Let’s say you have a picture in your head of how you want to look in 3 months, half a year, a year… It will require some repetitive effort; a routine (almost) every day to achieve that goal. But life is distracting. Whether it’s personal duties or entertainment, there are many things around you to draw away your attention. Reminders can help you stay focused – to convince you to repeat things that might not be pleasurable every day and jog your memory as to why you’re missing the party.
Putting notes in your planner, having a photo on your wardrobe mirror, getting notifications from your training app – anything that is in front of you even when you don’t really think of it helps you to remember that picture in your head.
Once I saw a fit, blonde girl with an amazing butt (a real one that you actually have to work for) on some website. Back then I wasn’t really into fitness but that photo caught my eye. I took a screenshot and I set her body as the screensaver on my iPad. I wanted to have a butt like that! That picture affected me like a magic pill. I started to notice fit bodies everywhere and I kept noticing who had toned thighs and a round butt. Suddenly fitness magazine type bodies became very attractive to me. I guess the law of attraction worked when I found another photo on Facebook; one of my friends was posing on stage in a glamorous bikini with a beautifully toned body. I asked her what she had done to look like that. She said she had started doing bodybuilding competitions and she asked me straight away if I wanted to work with her and her trainer who was famous for her butt. I couldn’t be more excited! I jumped into the fitness world and I saw that girl’s butt every single time I turned my iPad on. A few
months later I won my first bikini competition. In a couple of years I changed all my screensavers (sorry, fit blonde girl). Now I use my own favorite photos – of me, smiling, with a fit body and a round butt. Sometimes I get asked “Why do you have a picture of yourself
on your phone?” Because I love it and I’m proud of what I have achieved! It reminds me how hard I worked to look like that and it encourages me to keep working and to not lose that body. That’s my reminder to stay focused.
Whatever you want to get good at, you have to work for it. That means a lot of repetition. Training, practice, more training, more practice. Even if you love what you do, repeating things constantly can become monotone, boring and often not pleasurable or even a form of voluntary torture. Look at ballet dancers’ feet, aching and bleeding. Look at marathon runners, running even when it’s cold and raining. Even though it’s uncomfortable, even painful, they keep doing what they do to achieve their goal. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not encouraging you to struggle. Love what you do! But when it gets hard (things tend to get hard before they get easy), remind yourself with any tool that helps, that you need to repeat things. Repetition carves out a pathway in your life and in your brain to make that picture in your head a reality.