning is usually sacred to The Sleep In. The blue small person is taken to football by the husband, and the pink small person and I mooch around in pyjamas until just before they get home again. However, the pink small person has a dancing exam coming up, which involves extra dancing practice at 9.00am on Saturday morning. Horrors!

This where that motivation thing comes in; I have a few different things I do to make myself get out there:

1. Tell someone that you are going to do it. If you are an extrovert (I don't understand you, but I will try) that might mean that someone might come with you, and doing stuff with people always makes it more likely to happen. If you are an introvert (like me) and you don't follow through with something you have told someone else you will do, you will feel really dumb and embarrassed, which works like nothing else for me to get things done*. So I told the husband I would go for a run while the pink small person was dancing. And so I did.

2. Bribery and corruption**. I think this is quite okay if you are bribing yourself. I tell myself, if I manage a whole month of sticking to the 3 bits of exercise a week I will allow myself to buy that new exercise top I saw advertised that has the cellphone pocket in the racerback. Stereotyping hugely, my Jewish-Scottish heritage overpowers the Australian-Irish side every time, and I hate spending money on myself, so this is a good motivator for me. For those of you who like shopping (I really don't understand you, but my brain says I must be accepting of diversity), you might try reverse bribery, and not allow yourself to buy that thing until you reach a certain goal.

3.  Big picture.  This is where I fall down at the moment, as I need to have a big picture goal or something to aim at in the long term. Often Beth, my fitness coach, will organise some event that a group of us will enter, or I might find something to set as a goal (like the sister-in-law's wedding a couple of years ago), but just now I have nothing in particular. Having set my small goals, I need to have something bigger that they can all feed into, to make them purposeful.

4.  Electronic monitoring.  Which is not to say an ankle bracelet from the Prison Service! Recently I got a new phone for my birthday (necessary trade-up, but expensive, so not something I would buy for myself of course) and it came with a built in health and fitness tracker app. Somehow, constantly monitoring myself and knowing if I am not doing something functions in much the same way as telling someone, and it is really gratifying to see the good stuff has been recorded somewhere and noticed, even if only by an app.

Between all of those things, I usually manage to keep myself on track.  But I definitely need to have strategies in place to make things happen.

What do you do to motivate yourself when things don't go to plan? I'd really like to add to my arsenal of things to make me get out there. And how do you get yourself past the excuses that are sortof legit?

* this blog is the extreme version of this, the more people I tell, the more I have to do what I said I would.

** this also works as a parenting tool, but don't tell anyone I said so.

#reasonablyfit  #startagain  #fityou  #startover  #fitandhealthy