This is the second part of a long blog post about overcoming plateaus and challenges in being healthy…

You’ve had some early successes. You believe that your progress will only speed up and you will reach your goal in no time. You were motivated last week but all of a sudden you are beginning to find it more difficult stay focused. Family or friends need help, work becomes a drag, distracting thoughts invade your personal time. It feels like everyone else is doing great but you. You compare your struggles and successes with how superamazingfantiastic everyone around you seems to be doing. Let’s be clear. You might be projecting success on the people around you. You might be comparing your goals to the goals of someone else and feeling as if yours ‘don’t measure up’. We certainly have an issue with Keeping Up with the Jones’ with our new normal of hyper connected lives (social media stuff…). For whatever reason, you have equated your current individual situation and struggle with the success (or failure) of someone you know in your extended circle of friends/co-workers, acquaintances.

I promise you those very same people are also going through a struggle of their own. They are challenging themselves in their own way and fighting their own battles. They are not connected to yours. Some of them are failing and making mistakes in the very same way you are, you just don’t know about it. Nor should you. We all have our own paths to walk in life. It’s hard to not compare ourselves to others, to measure our definition of success with some one else’s. Ask yourself, “What is my choice right now?”. What choices can you make to pull yourself back from someone else’s life and into your own? How can you choose to focus on your path and not someone else’s?

This is when we need to rely on the honesty and strength of our support networks. They keep us moving forward (however slowly) and not backwards. It’s almost impossible to move forward in a healthy life without the honest, non-judgemental support of friends and family. If family or friends are not on board with healthy support, then an online support community is sometimes just the thing to help. A support network will be able to help:

1. Keep the motivation from early successes in the forefront of your mind
2. Keep your head in check and help you become mindful of distracting thoughts.
3. Keep your focus on small, incremental, intensional changes in daily (even hourly) habits.
4. Make the joke that will help you laugh when things get tough.
5. Keep your heart/soul/reasons for choosing health in a positive light.

Even when we make a mistake and become derailed from achieving a set goal, we have a choice. Sometimes it takes someone else to remind us of that….