BEGREATGUYS, Inc post #3

Reward your hard work. 

BUT 

Don’t depend use your reward against you.

In a world where sometimes we need a little motivation and a great deal of discipline to accomplish our goals, we have to find the time to reward our hard work. Yes, I said “hard work” because no matter how long it took you to accomplish something — you still have to put in some form of effort to finish it. I once had someone tell me “I walked a mile today, it isn’t much but it felt good” & my reply to this person was, “walking a mile is a lot because you could have stopped half way, but you continued until you finished”. So no matter what you think is a lot or a little, if you finished it — then you achieved something great. 

Rewarding yourself doesn’t have to be something ‘out of this world expensive’ unless you want it to be and doesn’t have to be daily, you can make it a monthly thing or a yearly big event, or something small each week. Rewarding your hard work doesn’t have to be done alone either, share your good news with friends and family and allow them to be apart of your big day! How you choose to reward yourself can be a broad range of things: new running shoes, something new for the bike, weekend vacation with the family, spa day, new fitness clothes from your favorite store, new gym bag, upgraded gym equipment for the garage, etc. The reward is for you to choose and something that will make you happy for accomplishing what you accomplished and keep you motivated to continue doing well for yourself. 

On the other side of things, rewarding yourself can be a positive thing gone negative if you aren’t cautious of how you reward your results. Some people may find their reward system may diminish their results/prevent them from further progress. These types of rewards are only benefiting you at the time, but in the long run they ruin what you worked hard for and set you back a couple of notches if you aren’t careful. The type of rewards I am speaking on are: eating a cookie for every mile you accomplish in the day, going to Mcdonalds for dinner on the weekends for eating healthier options during the week, buying clothes that are a size or two smaller to work towards, buying a motorized scooter instead of taking your bike to work, etc. These things are all good rewards in the beginning but these same rewards will work against you in the long term if you aren’t careful. 

For example maybe you decide since you are making so much progress, you will start to buy clothes a size or two smaller so that you have something to work towards each week or month, and while this type of motivation & reward doesn’t sound like such a bad idea upfront, in the long term it can turn into a bad decision because you become obsessed with wanting to fit the clothes and when you don’t feel as though you are making fast enough progress or it becomes a game of “I have had these same pair of jeans for 5 years hoping I would be able to fit them again”; it can start to weigh down on you mentally. Same with wanting to reward yourself with food, in the beginning it might sound like a good idea because you have chosen to cut them out of your life otherwise, but in the long term it can turn into a habit that becomes the delay of your progress. I believe if you want to eat something, do it but paying mind to the amount of it and how it may or may not effect your results is important because you don’t want to work hard for something and then end up losing it all due to your reward system because that same reward system is what is keeping you going in the first place — what sense would it be to have made an accomplishment then throw it all away at the same time.

Along side a good reward system would be to have a purpose/ A “Why” so that when the reward system fails you, you can use your purpose to keep you going again — a good purpose/good why, is one that drives you, keeps you grounded and doesn’t leave you with doubt. Sometimes our why’s can take the place of our rewards because our why is the reward.

Thank you for reading, please take the time to leave comments, likes, share or reblog, and follow. 

This post was in honor of my sponsor #BEGREATGUYS 

check us out at https://begreatguys.com/ and find my personal page at https://begreatguys.com/shay-lon-moss

Be sure to use my promo code “Shay” for discounted prices on apparel 🙂