Make sure compliance is the path of least resistance

When I worked as an IT project manager for an international technology company, I was also charged as the compliance coordinator just as they failed their external audit that suspended their ISO certification worldwide. My job for the next 3 months became reworking how things were done, and my guiding mantra was “making compliance the path of least resistance”. It worked.

It’s no different with anything else: you want to make the correct or preferred path the easiest one to take. Now, apply that to what you need in your life to be healthy…?

Last week, my family suffered the effects of an unplanned meal that landed us at Pizza Hut. We drank water with lemon, had a family sized salad (minus cheese and croutons, with fresh lemons squeezed on for dressing) and a veggie pizza (I tried). The dairy and gluten had it’s backlash on everyone in my house in different ways over the next 24 hours and I can guarantee it will be another year or more before we do THAT again (WHAT the HECK were we thinking????) And the experience made me want a sleeve of Chips Ahoy. Instant cravings. I know if we gave in to this, it wouldn’t stop there and the next few days would be really ugly and hard to pull back from. My own family has been through that enough times to make me go get a glass of water rather than send my husband out for cookies.

“send my husband out for cookies”

See that? See that right there? He would have to go out to the grocery store to get cookies. What a complete pain in the arse, right? Yeah–that’s by design. We don’t have unhealthy food in the house. So when we were first getting healthy and I had 10-11pm cravings, we pulled a bag of cooked and peeled shrimp out of the freezer, ran it under some room temperature water to defrost it, and mixed up some of our own cocktail sauce. After a week of this, I was no longer craving food at night. Experience tells me that feeding those cravings with chips or cookies doesn’t make them disappear in a week or two. And when my kids revolt against eating dinner, they’re free to eat whatever they can scrounge up because there aren’t any really “bad” foods in the house. When friends come over, nobody notices that they’re eating fresh, raw, cut veggies with hummus or homemade guacamole instead of tortilla chips; and nobody really cares.

Planning is critical. Planning meals, planning for shopping trips, planning when there will be blocks of time for cooking or exercising, planning the potential situations where food could be a challenge, and planning what you’re going to allow to happen (or how you’re going to avoid it) so that inevitable exceptions to healthy eating don’t result in a landslide of unhealthy eating.

Plan your week so you can spot opportunities to get exercise or fresh air or some kind of opportunity to destress and share happy times with friends. Plan your month, your travel time. Planning is huge.

And when I worked in corporate project management, the going statistic was that 99% of corporate projects failed… for lack of planning. Nobody wanted to “waste time” on that–they just wanted to get to work. But what they didn’t realize was that when you plan everything ahead of time, execution is quick and precise with significantly fewer mistakes.

It’s the same in our lives.

If you need help figuring out how to start transforming your life, let me know. Let’s work together to figure out what you need to start making progress.