Suffering Setbacks, Without the Suffering...

Improving yourself, your body, your relationships, your self-confidence, or your life is HARD. It takes a lot of time, energy, and most of the time it is uncomfortable. Lasting change can happen, there is hope for you, and hope for the life you want. But real change takes time, and unfortunately set backs happen along the way, they are to be expected. So what do you do when things have started to improve and then wham, you’re hit hard and it feels like ground zero again?

Here are some quick easy ways to turn set back into launch pads.

1. Acknowledge that you’ve made progress. The only way you can have a set back is if you were doing better already, so take a moment and recognize that you must have been doing something right, and that means you could do it again.
2. Take a moment and mourn. Recognize the setback, and label it as such, go ahead and feel sad about it for a moment. Heck, maybe even longer. If you are worried about getting stuck in this phase, be concrete about it. Go set your kitchen stove timer for 1-10 minutes and then use that time to really feel bad (if you don’t need the whole time that is great). But once that timer goes off, that’s enough. Time to say it’s over and I can do better from here.
3. Remind yourself that what matters now is your next right choice, and try to make it quickly. Do something good that works towards your improved life, and avoid the things that your know make things harder. If during this step you consider feeling bad about your setback, remind yourself that you already did that, and the time is up, so nicely talk to yourself about letting it go and focusing on what you can control now, and go make a good choice.
4. Watch for improvement, and as it happens praise yourself. Celebrate the small, until it turns into the big. The cool thing about set backs is that they give you even more opportunities for improvements, so the possibilities of what you can now accomplish are vast. Go for it, and when you experience successes, regardless of how small, celebrate them.
5. Remember setbacks, heck even failures happen, and they often happen before greatness. It took Edison over 2 years of failure before getting the right combination to make a light bulb burn, but when it did, it burned for 15 hours. His next improvement yielded a bulb that burned for 1500 hours.  What great feats could you accomplish with that much perseverance?
6. Finally, remember a great message I learned growing up from the Care Bears “It’s never too late if you care enough”. As long as you are still breathing there is hope. Let me say that again, as long as you are STILL BREATHING THERE IS HOPE, for you, for your relationship, and for the life you want.

So now, take a breath, tell yourself you can, and go out and live the life you want. You deserve it!

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