Inside Out: Being Your Best Self

I want to talk about a theme that is closely intertwined with the Peak Performance Pack, something I hope everyone is thinking about at this time of year: How you can be your best self in 2015.

The first thing I want you to know about being your best self is that we’re not talking about aiming for some sort of unachievable perfection. Being your best self doesn’t mean taking someone else’s best and pinning it up on your wall as your goal. It doesn’t mean wearing yourself out by trying to become something you’re not.

You might’ve heard what happened when Victoria’s Secret announced their new ad slogan a few months ago: “The Perfect Body,” accompanied by a photo of a group of airbrushed supermodels. More than 27,000 people signed a petition asking the company to change its slogan. The company wisely relented and changed its slogan to “A Body for Every Body.”

This is the generation of the “selfie”—the most photographed generation in history—so when we talk about your “best self,” it’s easy to get caught up in personal appearance. But being your best self isn’t about having a perfect figure or a sculpted physique. If you focus on body image or body weight, on what’s on the outside, you might do more harm than good. And there’s a very simple reason for that: Real change doesn’t come from the outside in. It comes from the inside out.

If you were at Launch and you heard about the research behind the Peak Performance Pack, you know that’s exactly how it works—from the inside out. The Peak Performance Pack starts at the cellular level and, in as little as one hour, helps the systems in your body perform better.

It’s almost a cliché in the world of nutrition to compare your body to a sports car. You might have a high-performance engine under the hood, but if you neglect it and feed it with subpar fuels, it won’t matter how nice your fenders are. You simply can’t perform optimally if you don’t give your engine what it needs.

The reality is (and I mean no disrespect to automobile engineers in saying this) our bodies are much more complex and magnificent machines than shiny, high-performance sports cars. The more you discover about how your body operates and what it’s capable of, the more you realize that every single one of us is a walking, talking miracle.

Being your best doesn’t mean being your skinniest or even your fittest; it means being your healthiest. It’s not just about what you do today; it’s about what you do daily for the long term. So when you’re determining what it means to be your best self this year, cut yourself some slack about what you see in the mirror and instead focus on consistently giving your body the nutrition it requires to perform.

The best decision you can make right now is to start using the Peak Performance Pack daily and share it with everyone you know. Once your bodily systems are running smoothly, the changes you want to see on the outside will come.

Regular physical exercise works in the same way. What matters is not how fast you ran your mile or how good you look in your workout clothing. It’s what happened inside you as you worked out and how your body adapted to it. The key to physical fitness, just like nutrition and any other lifestyle habit, is consistency.

Marketing Executive of the Year Brooke Paulin often shares this quote from philosopher Will Durant: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”

Something else happens when you do those activities regularly: you change. Your lifestyle changes, and you become a happier, healthier person. More and more evidence is showing that relationships are among the biggest keys to happiness and quality of life. This is a business where creating and then nurturing relationships, and even fostering communities, is central to your long-term success. There’s great satisfaction to be found in building relationships and communities in your organization.

Sometimes we get so caught up in celebrating the milestones of a Melaleuca business, and those things should be celebrated. But often, the real triumphs and successes come long before those successes begin to show up on your business report. The truly lasting accomplishments come in the personal growth, the courage and the fortitude we find as we build this business and discover what we’re capable of.

Start taking those small, consistent steps toward becoming your best self in 2015. When you get to December 31 and look back, you’ll be amazed at what you’ve accomplished.

By Darrin Johnson, Senior Vice President of Sales