By: Derek Wellock

Overcoming yourself is the first step to making any kind of positive change in your life. I know, as I have had to do this many times and will have to do it many more times. But oftentimes when momentum and motivation are lacking it is easy to let yourself slip, fall behind and lose track of your goals. When you find yourself slipping there are some things you need to do, and you must do.

First, you need to gain perspective, where are you now? Where have you come from? What is your new norm? If you were to draw a line graph of your progress over the last year or your life, would that line graph trend in a positive direction? If the answer is yes, then you need to give yourself some grace. You might need to back off the throttle for a second, regroup, refocus, and check-in to make sure your goals and vision for life are still what they were when you started this journey. As unsuspecting turns might be forcing a change in your life, and that doesn’t always need to be bad. I am going to take a second and use myself as an example of what I am talking about.

Going on year two of my health overhaul, this past month I hit some stumbling blocks. From Thanksgiving through New Years there were some changes that took place at work and for my family. My wife was in the middle of a major job transition, and I also ended up in the middle of a job transition at the same time trying to juggle kids and life in the process. November-December 2019 was a blur in my life and it kicked me right in the nuts. I put my head down, got done what needed to get gone, and made the changes that needed to be made. It was not fun and it was not easy. At the end of all this, my wife and I both ended up with new schedules, new routines, and some new goals that were not on the radar last year.

My brother and I had planned on doing some new challenges and moving the needle forward with our own fitness and health goals come January. I was pretty excited to jump into the next chapter of the Live Hard challenge and do the Reps of Discipline 10 min of burpees per day for 28 days with the goal of completing 3000 burpees in the month of January. Well, I failed at both.

Most of “my time” in the day used to take place from 4am-6am. This was 2 hours of my day, every day, that was the dedicated time where I would work on myself and my goals. I would work out, read, get creative work done etc. Those who know me best, know I happen to be firing on all cylinders at this time of day, and the morning hours are my best hours of the day. They are cherished hours for me. Welp, new plans came up and new routines had to be developed. With some recent changes in some coaches’ lives, I have opted to take on the 5am class at Midtown as the head coach. I did this for multiple reasons and for multiple reasons I will continue to do it for as long as I can foresee. But with this change, it has forced me to have to reevaluate some of my personal goals going into 2020, and if they are still important, I need to restructure, reevaluate and find some perseverance to move forward.

The additional coaching added about 10 more hours per week to my existing workload, which just meant I cut out the “me time” of day. The routine change these past few months have been whole family changes, and I can say for a fact it has been hard to build a new routine that matches my personal goals. But I am determined to figure it out, in order to figure it out, I had to make the decision I was going to back off the throttle for a while and try to create some space to build a new map to accomplish my same goals. The point here is, the destination is the same, but the route there has dramatically changed.

I still want to find optimal health and physically push my body to find that it is capable of. I get personal fulfillment out of physically and mentally challenging myself and when I am not doing that, I am not as happy as I would like to be. This I know for a fact. But other facts remain the same. My family and my work still take priority, not over my health, but over my extracurricular physical and mental challenges.

I had to stop and back away from some of my personal challenges in order to make sure I was putting my family, and my work first. Taking on 5am was both a blessing and necessity, this group of people have been dedicated to Double Edge and some of them since we first opened our doors. They deserved a coach who would step in and be just as dedicated to them. Finding an early morning experienced Welded coach is difficult, and I had been looking to get back into coaching for a while. It only made sense for me to jump back in by taking on this class as the head coach.

But there have been trade-offs, road bumps in my own personal goals, and I have been struggling trying figure out how I am going to continue to fill that internal need to keep pushing myself and keep my edge sharp, but for now, I had to take a step back and give myself some grace. Allow myself to catch my breath and use some downtime to reflect and refocus my purpose.

This past week was the first week in the last 8 weeks that I felt like I was back in the driver’s seat of my life and my day. My schedule went as planned and tasks started to get done. It felt good. One week down successfully and already I am starting to look at my goals and how I can start to tackle them again. I don’t have the map totally built yet, but I do have a clear picture of what I would like to accomplish this year. Giving myself a little grace and a little space to take a step back, take a breath, and refocus has been a gift, not a roadblock like I thought it was at first.

My new routine is allowing me to do what I love and truly impact and help people every single day by coaching class, and as more things fall back into place I am certain my map to accomplish my goals will also come into full sight.

My goal with sharing my failures is to reiterate that failure, routine changes, life disruption is a part of life. These kinds of things happen to everyone and during this time, you need to fall back to your baseline. If you have been playing the personal development game like I have been

your new baseline should be miles above your old one. Finding this out was truly one of the greatest blessings I have had these past two months. Old Derek would have fallen back to having a couple of unwinding drinks per night, eating crap food, skipping workouts, and being stressed all the time. New Derek these past few months, handled stress the way it should be handled, by taking action and moving forward with all that was in my control and letting go of all that was not in my control. New me has continued to workout 5 to 7 days per week, and still eat a near-perfect diet. The last few months exposed my new normal, and I can say I am stoked with it. I am proud of my progress but not satisfied. There is still work to be done, but letting off the throttle was the only way for me to gain perspective on how far I had come and seen what I have done, but it has also shed some light on what I am capable of. This all required grace, and to continue will require perseverance.

So if you find yourself struggling or feel off track from your goals. Look in the accountability mirror. Ask yourself, where are you? What have you done? Where have you overcome? Where to do want to go? Take that information and start putting one foot in front of the other to move forward again. The pace might change, the map might change, but the destination does not need to change. Ultimately you are in control.

Let me know if I can help in anyway team!