Opps! I completely forgot to do my ab workout yesterday. It wasn’t until I was writing down my workout this morning that I wondered where abs fit in. Right! I was supposed to do it yesterday.

The good news? I do not have to be perfect to meet my goals for the Transformation Mastery Challenge I’m doing. In fact, this provides me with the opportunity to overcome obstacles and persevere.

But it wasn’t too many years ago, that had I slipped up like this, I might have given up—either working out altogether or just blowing off the rest of my workouts for the week.

My thinking may have been along the lines of, “Well I messed this week up. I’ll just have to start fresh on Monday.”

I’m not alone in having had that “All or nothing,” thinking. This is one of those thought patterns that trips people up again and again.

Typical “All or nothing” thinking includes:

• I have to do my diet perfectly, or I’ve failed.
• I have to do my exercise perfectly, or there’s no point in continuing.
• I have to see weight loss every day, or there’s no way I’m going to meet my goals.
• I know I have something coming up this week where I won’t be perfect, so I might as well not even try.

When you bring this kind of thinking out into the light-of-day, it’s a little easier to see how invalid it is. But as long as you leave your thoughts unexamined, you may struggle and not understand what’s getting in your way.

You can challenge this kind of inaccurate thinking with questions like:

• ‘What evidence is there that this thought might not be true?’
• “What is the effect of my believing that thought and what could be the effect of changing my thinking?”

You can also begin to shift—almost retrain—your thoughts.

Here’s an example:

What would happen if you shifted your thinking after missing a workout to something like, “Wow, I totally missed that. It’s over and done, and I’ll get back on track with my work out tomorrow, and I won’t have any excuses for not giving it my all.”

You can also ask yourself, “What would someone else say about what I did or how successful I am?”

What I am doing is focusing on all the things I did “right,” which included getting in a fabulous back and chest workout yesterday and pounding my jump-training workout this morning. My nutrition was also spot on yesterday, and I’m focused on eating healthy again today. I’m still going to get two ab workouts in this week and I am going to use those workouts as an opportunity to focus and bring as much intensity to them as I can.

As Bill Phillips always says, “Progress not perfection.”

You do not have to be perfect to meet your goals. What can you do to begin seeing every challenge as an opportunity to overcome obstacles and persevere?

Together, we can do it!

Photo by Danilo Rizzuti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net