Setbacks

Hello everyone. Today I want to talk about setbacks. Have you ever had a setback? In case you’re not familiar with this word, it means to stop making progress. Sometimes it could even mean to move backwards from where you have been going. You can have a setback that causes you to rethink what you’re doing. Has this ever happened to you? A setback can be related to anything. For example, you could be trying to build something on a timeline. A setback can be caused when you run out of materials, or you can have a setback if you’re building something outside, and the weather changes all of a sudden. Now you’re experiencing a setback because you can’t complete the work due to the storms outside. Or maybe you are trying to do something, and you come down with an illness or maybe someone who’s helping you comes down with an illness. Now you don’t have enough workers to complete the tasks required to finish what you are doing. You’ve experienced a setback. What if you’re saving up for a special day and you experience financial hardship? That can definitely cause a setback! Maybe you have other plans that fall through for your special day, like resources become unavailable. Maybe your helpers are not reliable for whatever reason. These are just some examples to show that anyone can experience a setback in any situation where they are trying to accomplish something.

What about when you set goals for yourself? For example, maybe you want to stop smoking? All of a sudden, your stress increases in your life, so you feel the need to light up a cigarette to calm your nerves. You have experienced a setback. What if you’re in school? Maybe you want to complete certain classes in college or high school, but all of a sudden, the schedule changes and those classes are no longer available, or they don’t have any instructors to teach those classes. You’re going to experience a setback. What if you’re in college and you have these plans to finish school and then get a job? But then when you hit the job market, you keep hearing someone say you need to have experience already. Maybe you have a goal to be doing certain things within a certain timeframe. For example, you have a five-year plan, yet you keep coming up against opposition in the workforce where some jobs require experience, but you just finished school. You have all this knowledge you want to share, but you can’t progress. That can be a very discouraging setback!

What if you set fitness goals for yourself, but then you experience an injury? Maybe you were running, and you tripped. Or maybe there was something outside you were running on and then the pavement changed, causing you to twist your ankle and experience an injury. Well, that can cause a setback in your fitness goals. Or maybe you have a trainer that you’re working with, and they experience issues where all of a sudden you don’t have a trainer available anymore. That can cause a setback. What about nutrition related to fitness goals? Maybe you start experiencing cravings all of a sudden. People like me have a sweet tooth, and we need something sweet on occasion. We already know that sweets are not good for our nutritional health, so having an uncontrolled sweet tooth can make us experience a setback. Maybe you have an unexpected pregnancy, if you’re a female, which can cause all kinds of setbacks, especially if it’s unexpected. Even if you have an expected pregnancy with your spouse, but there are some health issues during the pregnancy that cause you to stop being able to be active in some things. Maybe they put you on bed rest for whatever reason. That can also cause a setback. What about this pandemic that caused all kinds of major setbacks, hitting people in different ways? There were a lot of things in motion with businesses and personal lives, so the setbacks caused by the pandemic were felt across the world. I won’t even go into all of that because it’s just astronomical. The impact that it had, the negative impact on different people, different walks of life, different things that people were trying to do, all came to a screeching halt when cities, states, and countries were shut down in an effort to contain the disease. Some people and businesses did not recover, and many are still trying to recover today.

Thinking about fitness goals, gyms and fitness centers closed up during the shutdown, and some never reopened. Whenever the city start to open back up, some of the gyms had just shut down permanently and couldn’t reopen. Of course, that caused some major setbacks in the fitness community! When you can’t workout, the muscles start to atrophy or waste away, and you lose strength and muscle mass. Those are major setbacks when you’re trying to reach your fitness goals.

I said all of that to say this: Setbacks are not uncommon. People experience setbacks all the time. The question is, what do you do when you experience a setback? Do you give up and claim defeat? No! That is NOT what to do when you experience a setback. Do you make excuses and never try again? No! That’s not what to do either, when you experience a setback. So, what DO you do when you experience a setback? You adjust your plans! That is what you do. The end goal doesn’t change. You still have the same end goal, whether it’s a fitness goal, or whether it’s other goals you have set for yourself. For example, if you want to stop smoking, that is still your end goal. You just need to change your strategy or tactics that will bring you success in reaching your end goal. If you’re saving up for a special day, you still have a special day that you’re planning. The end goal hasn’t changed. If you’re building something, you’re still building something. The end goal hasn’t changed. You just need to change your strategy to reach that goal. You adjust your objectives and your tasks that are needed to complete the goal. That’s what you do. When a setback happens, you have to change your thinking. You change from “I can’t,” to “I CAN” reach the unreachable things that you thought were not going to be attainable. You change your thinking to realize that you CAN reach that unreachable thing. You CAN reach the unreachable when you change your mindset. You can make a comeback. You take some time to restructure your plans, because, again, the end goal doesn’t change. You just need to change your plans on how you get there. Sometimes when you take a second look at something that you’re doing, you end up with a better strategy than what you started with. We have a message on our facility wall that says, “The comeback is always stronger than the setback.” Now that speaks volumes! First of all, a setback is not the end. You can make a comeback. It also says that a setback doesn’t have to be something that’s strong and overpowering because the comeback is always stronger.

You should change the way you’re thinking when you experience a setback. If you see a setback as “woe is me, this is the end of the world,” when you make a comeback, it’s going to be a lot stronger than that feeling of despair. You just need to change your thought process. GFI can help with that! When you identify what doesn’t work, you can figure out what DOES work and eliminate something that can cause another setback. Now that you know what you’re working with, and you can use wisdom and experience to help you restructure your plans so that you can reach the goal. You can have a comeback!

I just want to encourage you today that your setback doesn’t have to take you out. A setback is not the end of the world. It’s not the end of whatever you’re doing. It’s not the end goal. It is just something that hinders you temporarily, if you let it. It doesn’t have to be permanent. It’s something temporary, as long as that’s what you let it be. You LET it be just temporary. And that’s what it will be, because you can make a comeback. It’s just a bump in the road. You know, you can overcome bumps in the road. You can roll right over a bump in the road. You can make a comeback. And that comeback is going to be way stronger than your setback.