Look Before you Leap

Learning to avoid horrible diet mistakes

Episode 46

We all know how to eat, right? We know that exercise works, right? These are the assumptions that lead us to making some horrible mistakes because the truth is, most of the knowledge we have is gained from people trying to sell us stuff. Not only that, but when you struggle with your weight (or your finances, or being organised for example), and you see other people seemingly getting success and making it look easy you start searching for the answers. This makes us vulnerable and it's easy to get sucked into fads!

So what do we do about it? How can we be sure we are learning from the right people?  Where do we go for answers? How do we know it's good advice, good learning? How can we look before we leap? How do we even know if we should be leaping.

One of the problems we encounter is that researching, and learning, doesn't feel like "action". It doesn't feel like we've done anything, got started on our goals, solved our problem. But the truth is, if we take some time to learn and UNDERSTAND the solutions presented to us (and even those presented by people trying to sell us stuff, because you might need to pay for some of these services) then we will make more informed decisions, we will have accurate expectations, we will understand the part we play in the process.

In fact, one of the most important thing to consider IS the process. If you find yourself focusing on a result without finding out enough information about the process required in getting the result, then you're vulnerable to making a horrible mistake.

Taking the time to learn what you need to know (you don't need to become an expert, you only need to find out as much as you need to know) will help you to filter out the junk and the nonsense. The important step is knowing what you want to achieve, why are you wanting to lose weight, get fit or make more money? Really pin it down, don't think it's obvious, what does it mean to you? Identifying your own language around the topic will help you identify your "tribe", your potential teachers and resources of information because there will be words you recognise, phrases that speak to you and the information will be on a level you can understand from where you are.

We first talked about "Looking before you Leap" in last week's episode - you can listen to that and understand it's relevance to self-sabotage HERE.