Coaching Corner - It's About Time

Everybody wants more time. If you’re looking to find some “spare” time for exercise, meal planning, cooking, relaxation, whatever… forget it. If you’re like most people, your life is so overscheduled and overbooked, you can barely find time to take a deep breath, much less take optimal care of your health—unless, of course, you make health a top priority.

Nobody has any spare time. In fact, time is the great equalizer. The poorest person and the richest person on earth have exactly the same amount of it. So forget about finding extra time and focus on making time for the activities that support your health goals. Here’s how.

One of my colleagues and mentors, Dr. Jonny Bowden, shares this analogy: “Let’s suppose I gave you a bank account and I deposited $86,400 in it. There’s only one stipulation. You have to use it up in one day,” he says. “You either spend it or lose it. Now, wouldn’t you pay a lot of attention to how you used that money?

You have a bank account like that right now. It’s called time. You have 86,400 seconds in every day. If you don’t spend them creating the life you want to live, too bad. They’re gone. You never get to spend them again. Those 86,400 seconds are a gift from the universe. You’ve got the power and the responsibility to spend them in a way that makes a difference to the people you love and to yourself.”

In this context, we must take a hard look at where our time is going. When clients tell me there simply isn’t enough time, I encourage them to keep a log for one week to see how they are spending their time. Most of us have no idea how much time we waste every day. There are literally hours and hours at the end of every week that we could have spent on more meaningful activities. Where are you wasting precious hours?

This week, I encourage you to be more aware of how you spend your time. Do you genuinely want to make positive changes in your life? If so, then make a commitment to yourself and carve out the time. If you have been stressing about having no time to exercise, then you simply haven’t made a big enough effort to shift things around. Find the activities that eat up your time that are less important than the changes you wish to make. Then block out time on your calendar, and treat these appointments with yourself just as you would any other important meeting.

Everything starts in your thoughts. So, get clear on what you want, and start focusing your time and attention on how to make it happen. You get to choose how to spend your valuable account. And if you decide to use some of it to create a healthier life and a fitter, leaner body, the universe will cooperate with you. If you can commit, even when circumstances seem impossible, miracles can happen.