Keri McKibbin Personal Training

So you have a great opportunity to get fit and healthy, to turn your life around, and you start and things go well, and recognise that being fit starts making you into a different person, much more dynamic and your hopes and aspirations start to go up again.

Then the crucial stage starts form many. Although you do well, start feeling better, you no longer put your exercise as a high priority in your life.

Other things become more important, and you forget that the most powerful and helpful you can be in all areas of your life is when you are fit and healthy.

Getting fit and healthy is one of the most selfless things you will ever do, because you will automatically do more things and likely help others due to the increased zest and drive in your life.

When you have more energy, you can do more things, when you are healthy you are more positive. It’s easy to put others in front of yourself though, and let others talk you out of getting fit and healthy.

Nobody likes being told they are making excuses, nobody likes being told they aren’t trying hard enough to fit exercise into their lives, but it’s often true and their initial good intentions can disappear quickly. Please don’t talk yourself out of doing great things, don’t talk yourself out of a better future.

There’s nothing worse than a conversation you have with someone telling you “they exercised and did really well at it, but ‘life’ got in the way and maybe ‘someday’ they will have a go again”.

We all only have so many years, months, weeks left and taking action right now means that the future is likely to be a higher quality of life, don’t get to 60, 70 years of age wishing you’d starting earlier, and you’d reaped the rewards of exercise would have brought you in terms of being pain-free, much more energetic, and the opportunity to help those closest to you.

I see many, many individuals with us battling real adversity every day, but still fit in exercise 3 times a week because they want better lives. Prioritise your health again, and the rest will fall into place from there.

Here’s a life-changing story from Jerry Weintraub, who represented the great and good in Hollywood from Frank Sinatra to George Cooney to Matt Damon.

He takes us back to when he was 13 years of age, with his father (a travelling jewellery salesman), and somehow ends up in a film studio canteen opposite legendary actress Betty Grable (famously insured her legs for one million dollars in the late 50’s).

He was in awe of her, and he said she looked goddess like, eating her food and drinking a lemonade, he was literally sitting there with his mouth wide open watching a living legend.

Then all of a sudden Betty released the biggest belch he’s ever heard. He was in shock, pretended not to notice and looked away. This was life-changing for Jerry.

At the time, Hollywood was seen as the place for Gods and stars were seen as better than others and “untouchable”.

Suddenly though, jerry realised that they were indeed just like him, with the same habits, the same worries and insecurities, even though he was only a 13 year old from The Bronx in New York.

After that moment, he treated everyone the same, whether from where he grew up or the president of the united states.

It teaches us all a lesson. Nobody is better than us, nobody more supremely talented than us, it comes down to how hard we will work for something, how long we can stick at it, and making sure we take all the everyday opportunities that present themselves to us.

It’s not about our background, how much money we have, what school/college we used to go to, “who we know”, it’s about the here and now and how we deal with every day in front of us.

No time to dwell on the past, focus on the people who are here to help us and try to help them too, not everyone is against us, change the way you approach people and you will find more people will try to help you.

Things rarely work first time. We can’t run a marathon without any training, we can’t be the boss of the company straight away without a lot of experience and prior success, it’s impossible to lose huge amount of body fat in only a week, there’s no such thing as a overnight success in anything.

Best bit of advice I ever had was that you need to put the work in consistently if you want to get anywhere, and don’t always expect it to go your way, in fact expect it not to for a while.

Expect to fail many times, expect MANY people to tell you to give up and forget your dreams, but on the way keep refining your efforts, keep modifying your approach until you get it bang on right.

Many negative voices will appear, but keep your head down and work even harder to prove them wrong, your success will appear somewhere down the line if you stick with it.

The most dangerous time is when you think things are going perfectly, expect something to pop up and knock the complacency right out of you and test your resilience to the full.

Prepare for failure but make sure you set down strong foundations down for yourself so you can bounce back immediately and achieve success. You can come back from anything and overcome the biggest of challenges.

When you are trying to achieve something memorable that will positively affect your life, expect the journey to be tough and life will test you out many times before you arrive at your destination.

Remember the road to success will be crowded to begin with, but your success will most likely come when everyone has left the field, because they have given up and they weren’t as willing as you to work as hard, overcome so many odds and you went the extra mile when nobody thought it was possible.