After 10 years working in fitness, I had a strong desire to do more. I wanted to find a way to use my experience to help more people reach their fitness goals.

I decided to conduct a poll. I chose 25 random people and asked them the question, “What are your top priorities in life?” The results were very telling. The majority of people’s top two answers were family and career. Many people also said faith was a top priority.  What was alarming to me, was that no one, not even one person out of the 25, said anything about fitness. This blew me away!

Not Enough People Make Fitness a Priority

I’m sure the results would have been different if my question was, “Do you think exercise and nutrition are important?” or “Is exercising and eating healthy beneficial?” I have no doubt that everyone believes exercise and eating right is important and beneficial, but no one seems to believe that they can make it a priority in their life. We all have obstacles in our lives that we use as excuses as to why we can’t make our own health a priority at the moment.

Tell me if any of these sound familiar:

• I don’t have any time to workout.
• I work crazy hours and that makes it impossible for me to get into a consistent routine.
• I have kids at home I need to be there for.
• My kids have activities going on every other night of the week, and I need to be there to support them.
• I travel all the time for work, and I never know where I’m going or when I’m going.
• My job is so stressful that I don’t have any energy left when I get home.
• There are so many scams in the health and fitness industry, how do I even know who to listen to?
• It’s just too expensive to eat healthy these days.
• I don’t have a gym nearby to go to.
• I wouldn’t know what to do at the gym even if I went.

Do any of those statements sound familiar? Have you used any of them? We use these obstacles as validation to ourselves that it is just not in the cards for us to get in shape right now. Our fitness is always the thing we plan to get to later, you know, when we have more time. The problem with that way of thinking is that that magical day we are waiting for when all of sudden we won’t be busy anymore and we will have tons of free time–that day will never come. It does not exist. That is the realization you need to make right now. I really hate to be the one to break it to you, but there will never be a shortage of excuses. There will always be excuses you can use to skip your workout and validate going through the drive through.

Making fitness a priority isn’t easy. I never said it was easy. However, the truth is that even though it can be challenging anyone can do it!  Do you still need more convincing?

Alright, you asked for it…

I’m going to put you through a humbling mental exercise of mine that I call The Fit List. This is an assignment I put clients through who don’t believe that it is possible for them to make fitness a priority in their lives.

The Fit List

Write down the names of five people you know who have made fitness a priority in their lives. Now let’s take a closer look at these people who have been able to pull this off. What obstacles do they have to overcome? Do they have jobs?  Is there job stressful? What is their work schedule like? Do they work long hours? Do they have to travel for work? Do they have kids at home? How many kids do they have? Are their kids in activities? Do they have personal trainers?Do they have access to a gym?

Take some time and write down every obstacle you can think of that they have to overcome to make fitness a priority in their lives.

Now let’s make some observations…

Do they have to face more obstacles than you, fewer obstacles than you, or is it equal? How do you think they managed to overcome their obstacles? What have they done differently than you?

Creating this list and taking some time to make some observations about the fittest people you know, can be a very eye-opening experience. More times than not, after someone does this exercise, their mindset switches from “I’m too busy” to “If they can do it I can do it.” If that is now where your mind is, then I just have one more thing to say… It’s what you do next that counts.