Have any of these situations ever happened to you?
You have to give a presentation in front of a large group, you haven’t started preparing yet and the stress of getting up there is eating you up.
Or maybe even closer to home — you are committed to coming into the gym tomorrow for the 6am class, but then you see the workout and it looks even more daunting than others. You have no idea how you’re going to get through 150 wallballs without barfing – that’s a crazy number, there’s no way!
Let’s get real here and talk about the Whole Life Challenge, for those of you participating. You’ve committed to doing your best with a pretty strict nutrition plan, something that represents a big shift in how you used to eat. But then you look at your schedule and today is going to be a crazy day, lots of running around and definitely out of your normal routine. What I’ve experienced up to this point (4 days in!) is that I feel even more stressed out about my diet during these crazy days because I feel stuck eating something that is convenient and not nutritious, or going hungry for a long period of time because I don’t have access to good food. Does that sound familiar to anyone else out there?
Looking back at all these situations, they all could be vastly improved by some dedicated preparation time, and then a little mental rehearsal. Those of you that have done any SCUBA diving may have heard the saying, “Plan your Dive, Dive your Plan.” Planning your dive means mapping out what is going to happen, and then a “dirt dive” would be rehearsing the plan before you get in the water. Let’s apply that to these stressful scenarios and see how the stress can be relieved by following the process.
The first situation about public speaking is rather obvious – the more you prepare, the more you start to feel better about your prospects of delivering a solid presentation. Then after preparing the speech, you spend some time rehearsing it in your mind, thinking of audience questions that might come up and how you would respond, or what you would do if the projector didn’t work.
In the “daunting workout” scenario, dissecting the workout into smaller, doable pieces is the appropriate preparation step, rather than stressing out over a huge mountain of reps. 150 wallballs breaks up in to 15 sets of 10, right? Just do 10 and take a break. Not bad at all. Then when you have a plan, you can visualize that plan in your head, and having successfully completed the workout once mentally, the actual execution on gameday — diving your plan — is not as big of a deal.
Bringing the preparation and rehearsal into your nutrition plan is not that big of a stretch, and will save you a ton of grief (and hunger). Each night, as you’re thinking about the next day’s schedule, plan out what you’re going to eat! What are you going to have for breakfast, and what do you need to do to get that ready? Making breakfast ahead of time (and maybe even a big batch of it for future crazy mornings) is always a good strategy. Do you need a mid-morning healthy snack to bring with you? Where are you going to eat lunch, and if you’re at a restaurant, what can you get that complies with your nutrition plan? Or even better – are there some leftovers from tonight’s dinner in the fridge that you can bring to work with you? Don’t be that guy that reheats fish in the microwave, but anything else is pretty much fair game! When you’re done drawing out your nutrition plan for the day, go through it one more time and try to poke some holes in it – is there anything else that you might need to prepare for and have another healthy snack on board just in case? The planning and quick run-through won’t take more than a couple minutes, and then you can spend any time needed to actually prep your breakfast and snacks. You’ll go to bed feeling positive about your extra planning effort, and wake up ready to hit the ground running!
I hope this helps you out if you’ve had some stress about complying with the Whole Life Challenge or any plan that you are doing your best to follow. Take the time to “plan your dive”, thinking about how your meals and snacks will fold into your busy day, and you’ll be much more successful at making it happen!
Ryan
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