It’s funny you know, there are so many things that we’ve chatted about over the last few months where I’ve come to realise that life and diet kind of mirror each other, you know? It’s almost like there’s a set of life rules which apply to all situations including food and lifestyle choices, which I always regarded as something completely separate.

I’m going through the process of applying tags to all my posts at the moment so they feed into the tag cloud I made last week, and reading some of the older posts reminded me of some of the moments where things started to fall into place for me. Unpicking the flawed thought patterns in my head is an ongoing process which has been utterly priceless on this journey so far, and I find myself drawing comparisons all over the place now, often subconsciously which goes to show just how determined my head is to weed out all the crap.

This week, out of nowhere, I found myself staring one of my more familiar mantras square between the eyes and wondering how I’d never drawn the parallel before between life and diet. I bang on about it all the time, and yet I’ve never joined the dots.

So one of the things that I live and breathe in my day job is leadership development. When people first start cutting their teeth in leadership roles, one of the things which sometimes trips them up is where they start holding people accountable for the results they get without giving any thought to the input which was at the root of someone’s success or failure in any given project.

Of course you have to measure and evaluate whether someone is achieving results, but you can’t coach and develop their output, can you? What you can do as a leader is coach and support someone in how they do their job, so the quality of their input is better. In turn that has a direct effect on their results, which get better. Every time.

My mantra therefore is that you manage the input, and measure the output. Don’t hold people accountable for just the results, right? The results are what they are, actually they’re just a by-product of what someone has put in at the front end…accountability starts and ends with the behaviours which feed those results at the business end. And I was listening to one of our senior managers playing that back to someone in his team, and the penny dropped…how is that different in the context of our efforts to lose weight? It’s not! Of course it’s not, in fact saying it out loud makes me feel like Queen of stating the bleeding obvious.

I should worry less about what the bitch in the bathroom is going to tell me, and focus all my energies instead on what I’m bringing to the party. The number I drop at the end of the week is a direct result of my input over the last seven days, right? With the odd blip here and there, but by and large there’s a direct correlation. The number is what it is, the bits that I’m accountable for are the choices I’ve made around what I’m putting in my mouth and how far and how fast and how regularly I’m moving my body.

I take care of the input, and the bitch in the bathroom’s only job is to report back on the number. Providing she’s on the correct tile, obviously.

Of course it’s never just that simple is it…if it was I’d have earned my string bean stripes donkey’s years ago. It’s complicated by the Asshole voice who’s on a mission to derail the input and my own occasional willingness to listen to him over holding the line and getting it right every time. However. Instead of saying I’m going for three pounds down this week, what I should be saying is I’m going for a 100% clean eating week with exercise every day and I’m going to resist any asshole suggestions that don’t support the cause.

So…I’m going for a 100% clean eating week with exercise every day and I’m going to resist any asshole suggestions that don’t support the cause.

Watch this space 🙂

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