One way to ensure you maintain motivation over time is to realise that you are only running your own race and not in competition with anyone else. I do realise this is a sweeping statement that is easier said than done these days with the world becoming a smaller place through social media and having access online to a far greater number of people in a “peer” group sense that we ever would have had in the past.

On one hand, it makes complete sense that you want to benchmark your progress against others to see if what you’re doing is competent and to what degree for your own self-esteem and, let’s be honest ego (we all have one).

However, I’ve seen the other side of this with clients in the past and it can become unhelpful to your journey and often really quite  unhealthy in more severe cases.

There’s 7.3 billion people on the planet last time I checked so it’s likely there is going to be someone stronger, faster, leaner (or a combination of) than you and you won’t have to look very far to find them. It’s ok to use this as a source of inspiration and this coupled with a “no one is cut from a different cloth” attitude is a powerful combination that should serve you as a driver to keep pushing you to take action to get to where you want to be.

That’s the good side… The opposite of this is what to watch out for, feelings of inadequacy because you don’t look or can’t perform in a certain way can get out of control if you let them. Instead, focus on your own progress curve, if you are being consistent with what you said you would do give yourself some credit and a pat on the back and only use the comparison frame with your old self.

One thing to bear in mind is, as humans we often fall into the trap of what’s known in psychology as “The Apex Fallacy” this is where we will often overestimate the ability of a group based on what the top people can do. So, for example let’s say you don’t go to a gym but you’re looking at joining and someone there can do 80 press ups, you think everyone else is closer to that and the average is perhaps 50-60 when in actuality it’s probably more like 10 or 11 across the whole member base. This can be demotivating because you think all be it subconsciously in some ways that you don’t meet the standard, or your efforts will be scrutinised when that is often just not the case.

In my experience true happiness comes largely from being in a growth mindset and wanting to better yourself, if you are working to do that a little bit every day then that’s a tremendous positive and you should take fulfilment and satisfaction from the journey that you’re on.

Work to set goals and achieve things that are a little out of your reach right now but when you get wins celebrate them and create a feel-good energy that’s infectious and wants to self-perpetuate. Be the star in your own movie and focus on your journey because at the end of the day that has very little to do with anyone else!