There is a LOT of head trip stuff to success.

After coaching a lot of people through the years in both fitness and business, I consistently see that what goes on between your ears is just about 99% of the battle.

Building a successful business is not unlike a fitness program. What you believe to be true -- what your baselines of standards are -- generally determines how high up the ladder you’ll climb.

YOU know this to be true. Take a look at clients that succeed and clients that fail in your fitness business. Have you ever spent time thinking about what separates the winners from the losers, and then applying that awareness to yourself and your own success in achieving your goals?

Let’s talk more about a typical fitness client who wants to lose weight. Everyone starts at the same place on day 1. But some people wash out after about a month or so, because they think that building a regular pattern of exercise and healthy nutrition into their life is too much work. Or they think, “I just can’t do that, because I wasn’t born with great genetics,” or “being fit is only for crazy people that are fanatics.” But the reality is that everyone can live a healthy and fit lifestyle. Being overweight and out of shape doesn’t just happen, just like getting and staying in great shape doesn’t just happen.

Both states of being are a result of the choices we make and behaviors we build into our lives.

Ask yourself, what do you believe to be true?

Is being in shape and being wealthy for crazy people?

Personally, I believe that being unfit and broke is what’s crazy!

We all get to make a choice about whether we want to live fit or fat, rich or broke, happy or miserable. Accepting personal responsibility for the decisions we make in life is the first step in determining the type of life we will live. Then, follow-through with congruency in our behaviors and actions, combined with a commitment to persistent, unyielding and steady discipline, is what completes getting things done.

The success formula is really simple. You set a goal, commit to the action steps required to achieve it, and get shit done. In its simplest form, success is NOT a big secret or mystery… it’s just not easy.

Putting yourself on the success track (and keeping yourself there) requires a lot of saying no and cutting off old people, patterns of behavior, and other chains that are holding you back. Said another way, before you can fill your refrigerator with healthy fruits and vegetables, lean protein, and lots of bottles of water… you’ve got to throw out all the ice cream, cookies and frozen pizza. And this is where so many people get hung up and stuck.

Saying yes to success is easy. But saying no to failure is hard.

It’s my personal belief and observation as a coach that more than loving success, you’ve got to really hate failure. And you’ve got to hate failure so much that you’ll stop at nothing to eliminate it from your life. They say that failure can be a great teacher, and that’s true.

The biggest lessons in life generally come from failure, not success. In the beginning, you don’t know, what you don’t know. But after you’ve made a mistake once, repeating the mistake a second (or third, fourth, fifth) time only means that you’re continuing to allow failure to happen through the decisions you’ve made.

Sure, sometimes we all get blindsided. But more often than not, there are warning signs and red flags. Ignoring a problem, repeating a mistake, hoping it will all just go away, or rationalizing to yourself that things will just work themselves out are ALL decisions.

But these are decisions for those without the courage to stand up, look failure (and fear) in the eye, and then kick it in the teeth.

If you really want success, then you can’t run and hide. You’ve got to have the courage to stand up and fight every step of the way. And you can’t allow anyone or anything (including yourself) to hold you back.

Am I crazy? You tell me. Is it crazy to be successful, fit, rich, and happy? Or is it crazy to be a failure, fat, broke, and miserable?

It’s important that you make a decision here, and don’t be wishy-washy about it!

Make a stand. As a close friend of mine says, “choose your Alamo.”

I should warn you that this change in your thinking and beliefs will separate you from the majority of the world. You’ll be living your life in a way that most human beings can’t understand or identify with.

But then again, most of them are failures; fat, broke, and miserable… so cutting yourself off from this group, in the end, is a VERY good thing.

But don’t worry; you don’t have to go it alone. There are a LOT of great new people you’re going to meet and that you’ll attract into your world. Like attracts like, and success attracts success.

You’ll be rising up to join a group of winners and other successful, fit, rich, and happy people. You’ll have made your own Quantum Leap.