I read a great email from Precision Nutrition this morning that brought up “NEGATIVE LUMPING” that really hit home with me.
Basically “negative lumping” is when people dismiss valuable progress because they didn’t fully achieve their stated goal. They lump the entire endeavor into the bin of failures. In their minds the whole thing either has to be labeled a failure or a success, progress be d@mned!
As I thought more about this, I realized that I am very guilty of this negative mind framing. I have so many projects, so many goals, and so many things I want to do better. But I often feel like a walking failure. I try to tell myself that I’m only a failure because I often shoot for the moon so that I can miss and be among the stars. Truth be told that I still feel like a failure. Even if I achieved 99% of the desired results.
More examples of this are: losing 8lbs instead of the 10 desired, dropping down to a 50k instead of completing a 50 mile race, drinking a soda after 5 days of eliminating soda, and the list goes on and on. The point is that we are discrediting progress and devaluing accomplishments that occur on the way.
As a coach, I have struggled with the importance of goal setting with myself and with clients. Make the goal too easy and it doesn’t hold value. Make it too hard and it can be crushing. We’ve all heard about SMART (Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time bound). And yet I’ve grown to loathe this acronym because it focuses solely on results.
In the 12 Week Year program by Brian Moran, you still have to set measurable goals, but the process is more heavily emphasized. You set up weekly indicators, pair them with lead and lag indicators, and finish them off with weekly accountability. This allows you to FEEL the process instead of being held HOSTAGE to only the results.
Am I working hard towards my arbitrary goal of a sub 20 min 5k? ABSOLUTELY! Should I feel like a failure if I only get down to 21 mins, or if I get hurt, or if my son starts running a 19 min 5k? Probably not, depends on how I felt about the process and the growth I made to get there.
So before you lump all your failures into one singular event to throw away in the trash, take a second look to see where your process wins were. Now take that energy and success to snowball into more success. I remember that I would have been ecstatic to get an 80% on certain tests and bummed to get 90% on other ones. That’s because school is a process, so are your goals.
What wins do you have to share after initially feeling like you were a total failure?
