What to do when you feel like a big ol' bowl of crapola

In the last newsletter I sent out, I mentioned that in this installment, I’d write about one challenge someone emailed me about – something that’s been hamstringing their performance efforts.

So here we go: Kimberly relayed that she is very much on track 95% of the time with regard to her goals and training. However, she laments the times she stalls out because, for whatever reason, she doesn’t feel up to the challenge of the day or moment.

She said that sometimes this is due to feeling under the weather, or there’s a strain in one of her close relationships, and other times she generally just doesn’t feel like herself. Consequently, she finds it difficult in such instances to perform at the levels she would like to.

In other words, when she feels like a big ol’ bowl of crapola, her performance tanks.

Can you relate? (Please say “yes” because otherwise Kimberly and I are all by ourselves on this one.)

So, instead of launching into 50 different ways to pick yourself up (one of which I’ll be posting about on Instagram later this week), I’m going to keep this simple.

When you feel like um… you-know-what, here’s what to do (in my extremely humble but correct opinion):

Stay in the game.

Allow me to elaborate…

Feeling like a giant pile of dookie is enough to knock most people out of the running entirely, because EVERYTHING they do and every decision they make has its genesis in the dictates of their feelings. If you’re reading this blog then you likely don’t belong to this category of sad peoples, thank God.

However, this issue can still be trying even for the baddest of you badasses out there. I know it is for me. And the most basic, yet effective, remedy I know of – when the crapola bowl is warm and in full brew – is to choose to stay in the game and be consistent.

Will you perform at your absolute best?

Probably not.

But you will have done two things that mediocre mortals and ne’er-do-well folk never have the experience of reveling in.

One, you will have reinforced your commitment to stay the course no matter what, and two, you will find second and, in some instances, third winds you didn’t even know you had access to. It takes grit to get the ball across the goal line whether we’re talking about sports, parenting, art, or business. And that takes developing a certain mentality; one that says “I don’t stop working on my mission just because I’m not ‘feeling it’ right now.”

There are obviously wise times to take a break – your body has ways of telling you when you need to back off. But most people confuse having a tired body and a whining mind with needing a break. Big mistake. And frankly, it’s the “out” that weak-minded people take constantly.

I’ll even go so far as to say it’s the days when you feel like crap that are your biggest opportunities to separate yourself from the pack of whiners, complainers, and the crowd of second-stringers who bench themselves whenever they’re not feeling 100%.

If you stay in the game and play to the best of your ability even when your mojo feels farther away than a Mars rover, you’ll gain a level of grit, strength, and respect for yourself you can’t really get any other way. You’ll also come out ahead when you reach the other side because you’ll still have momentum; momentum other people completely lost out on.

- Brian Bergford