WLC: Conflict of Interests

Well, week 5 wasn’t too terrible. I came off the high of a PR at Nike Women’s Half Marathon and felt great. See me working out in my bright green NWM finisher’s shirt! The challenge for week 5 was to “brown bag” it all week – in other words, make every meal yourself, breakfast, pack a lunch, and dinner. I do this anyway. Easy peasy.

However, the hard part was my conflict of interests. I agreed to do a review of the Muscle Gauge Nutrition protein powders, but they are milk based. So, every day that I tried them I lost points. That is fine with me, but it certainly means that I will never recover the ground I’ve lost. There were also a few days I plum forgot to log in.

It’s funny how, after a month of working so hard to remember to do something, I can start to get lackadaisical about it, or take it for granted that I’ll remember. I even set a daily alarm on my phone but that didn’t always help. I automatically log in to all of my e-mail addresses daily, so how hard can it be to log in to the Whole Life Challenge website daily? No, so there must be a reason I’m blind-spotting it. 

What I’ve come to realize is that I’ve got a lot going on and I’m feeling the pressure. My natural reaction in this situation is to start cutting out stuff to make things more simple and manageable, or narrowing my perspective to focus on priorities. Seems I have a few more conflicts of interest.

I’ve had the privilege to participate in a lot of awesome campaigns recently with some great fitness brands – but this requires a lot of thought and planning to create good content for each campaign. I’ve been able to do some amazing long trail training runs on the weekends – but it takes the majority of the day (between driving and recovering), leaving me pretty useless for the remainder of the day. And these things are just my hobbies outside of my full time job and my full time marriage. The hubs even reminded me that we need to make “us” time a priority so it doesn’t get lost in the shuffle, and I’m so glad he said something.

I’ve been pushing back a bit, starting to release some pressure by ignoring things that are lower on my priority/commitment list. Right now, that’s the WLC. I know that I’m eating well and working out a lot and I’m happy with that. The Whole Life Challenge has definitely taught me a lot so far about areas that I can be intentional about improving. I am looking forward to being done, though.

Questions to consider: Does it take you a while to recognize that you’re getting overwhelmed or taking too much on? What are your key indicators that it’s beginning to be too much? Do you have someone in your life to point it out to you when you need to hear it?