American Fitness Professionals & Associates

- Part Two -
Dr. Frank B. Smoot, MA, DD
GHF’s Success Coach
www.CoachFrankSmoot.comYes, as much as we’d like the road to fitness to be straight, smooth, and uninterrupted, it’s a fact of like that you’re going to bump into a few obstacles along the way.

Last time we looked at Roadblocks 1-4 and how to blast them out of your way on the road to success. In today’s article (Part 2) we’ll look at the next four in some detail. I’ll cover the rest as we move through his 5-part series.

Success Roadblock Number Five:
Rationalizing Your Self-Defeating Behaviors

If there’s one thing we’re all really good at, it is rationalizing our own self-defeating behaviors. I think this is something we learn from birth, or perhaps even in the womb, since all of us seem to suffer from it one way or another.

You can call it denial or whatever else you want, but the fact is that we seem to like to plod along from one day to the next in a blissful state of ignorance about our problems, and particularly about our health problems.

Actually, considering the state of contemporary “health care,” this is completely understandable. As I never tire of pointing out, our medical / pharmaceutical / food processing industry is much more focused on illness than on health. And we, the public, can’t help but pick up the money “vibe” behind everything they do.

Not that there aren’t thousands of sincerely dedicated health care providers out there, but any objective observer would have to say that contemporary medicine is all about getting rid of the symptom, because they simply don’t have either the time, the will, or the skill to solve problems at its root.

That’s why it becomes our job to “repossess” the responsibility for our own health-care, to come out of denial, to be wide awake about the problem, and to actively pursue and find our own solutions. If we’ll leave it up to the health-care industry, we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves when we fail.

Success Roadblock Number Six:
Arguing For Your Own Limitations

If this is a concept you’re not familiar with, I can tell you it’s a mighty important one. In a way, it is closely aligned with Success Factor Number One — the belief that you can and will succeed. [Details about the ebook that explains the four Success Factors are at the end of this article.]

You can tell when you’re arguing for your own limitations when you hear yourself starting sentences with, “I have never been able to…” or “This sort of thing just runs in my family,” or “I don’t see how I could ever…” or, the most popular one of all, “Yes, but…”

Arguing on behalf of your own limiting beliefs is the surest way to make sure they stay intact and in place, and continue to sabotage you forever.

It’s safe to say that you have been arguing for a lot of your own limiting beliefs for as long as you have been able to argue. Can you think of any personal beliefs that fall into that category?

Several places in this book I have suggested that you start a Success Journal. Keeping this journal is a mandatory part of the success process. I’ve also talked about the importance of recognizing the negativity in your own internal dialogue. That’s why I suggest keeping a Negativity Journal, where you will start to zero in on the specific wording that your negative, self-sabotaging beliefs and attitudes feed into your mind.

Being able to actually see your negative inner dialogue in print will make a huge difference in your consciousness awareness, and that is the first step toward eliminating any self-sabotaging behavior.

Success Roadblock Number Seven:
Severely Limiting (But Unconscious) Self- Sabotaging Beliefs
And Attitudes Are Still In The Way

In Chapter 8 we laid out a step-by-step plan for creating your own personal health and fitness Recipe For Success. As you got into steps six through nine of that program, your primary job was to evaluate whether your current plan was working. If it’s not, it’s a safe bet that you still have some “search and replace” work to do with your beliefs and attitudes.

The bad news about beliefs and attitudes is that they are very often hiding out in your subconscious, where you can’t really detect them. It’s hard to conquer an enemy you can’t see.

The good news is, you don’t have to identify and replace all of your problem beliefs and behaviors. All you really need to do is correct enough of them to tip the balance scale in your favor.

You only need to achieve what I call a “critical mass” of self-supportive beliefs and attitudes. Once you have that, it’s a simple matter of statistics. In any given circumstance, you will now be more likely to make a healthy decision and a healthy choice than an unhealthy one. Does that make sense?

Success Roadblock Number Eight:
An Inadequate Sense Of Self-Worth

As you may have guessed, the previous roadblock related to Success Factor One, and this one relates to another Success Factor. Based on my own experience, I have never met a coaching client who didn’t have some self-worth / self-esteem / deservability issues.

As resilient as we human beings are, most of us have still been beaten up enough in childhood — either physically, psychologically, or perhaps both — that our sense of value as a person is nowhere near what it could or should be. And that’s truly tragic, because low self-esteem most often keeps us from claiming or even acknowledging the good things that are rightfully ours.

One reason I prefer to the term “deservability” over “self-esteem” is because the psychological community has tended to look upon the latter as a single, measurable factor. Then they have traditionally tended to label people as either having high self-esteem, low self-esteem, or something in between.

The truth, however, is that we all have areas of good self-esteem and not so good self-esteem. We all have what I call “cavities” in our self-esteem.

It is the presence or absence of these cavities that ultimately determines what we do and do not believe we deserve in life — even including good health, fitness, and happiness. Until we fully understand the consequences of having low deservability, we probably won’t take any serious steps to fix it, which means we probably won’t end up getting the good things that we should be getting and enjoying in life.

The roadblocks you’ve just read about were excerpted from my new ebook, “Ultimate Fitness Secrets: Revealed!” To learn how to blast all 20 roadblocks out of your way, and discover the secrets of lifelong, struggle-free fitness, bulletproof health, and low-stress living, just click here now and get the whole story!

Yours in total health, “Dr. Frank”