Achieving a Healthy Lifestyle Begins With an Aspiration

This post appears in the March 2013 edition of  Truck News

I closed off my February column with a commitment to sharing some thoughts about how I keep myself motivated to exercise and eat right while dealing with the rigors of the trucking lifestyle. I started laughing at myself over this. After all I'm a truck driver not some sort of motivational guru. There is no sugar coating the fact that it is as hard as hell to put in all the hours we put in as professional drivers and still find the time to exercise and prepare healthy meals. The availability of time, or lack of it, is most often cited by drivers as the reason we don't take better care of ourselves. I don't disagree with that statement at all. It's a fact.

The irony is that successful professional drivers possess the personal traits required to create the time in their lives to make that lifestyle change. Professional drivers are self starters, they have the ability to plan and organize, they have the ability to solve problems as they arise, they are able to roll with the punches, they are patient, they are tenacious, and they posess a high level of commitment.

I can share three things with you that I have learned since I smoked my last cigarette in the fall of 2000 and kicked off my quest to improve the quality of my life. These are not mind blowing ideas or practices. I haven't developed some sort of revolutionary health plan. To me these three things are just common sense.

• I have maintained an aspiration to make healthy choices and practices a priority in my life.
• I have an ongoing and flexible plan to adopt those healthy choices and practices.
• I have developed a support network to help me stay focused on those healthy choices and practices.

So you see I don't have any big motivational secret or quick fix solution to the health challenges we face everyday as professional drivers. In effect I don't allow my personal health and well being to be less important than the freight I handle everyday. When I started it didn't look this simple or straightforward to me. It was a messy struggle that started with a deep desire for change.

I often say that there is no point trying to make a change in your life if you don't want to change. It's why I use the word aspiration and not goal or objective. To aspire to change speaks to an emotional need, a passion, an ambition, a deep desire. It's often a significant emotional event you have experienced that triggers the deep desire to make a change in your life. For me it was a noticable decline in my health between the ages of 38 and 40. I described myself at that time as a train wreck just waiting to happen. I possessed, and practiced, all the high risk factors associated with heart disease. I believed then that if I didn't make a change I'd be lucky to make it to retirement. It was a very emotional time for me. I think it was the first time I had come face to face with my own mortality. So this is where my aspiration to make healthy choices and practices a priority in my life comes from. It is a very powerful source of motivation for me. It's a place I have left behind and will never go back to.

So when it comes to your health and well being what is your greatest aspiration? Forget about how you would accomplish it at the moment, forget about goal setting and planning. Don't think about having to exercise or quit smoking or change your eating habits. Put those thoughts aside for the moment. Just picture yourself 5 to 10 years down the road. How do you picture yourself? What would you have to change in your daily life to meet that aspiration? The answer is different for each one of us. It takes a lot of introspection, a lot of time being brutally honest with yourself to answer those questions. It's not comfortable for most of us to do. It's far easier to leave your life on cruise and wait until you run into something.

But having a lifelong aspiration is the 'Big Idea' and it won't resolve all the issues you face in the daily grind of a drivers life, or any life for that matter. That's where devising a flexible plan and developing a support network comes in. This is where you do all the hard work, especially at first. The trick I learned is not to try to do to much, not to set your sights too high. Slow and steady wins the race when it comes to forming new habits. More on this next month.