The first time I remember running, intentionally, just for the sake of running and not because I was playing hide or some other game with the neighborhood kids, I was in elementary school.

Our gym teacher Mr. Stock was explaining to the class that President Reagan was very invested in how long it would take us to run a mile, and as such, we needed to run four laps around the track that we were standing on, while he stood at the finish line with a stop watch, shouting out our finish times.

Beyond having a stitch in my side and chaffing from jeans, all I remember is that I hated running.

Fast forward to college and eight years in to organized sports, my lacrosse coach had us running something called heart attacks. All you need to know is that they worked hard to deliver on the title.

I hated running.

My mindset around running was that it was something that caused great pain, that I had to do as quickly as possible (I was slow), and was often used as a punishment in practices for being late or under-performing.

Of course I hated running.

During my junior year in college, I came across a book about Holistic Spirituality, and low and behold there was an entire chapter on the meditation and spirituality of running. I was a really self-reflective kid, and really interested in anything that might help me understand myself better.

In this book, running was positioned as a chance for some alone time. An opportunity to be out in nature. A chance to be present and mindful in your body. Time to pray and meditate.

This was the first time running was presented to me in a different light. Where for most of my life, it meant being punished in sports, was all about going as fast and as hard as you can, suddenly someone was putting a new hat on the idea of running. 

There would be no stopwatch. No timer. Just whatever music I had on my Sony Walkman (remember when the battery was dying in those?) and some peace and quiet.

I write this not because I'm suggesting you take up running (though I still enjoy it, for the above reasons). But I am curious about what your mindset is or has been around your fitness and nutrition journey. Has it been filled with shoulds? Misery? Someone else's terms?

We tend to put a lot of pressure on ourselves in all areas of our lives and fitness and nutrition is no different. Most of the coaching that I do isn't around the nuts and bolts of exercise or even nutrition. It's around mindset.

I created the image above for my clients when we talk about having success in their fitness journey, and especially in this world of virtual training. Most of our work happens between the "life got life-y" and "ok, now I see how this works" part of the journey.

The part where we begin to not only see how movement and healthy habits can fit in our lives, but we believe that we can make it work. My high school vice principal always said "believe to achieve." And that is perhaps the biggest shift you could have.

“Do you think if you do a poor job you won’t have to wash the dishes anymore?”

My dad held up a pan with a hardened piece of spaghetti on it, as I pulled my foam headphones off of my head and paused my walkman.

“What?”

"If you think leaving food on the dishes is going to get you out of doing the dishes, you've got another think coming."

I stood there, marveling at the idea, which hadn't ever occurred to me. The idea that I could be that deliberately calculating was much more credit than I deserved as a teenager.

Eventually, as an adult, my family (and many friends) realized that leaving a little egg on a pan was less about my shrewd effort to avoid dishes and more an overall lack of attention to detail. As I understand it, I take a lot after my Grandma Lloyd, who was notorious for doing things like making my dad a sandwich and forgetting to put anything between the bread.

Growing up, my parents were fanatical about putting elbow grease (I’ve never seen a greasy elbow…) into anything my brothers and I did. When it comes to a work ethic, my parents had zero tolerance for anything less than full tilt.

Despite my poor attention to detail and overall distaste for any kind of housework, I’d like to think I absorbed the value and importance of working hard. And I think the same is true for many of my clients.

While that mentality serves us well in so many places – our pursuits in academia, achievement in sports, and a reputation for being a hard worker, when it comes to our health and fitness journey, that "all in" mentality doesn't always serve us well.

Because when we come up short in our effort to pursue things like weight loss, we make a plan, and it is ingrained in us that we need to follow that plan, as it is written, come hell or highwater.

But eventually, hell or highwater does come, because life. And so we feel like failures, because we not only know how to work hard, but for many people, hard work is a core value.

I often have clients start our work together by doing an exercise where they identify their core values. Because the better we understand how we work, how we think, and what’s important to us, the more we can make a workable plan that is suited to us.

If our only definition of a job well done is all or nothing, we’re going to spend a lot of time battling ourselves in this journey. And I’m not saying that it’s ok to half-ass your effort when you show up to your workout or the process.

It’s absolutely important that you put a little elbow grease into this work.

But it’s equally important to understand balance. Two of my most common questions to clients is:

What feels doable this week?

What’s one thing you can do to stay connected to the process?

There are going to be many, many times when you don’t have the time, space or energy to go full tilt in your workouts or your wellness in general.

So please, please - understand that it’s ok to not be all in, all the time. It’s great to have a solid work ethic. But it’s also important to know that sometimes, you just have to do what you can, with what you’ve got, wherever you are.

I was coaching softball at a small Division III school in Boston, when a star soccer player approached me in the preseason.

“I’d like to play softball,” she said. “Even though I’ve never played before.”

As a coach, it’s rare to get a player who shows up to you without any prior experience, and therefore, any preconceived notions about how to play the game. Usually, athletes have had numerous coaches by the time they hit college.

This player showed up as an empty vessel when it came to softball. She had no bad habits to break, no competing information in her head about how to swing the bat or play the field.

She approached everything with a beginner’s mind, and as a result, turned into a solid hitter by the end of the season. It's not that I did an amazing job coaching her. But she didn't have any bad habits to unlearn, and she had no expectations of how things should be done, because she'd never done them before. So she was open in her learning and relaxed in her performance.

Shoshin is the Japanese term for beginner’s mind and is a concept from Zen Buddhism.

I often have clients tell me that they can’t get out of their own way – usually meaning that they’re overthinking and over-complicating the process. Which isn’t hard to do when you look at the overwhelming amount of information we’re exposed to daily.

News, books, social media, conversations, emails – our minds are overflowing with information, worries, expectations and stories in everything that we do. And within that information is often competing suggestions about what will or won’t work.

So what can you do to start shifting into more of a beginner’s mindset?

1. Meditate – or even just pause a few moments to start the day.

Even if it’s only two minutes a day. I’ve been starting my day with meditation pretty consistently for the past nine months. It not only eases me into my day, but I find that taking the time to focus on the breath is an anchor that stays with me throughout the day. When I’m feeling overwhelmed or scattered or distracted (or all three at the same time) I can come back to my breath, which helps to quiet my mind, even if it’s only for a few seconds.

2. Pay attention to how much “should” is driving your actions.

I often ask clients to make two lists when we start working together. The first is a list of all of the things they feel that they should be doing. The second is a list of all of the things they want to be doing.

The first list is usually quite long. The second is usually much shorter, because we haven’t taken the time to think about what we actually want, because we’ve been driven for so long by the shoulds.

What should happen is based on your preconceived notions and ideas. Especially as we age and continue to compare ourselves with younger versions of ourselves.

What if you approached a situation with a fresh mind, as though you’ve never experienced it before? The outcome would be the outcome, with zero expectations of the result.

3. Be coach-able.

Having a beginner's mind might feel more natural when learning something new, but figuring out how to drop the expert's mind in situations you've been in before can be an important practice in learning.

My soccer player turned softball player was very coach-able, because she had no competing information and no ego about her performance. There is a lot of freedom to make mistakes when we start something new, because we expect to make mistakes.

Sometimes it's hard to drop that expert's mind, especially in situations that we've been in a number of times before.

But imagine if you could come into a familiar situation, without any of the old stories or expectations?

Easier said than done for sure.

But an interesting experiment nonetheless.