Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Posted by: melissa

Here is a great blog post by Andy Petranek, creater of the Whole Life Challenge!

Losing Points and Winning

Written by Andy Petranek

It's just one glass of wine. One piece of bread. One scoop of ice cream. One drink of juice. How bad could it be? It's just one point. Funny... the first time I participated in the Whole Life Challenge, this was the conversation that I had with myself... pretty much every day. After the first two weeks (the time during which I had the motivation, momentum and will power to stick to it 100 percent) and the first lost point, I found myself asking that question all the time... and justifying the choices I made to cheat, and to lose a point. Oh it's just one serving of rice. Or it could have been worse, I could have had both the tortillas AND the rice (and lost 2 points). I was willing to make the choices I was for a point here and a point there. I continued this all the way through to the end - having both good days and bad... and ended up on the leader board somewhere in the middle of the pack.

Do you think that the person who participates that way gets less out of the WLC than the person with the perfect score? I can tell you for a fact that the players with lower scores get as much or more. In the bigger picture, and this is one of the main purposes of the WLC, you're making these sorts of choices every day anyway, just not assigning points to them. Is it possible that if you let yourself off the hook for a glass of wine (and a point) every single day for the first four weeks that you might get sick of losing a point every day for a glass of wine? Of course that's possible. And might that process be necessary for you to go through to get to the place where you're no longer to willing to trade the point for the glass of wine? Maybe. But in your regular life, when you let yourself have the glass of wine every day, there's nothing to draw your attention to it (like a point on the leader board).

So I guess what I'm saying is to be kind to yourself. Be gentile. It's OK. You're in your process - whatever it is. Even if you haven't checked in at all since the start and have zero points - maybe seeing that big fat goose egg of a score is what you need to get yourself started again. No one can do it for you. Keep plugging along... you're starting week two tomorrow. Stay in the game - whatever that game happens to be.

Lets hear about your experience so far with the Whole Life Challenge in comments. Has it started getting hard yet?