There are certain words people use in conversation that immediately make my ears prick up. One of them is in the middle of the title to this blog. “Seem”. I’ll be catching up with people and checking on their progress and they might say something like “It doesn’t seem to be working”. Another one is “feel”. “I just don’t feel I’m getting anywhere” (although there’s a second word in there that I’ll come back to tomorrow). Because ultimately, a lot of the time when we use words like “seem” and “feel”……. We’re just guessing. There’s often a lack of precision about what’s happening that those words indicate. If I start to explore with them what they’ve been doing differently, the answers will nearly always show a similar level of vagueness; “Eating better” “Snacking less” “Not drinking as often” And that’s a bit like your boss at work asking why you’re not hitting your KPIs and you saying you don’t know as “I’ve been working harder”. It’s hard to know why something did or didn’t work when we’re vague about what we actually did. The more exact we can be with what we’re actually doing………. The more able we are to track the corresponding results. And, if they don’t come, the more we have to go on to then make further changes to what we’re doing. If we know that we’ve been in an average deficit of 500 calories a day for a month, we should have lost an average 4lbs (of body fat). If we haven’t, we have a starting place for the next step – double checking the maintenance figures we’re working off, confirming how accurate our tracking is, etc. If we’ve “tried meditation” then knowing how much, how frequently and what outcome we were hoping for (not buddha-like calmness 10 seconds into the first attempt) will help us make adjustments. If it’s the exercise side of things, what was the specific desired improvement, how have we measured that (if at all) and are we doing the right things to specifically progress that? “Seem” isn’t necessarily telling us it isn’t working. Sometimes it’s telling us we haven’t measured enough to know. Much love, Jon ‘9 to 5’ Hall P.S. If you’d rather know what’s working, what’s not and what to change next, that’s a big part of what we do –> www.myrise.co.uk/apply
