Pros and Cons of the All or Nothing Mentality

People commonly recommend that you have a Plan B. That mindset creates the assumption that Plan A won’t work, or at the very least, that there’s a chance it won’t work. It opens your mind to second-guess your Plan A actually working out and allows you to start coming up with excuses as to why you’re not going to reach a goal. It’s preventing you from believing that Plan A is possible.

What is the All or Nothing mentality?

There’s no overnight success and reaching a goal doesn’t always come easy. When someone has no Plan B, they are all in on Plan A. They are willing to grind and be patient to reach the goal. Is this what the term All or Nothing means to you? You’re all in or not in at all.

What about when you need to pivot?

What about when you experience something like an injury? You put your mind to achieving something, but the injury would make it more detrimental to continue than to pause and go in a different direction. That’s the key – awareness and knowing.

For example, you’re climbing this ladder on the side of a building, and your goal is to get to the top. You’re climbing the ladder, climbing the ladder, and you get to the top of the building and realize that it’s the wrong building.

So, what do you do then?

You have to go down to the bottom, put the ladder on a different building, and start climbing – awareness and knowing. Think about a time when you had to make a different decision and be ok with it.

Regardless of your beliefs, we all know that if you want something to happen, but the timing isn’t right, it’s not going to work.

We think to ourselves, “This isn’t the way I planned it. This isn’t the way I wanted things to happen.” When things happen outside of your control, what do you do? Are you going to wallow in your misery of the woulda, coulda, shoulda? Or do you have a Plan B or go in a different direction than what you originally planned?

“I want to lose weight.”

In the health and fitness industry, we see a lot of people who want to lose weight. Whether it’s driven by a New Year’s resolution, a desire for the summer bod they want, pre-wedding prep, or whatever the reason, they want to lose weight.

Most of the time, they feel like everything “bad” for weight loss has to go. They cut out sugar, bread, and pasta. It’s great to want to reach a goal, but cutting out all of the things you absolutely love in your diet because you have the All or Nothing mentality will lead you to setbacks, failures, binging, or stopping altogether. There are so many negatives to going about it that way.

The All or Nothing mentality can work in some ways, but it can also be like your Achilles tendon. All or Nothing is similar to black and white. And when it comes to life, sometimes mixing them up and making gray, somewhere in between, works best.

So instead of saying, “I’m not doing or eating any of this again,” instead of doing it all the time, meet somewhere in the middle and say, Can I allow myself these foods here and there? Can I indulge?” Seriously consider if things have to be so strict because that will only last for so long. It’s never a long-term solution.

Be willing to be flexible with your approach to how you get there and check in with your mental and emotional health along the way too. So, are you ready? All the tools you need to transform your body and life are yours if you want them. LET’S GO! 

Listen to Anthony’s personal story about the All or Nothing mentality and how it led to a binging pattern in the full podcast episode here.

Check out our Project My Life podcast here.

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