“Do you think if you do a poor job you won’t have to wash the dishes anymore?”

My dad held up a pan with a hardened piece of spaghetti on it, as I pulled my foam headphones off of my head and paused my walkman.

“What?”

"If you think leaving food on the dishes is going to get you out of doing the dishes, you've got another think coming."

I stood there, marveling at the idea, which hadn't ever occurred to me. The idea that I could be that deliberately calculating was much more credit than I deserved as a teenager.

Eventually, as an adult, my family (and many friends) realized that leaving a little egg on a pan was less about my shrewd effort to avoid dishes and more an overall lack of attention to detail. As I understand it, I take a lot after my Grandma Lloyd, who was notorious for doing things like making my dad a sandwich and forgetting to put anything between the bread.

Growing up, my parents were fanatical about putting elbow grease (I’ve never seen a greasy elbow…) into anything my brothers and I did. When it comes to a work ethic, my parents had zero tolerance for anything less than full tilt.

Despite my poor attention to detail and overall distaste for any kind of housework, I’d like to think I absorbed the value and importance of working hard. And I think the same is true for many of my clients.

While that mentality serves us well in so many places – our pursuits in academia, achievement in sports, and a reputation for being a hard worker, when it comes to our health and fitness journey, that "all in" mentality doesn't always serve us well.

Because when we come up short in our effort to pursue things like weight loss, we make a plan, and it is ingrained in us that we need to follow that plan, as it is written, come hell or highwater.

But eventually, hell or highwater does come, because life. And so we feel like failures, because we not only know how to work hard, but for many people, hard work is a core value.

I often have clients start our work together by doing an exercise where they identify their core values. Because the better we understand how we work, how we think, and what’s important to us, the more we can make a workable plan that is suited to us.

If our only definition of a job well done is all or nothing, we’re going to spend a lot of time battling ourselves in this journey. And I’m not saying that it’s ok to half-ass your effort when you show up to your workout or the process.

It’s absolutely important that you put a little elbow grease into this work.

But it’s equally important to understand balance. Two of my most common questions to clients is:

What feels doable this week?

What’s one thing you can do to stay connected to the process?

There are going to be many, many times when you don’t have the time, space or energy to go full tilt in your workouts or your wellness in general.

So please, please - understand that it’s ok to not be all in, all the time. It’s great to have a solid work ethic. But it’s also important to know that sometimes, you just have to do what you can, with what you’ve got, wherever you are.

I was coaching softball at a small Division III school in Boston, when a star soccer player approached me in the preseason.

“I’d like to play softball,” she said. “Even though I’ve never played before.”

As a coach, it’s rare to get a player who shows up to you without any prior experience, and therefore, any preconceived notions about how to play the game. Usually, athletes have had numerous coaches by the time they hit college.

This player showed up as an empty vessel when it came to softball. She had no bad habits to break, no competing information in her head about how to swing the bat or play the field.

She approached everything with a beginner’s mind, and as a result, turned into a solid hitter by the end of the season. It's not that I did an amazing job coaching her. But she didn't have any bad habits to unlearn, and she had no expectations of how things should be done, because she'd never done them before. So she was open in her learning and relaxed in her performance.

Shoshin is the Japanese term for beginner’s mind and is a concept from Zen Buddhism.

I often have clients tell me that they can’t get out of their own way – usually meaning that they’re overthinking and over-complicating the process. Which isn’t hard to do when you look at the overwhelming amount of information we’re exposed to daily.

News, books, social media, conversations, emails – our minds are overflowing with information, worries, expectations and stories in everything that we do. And within that information is often competing suggestions about what will or won’t work.

So what can you do to start shifting into more of a beginner’s mindset?

1. Meditate – or even just pause a few moments to start the day.

Even if it’s only two minutes a day. I’ve been starting my day with meditation pretty consistently for the past nine months. It not only eases me into my day, but I find that taking the time to focus on the breath is an anchor that stays with me throughout the day. When I’m feeling overwhelmed or scattered or distracted (or all three at the same time) I can come back to my breath, which helps to quiet my mind, even if it’s only for a few seconds.

2. Pay attention to how much “should” is driving your actions.

I often ask clients to make two lists when we start working together. The first is a list of all of the things they feel that they should be doing. The second is a list of all of the things they want to be doing.

The first list is usually quite long. The second is usually much shorter, because we haven’t taken the time to think about what we actually want, because we’ve been driven for so long by the shoulds.

What should happen is based on your preconceived notions and ideas. Especially as we age and continue to compare ourselves with younger versions of ourselves.

What if you approached a situation with a fresh mind, as though you’ve never experienced it before? The outcome would be the outcome, with zero expectations of the result.

3. Be coach-able.

Having a beginner's mind might feel more natural when learning something new, but figuring out how to drop the expert's mind in situations you've been in before can be an important practice in learning.

My soccer player turned softball player was very coach-able, because she had no competing information and no ego about her performance. There is a lot of freedom to make mistakes when we start something new, because we expect to make mistakes.

Sometimes it's hard to drop that expert's mind, especially in situations that we've been in a number of times before.

But imagine if you could come into a familiar situation, without any of the old stories or expectations?

Easier said than done for sure.

But an interesting experiment nonetheless.

A few weeks ago, I sent one of my clients a nutrition tracker.

It was a single sheet of paper displaying check boxes to track the servings of protein, carbs and veggies she was supposed to hit every day (if you’d like one for yourself, let me know).

When we chatted the following week, she sheepishly confessed to not using the tracker.

“You’re going to think I’m ridiculous,” she said. “But the boxes printed out so light that I felt like I couldn’t see them and that’s all it took for me to throw it to the side.”

She went on to say how dumb she felt that something so small could get in her way.

But if I’ve learned one thing in my years coaching clients, it’s that nothing is too small to be a big deal when you’re working on behavior change.

Nothing.

There are many different factors when it comes to our behavior, including environment, which refers to everything in the world surrounding you – everything but you.

Part of that environment, lest I start sounding like something from your Psych 101 class, is friction, which can be described as a restraining force that impedes our action. Increasing or reducing friction can have a dramatic impact on our behavior.

Think about the last time you binge watched a Netflix show. It was easy to do because the next episode started playing immediately, even skipping the intro so you don’t have to watch it again.

You didn’t have to get up and change the DVD or anything….

I can promise you that I order more from Starbucks than I ever did because mobile ordering means I don’t have to wait in line. It's also why I use Uber when traveling. Companies study friction and try to find ways to reduce it.

As a coach, I’m constantly looking for ways to make this work as doable as possible for my clients. And in order to do that, we need to work on reducing friction. This might mean joining a gym that’s within 10 minutes of your house, setting out your workout clothes the night before (or sleeping in them) or using a checklist to track your food instead of your phone.

Last Christmas, Sheila bought me a Yeti water bottle with a straw. Up until that point, I’d been using a Nalgene bottle. I was astonished at how much more water I started drinking, simply because I didn’t have to take the lid off every time I took a sip.

What’s important is to not shame or judge yourself for what you are or aren’t doing. Instead, take a look at the desired behavior, and ask yourself – what would this look like if it were easy?