Why Should You Get Healthy?

Health-It’s something you first remember as your parent’s probably nagging you about when you were younger-brush your teeth, go get a shower, finish your dinner. However, we are adults now and the parents job is no longer to micromanage your health. It is now your full responsibility to take ownership and participate fully in being a healthy individual. Often times when I get a client they are aware that they need to improve their health, but they still don’t grasp the full ownership that they must have to encourage sustainable lasting results. How could this be? They haven’t yet found their “why”.

            As Friedrich Nietzsche stated, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

Of course this is an intense statement, much like the German Philosopher Nietzsche himself, but it holds the key to understand how we can withstand the metaphorical storms that are approaching us as we set out on our sea of goals.  I had a client, Steven, of whom I met 6 months prior to moving to Colorado Springs. When I met him he had a vision and purpose, he was 252 pounds of full-steam-ahead determination to change. Why? Because he went into his doctors office and was told “If you don’t lose weight and change your lifestyle, YOUR GOING TO HAVE A STROKE”. He had a strong enough why in the beginning–he demanded to return to good health in order to avoid the crisis of death. Over the next six months we achieved 60 pounds of fat loss, these kind of results only come from you (the participant) taking full responsibility and ownership of your health, and when times get tough remember why you started.

            So your convinced finding your “why” matters, however, you could be asking yourself at this point-I haven’t received  dramatic life changing news like a chance of death, how do I find my why? Good Question. The first thing you must do is assess your first impulsive answer, maybe you said “I want to be healthy because I want to have higher energy levels.” You must ask “why?” a minimum of five times after your first impulsive answer. Often times these impulsive answers are just symptoms not the root cause. The root cause is the one thing that will compel you to stick with the new changes in your life, symptoms won’t. So ask why, why, why, why, and why again. You’ll sound like a little kid doing this, but that child-like curiosity is what will allow you to explore yourself enough to find why your really doing all this for.

Let’s look at an example to understand better how to put this into practice:

“I want to get healthy because I want to have higher energy levels”

Why?

“Because I would like to be able to do more than I currently am now”

Why?

“Because I come home from work exhausted and cannot give my kids the full attention that kids their age need”

Why?

“Because I want the best for my kids and I know they deserve more than what I’m able to give”

Why?

“Because I need to provide for my family”

This process has diluted the symptoms to the root cause: You really want to get healthy to provide for you family, not to have higher energy. The “5 why method” is taken from Six Sigma, a technique developed by a Motorola engineer Bill Smith, who created a problem solving method to fix machinery. The brain is a complex piece of machinery as it has various amounts of information floating around each second. However, if you can extract your concrete “why” you are able to understand your motive to change. This motive will be something your going to want to repeat in your head and feel deeply in your heart when things get hard.

            Maybe this technique didn’t work for you, that is okay we’ve got two more to help you find it. The book “Believe it to Achieve it” speaks about how we have two major motivations in life-the desire for gain and the fear of loss. Interestingly you are two and a half times more likely to be influenced by the fear of loss. The concept of loss aversion, a cognitive psychology term, refers to people’s propensity to prefer to avoid losses rather than gains even when the odds are equivalent. That means if you were to either win 5,000$ for getting in the best shape of your life, OR you were to lose 5,000$ if you didnt get into the best shape of your life, you’d would be much more motivated to change to avoid the loss rather than the gain. In fact, heatlhywages.com is a website that plays directly with this idea. I had a client, Dottie, who participated in the “healthywage” and it was enough for her to lose over 30lbs!! This can be a great motivator, but it can also lead you straight to your “why”. Reflecting on my client Steven, he wanted to avoid the strongest loss of all-death. So this may be a technique you can use in order to pinpoint your why if the first exercise didn’t work.

            The last shortcut to finding your why is to look at what you would gain from this endeavor. That could be something like gaining a better mindset in absence of depression, anxiety, self-consciousness, self-pity, ect. The only pitfall with both of these shortcuts is it often will lead to several symptoms rather than the root cause. So it may require that you use all three techniques discussed in order to have a list of things you will gain as well as a list of things you want to avoid losing. Once you have this list, understand the deeper meanings to these things by asking why you would want to gain this/avoid losing that. If these techniques help, please let me know! I am excited to hear from each of you, I write this blog to help others as it is my passion! If you haven’t had a chance to listen to my podcast yet, I highly recommend it as it talks on these points as well in our first season. Find it on iTunes and Google play; podcast name: RWYS, Remember Why You Started.