Priorities

Simple advice is not always simple to apply.

Good advice is rarely good if it’s too simplistic to be applied in a real world context.

Here’s an example of good, simple advice: “If you want to work on your health, you have to prioritize it.”

There’s no getting around that. It’s true. (It’s also rather “duh, thanks Einstein.”) But that doesn’t mean that acting on the advice is easy.

The principle is clear. The application of the principle can take real dedication, and not a small amount of struggle.

If this point isn’t clear, just because I wrote it and you read it and understood the words, let me explain from a different arena from health and fitness. For 20 years, I was an IT system administrator and desktop support technician. Over and over, I found myself in situations where the advice I gave, to the people I was assisting, seemed like simple advice, but was anything but simple to apply.

Most of us will understand my point by example: real world people don’t always know the field of computers, or the terminology, as well as somebody who’s been at it for a while, someone who is paid to keep up with the technology. Therefore sometimes, what seemed simple to me was a product of my experience, which not everyone shared. (If they’d shared it, they wouldn’t have had to call on me.)

Sure: “just look for the printer icon and press it.” I know people … smart people … whose workflow could be thrown out of whack because different programs used different icons to represent a printer function.

We all know the stereotype of the snarky IT person who rolls their eyes at someone for needing help with something ‘easy’. Like many stereotypes, it’s based on real examples. Being that person was a temptation, when I had seen hundreds of examples of ‘printer icons’ and so it was usually not too hard for ME to find one even if it looked different. But it would have been terrible to give in to that way of behaving.

That wasn’t the only way that ‘simple principle, complex application of principle’ arose. Sometimes the simple advice was correct, and the people in question understood it fully and easily, but they were dealing with other important priorities, other pressing requirements of their jobs, things which meant they couldn’t apply the simple advice right away, or couldn’t apply it at all because the simple solution involved messing something else up.

Consider situations where someone’s program was running slowly, and initial tests made it likely that uninstalling it and reinstalling it would help. But it was also the program that they had to use for critical work on a tight deadline. Consider, further, that reinstalling was sometimes only the SMARTEST, FASTEST option, but didn’t carry a slam-dunk guarantee—after reinstalling, there might be further issues, or ruling the software out as an issue might only uncover the real problem. 

Consider that for large software programs, the reinstallation might take longer than the slowdowns caused by the existing software malfunctions.

In those cases, “just reinstall” might be the simplest answer, but not the one worth pursuing in the actual context.

One final point: many people are familiar enough with computer hardware and software these days, that they expect to be given the dismissive ‘that’s simple, just do X’ answer from an expert, and come into these interactions knowing that they’re not going to be listened to. Which doesn’t help anyone trying to figure out what’s really the best course of action. People tend not to be able to apply well-intentioned advice if they already suspect they’re just being palmed off because someone else is ‘too busy’ to assist them.

I wasn’t the smartest technician with the best skills, but I can’t tell you how many times I had success with my clients precisely because they discovered that I was ready to work with them on more complicated solutions which actually fit their situation.

Other times, just being willing to let them tell me how complicated it was, just taking them seriously, was what was needed to go ahead with a ‘simple’ solution. Because they understood that if the simple solution didn’t really fix things, I wasn’t going to give up on them.

I’m not going to assume that the relevance of all this to fitness and health is obvious. Let me spell it out.

This morning I was on a bike ride where I used my ‘clip shoes’ for the first time this year. Winter weather keeps me off the roads, I don’t have an indoor bike rig that works well for me, so I get out of the habit of using those special shoes. Each year, adjusting to them again takes me a couple of rides. And it always makes me a little nervous.

The simple, obvious solution is to buy a better indoor bike. One I could use my riding shoes on.

So why haven’t I? Well … when my dad was living with me, I quite literally didn’t have any place I could have put it. I went from three rooms of my own to one, and that one had barely enough room for essentials. Dad was in the second room, my brother in the third … because I wasn’t Dad’s primary caretaker, given how busy I was fixing people’s hardware and software.

Now that I’m a full-time personal trainer? I have to watch my pennies. Maybe over the next few years I’ll build up a big client list, but right now it’s wise to be frugal.

I bought all of my bikes and all of my weight training gear back when the IT job made me high 5-figure salaries. For now, I don’t have that.

I have enough savings to prioritize an indoor bike, but as with the cases of ‘I need this software to run faster, but I also can’t afford losing it entirely if something goes wrong,’ right now it makes sense not to blow savings on that.

So to get back to “if you want to work on your health, you have to prioritize it”: YES, BUT.

What else do you have going on?

How much of your life can you shuffle the priority-deck for to make room for more exercise?

Of COURSE exercising more is likely to pay health dividends. Just like reinstalling that program that’s running slow. But while the reinstallation is happening, while you’re in the middle of adjusting to a new routine, things might feel tough. Things might feel worse.

YOU’RE NOT WRONG TO BE THINKING ABOUT THAT.

I find that a lot of fitness professionals don’t talk about this side of things. There’s a lot of “If you want it bad enough, you’ll make time for it.”

And yet after ten years hanging out with other fitness nuts, I’ve seen evidence over and over again of how people made sane adjustments to their priorities in ways that just so happened not to put fitness first.

“Children” are a classic example. I have met so many people who got restarted on their health only when their kids hit their teens or left home. Many of these people talk themselves down as if they wasted ten or fifteen years. But then you see new parents, some of them very fit and very dedicated, struggling to keep active now that they’re responsible for tiny lives. Call me crazy, but I think these things might be connected: maybe parents struggle to put their own health first because a child’s health has to be managed by the parents, until the child is old enough to function on their own?

Maybe the priorities those parents had were the best ones possible?

Which would mean that “If you want it, you’ll make it happen” was TRUE, but fitness didn’t win. “If you WANT kids, you’ll put THEM first … and figure the rest of it out as best you can.”

Maybe that’s true for lots of other reasons and situations?

“Life is complex” actually feels like one of the SIMPLEST things to remember. Right?

Still, here come the fitness professionals re-stating the fallacy that a simple principle about prioritizing health leads to a simple process of doing so.

I’d rather see everyone, fitness professionals and people who want to be healthy, do a better job of reminding ourselves and each other that life is complicated. Speaking personally, I find value in fitness and health BECAUSE life is complicated: I manage the complications much better now that I have prioritized exercise as highly as I do.

But that wasn’t at all easy for me to learn to do. And I’m still not going to drop everything and buy that indoor bike rig just yet.

Priorities. We all have them. Don’t ignore how external priorities can hold you back from being your best self, but don’t beat up on yourself too hard for the times you sort through all that and have to put yourself on the back burner. Just KNOW you’re doing it, know your reasons why, and keep checking in with yourself. Because you can and should evaluate periodically and see whether you can work yourself back into the mix. And you deserve support for that, not simple platitudes. No matter how true they might be in a perfect vacuum.

© 2022 Grampa Fitness

Disclaimer: Ideas expressed in this blog post should not be construed as official advice on how to safely perform fitness activities. Always consult with your doctor and other medical professionals as necessary, before engaging in exercise.