Episode 62: Reframing Setbacks & Building Self-Worth Beyond the Gym
We’ve all experienced moments when progress stalls, motivation dips, or a workout just doesn’t go our way. In this episode of the Coaching Corner Podcast, I’m diving into the emotional and mental toll that setbacks in the gym can have—and how to turn them into powerful opportunities for growth.
As a personal trainer and health coach, I’ve seen how easy it is to tie your self-worth to your physical performance. When things don’t go as planned, it can feel like a personal failure. But I’m here to remind you: it’s not. Setbacks are part of the process, and they can actually strengthen your mindset—if you approach them the right way.
In this episode, I cover:
Why gym setbacks can impact mental health more than we realize
How to separate your identity from your performance
The role of self-compassion in your fitness journey
Ways to develop a strong, well-rounded sense of self outside of the gym
How to find balance through hobbies, connection, and self-reflection
This conversation is for anyone who’s ever felt discouraged by a lack of progress or questioned their worth because of where they are in their fitness journey. If you’re looking to build a resilient mindset and redefine success on your own terms, you’ll want to give this one a listen.
🎧 Listen now on your favorite podcast platform or watch the full episode on YouTube!
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Jayd (00:00):
If you're coming to the gym with that attitude of how can I pick myself apart and beat the shit out of myself? You'll find something to do that with. But if you instead have a growth mindset of all of this is just facilitating my personal growth journey and setbacks in the gym should be handled exactly the same way that we should handle setbacks in real life, which is, okay, that didn't work. What can we learn from this? Or is there something to learn from this? Because it might just be I'm having a shitty day and it just didn't work. Get it next time.
(00:43)
Hey there. Welcome to the Coaching Corner podcast. I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. I've been a personal trainer and health coach for over 10 years, and I've created this podcast to share with you some of the conversations and the tips that I share with my followers and personal training clients. In today's episode, I'm sharing a conversation that I had with my Twitch chat when I was live on my Twitch channel, that's Twitch tv slash Jaydigains. And in this conversation, one of my followers was telling me about a setback that he recently experienced while he was in the gym and he was having a really hard time coping mental health wise with that setback. Now, I think that this is a really common thing to happen for a lot of people, especially if you are the type of person who has a lot of high standards for yourself or if you tend to struggle with self worth.
(01:33)
So in this conversation I gave some tips for how to reframe the experience of setbacks in the gym so that it doesn't set back your mental health. If you struggle with self-worth or if you have a hard time not defining your self-worth by your performance in the gym or by your physique, then this episode is a great one to listen to. It's all about developing a stronger sense of self, a stronger connection with yourself, and learning to contextualize what we do in the gym in the grand scheme of things so that we don't experience setbacks as personal failures. And before we get into this episode, make sure to like this video if you're following along on YouTube, and make sure to also subscribe to my channel so you always get the latest videos. If you're listening to this podcast, make sure to follow the show so you always get the latest episodes delivered right to your device. And also, don't forget to give me a follow on Twitch if you're interested in joining me for my future livestream conversations. I go live on Tuesdays and several other days throughout the week in the fitness and health category where I do my workout and I offer fitness advice to my chatters and listeners, I hope to see you there. Just go to twitch.tv/Jaydigains and give me a follow or subscribe to support the channel. And without further ado, let's get into the episode.
(02:57)
So Thursday, it felt good, jumped on the planned one rep Max pr. From the next week to that session, you messaged the guy helping you programming and said, if you feel safe with the need, do it. You did it, but you're not happy with your depth on it. At the time, you thought it was okay, but now you're depressed because you thought it wasn't good and you've been down on yourself. Any advice, it doesn't matter. None of this shit fucking matters, dude. Sometimes you got to step back and stop taking yourself so seriously. Your value, your personal value has nothing to do with how heavy you squat or you know how perfect your squat is. You can't identify who you are as a person with your performance in the gym because guess what? We're all getting old one of these days. You're not going to be able to do this shit anymore, and it doesn't mean that you won't be as valuable of a person.
(03:56)
This is something that we do for fun because it is fun. This is enrichment, but it's not everything. You have to develop a sense of self. Remind yourself of who you are outside of the gym. If you overly identify with the gym and your performance in the gym, you're setting yourself up for some real bad mental health. So I would suggest reconnecting with other things that you love to contextualize what we do here in the gym sometimes, if this is the only thing that we're doing outside of work, then it becomes overly important to the point where your mental health really suffers. If you miss a lift or something, it's not that important. I love what we do, don't get me wrong, but it's just a part of our life. So I would suggest you take some time to focus on reconnecting with other things that are important to you.
(04:56)
Spend time with people that are important to you, other hobbies, and cultivate a sense of self outside of the gym because this is something that we do to enrich our lives, but it's not like life or death. If you're having trouble over identifying with the gym, look for some places that you can volunteer like at a food bank. Volunteering and helping people in your community is a great way to re-contextualize your life and remind yourself of what's actually important. Connection. Connection with other people, connection with ourselves. Also, trust that the depth of your squat, the form is going to come. Maybe you're not on there right now, or maybe you had a bad day, you're going to have those days. You're a human being and it doesn't say anything about who you are as a person. If you can't hit your squat depth one day, try being depressed about late stage capital like me.
(05:58)
Well, I think that the two sides of the same coin, because this system that we've grown up in, what we learned to value about ourselves is not our true selves. It's what we do. Our performance, being a good boy, a good girl, I mean, our worth is being measured from an early, early, early stage of being little middle school or elementary school kids having our work graded and then we mistake in this country, the whole fucking point is not to earn straight A's, be 100% perfect. The point is to grow as a person, be curious about the world. So we carry that with us into later stages of our life. But yeah, so what? You had a bad day. You got to set your expectations about yourself. What do you expect from yourself? Truly, this shit doesn't matter. The whole point of all of this is that we're just keeping our bodies healthy, that we're growing as people.
(07:03)
This should be a vehicle for self-development and self-exploration, but the gym is going to reflect back to you whatever you bring into it. At the same time, if you are looking for a reason to beat the shit out of yourself, you'll find one, right? If you're coming to the gym with that attitude of how can I pick myself apart and beat the shit out of myself, you'll find something to do that with. But if you instead have a growth mindset of all of this is just facilitating my personal growth journey and setbacks in the gym should be handled exactly the same way that we should handle setbacks in real life, which is, okay, that didn't work. What can we learn from this? Or is there something to learn from this? Because it might just be, I'm having a shitty day and it just didn't work.
(07:51)
Get it next time. This is an invitation, I think, for you to adjust your attitude that you bring with you into the gym and probably into other areas of your life. So I don't want to say harden up or stuff your feelings down that's not at all the answer. You got to feel your feelings. Your feelings are there to tell you something, and I think in this case, your feelings are telling you that you are over identifying with your performance in the gym for your self-worth. And it's not that you need to harden up, it's that you need to pay attention to how you're defining your sense of self and develop that in other ways because we have our true self who is, that's at our core of who we are, and then we, each of us put masks on to the world because none of us wear our heart on our sleeves and just are completely ourselves to the world.
(08:48)
We always have modes that we operate in depending on the social situation. So that mask is how we present to the world. Sometimes we mistake that mask for our true self. So maybe you're worried about other people judging you or something because you didn't get that squat depth or something. Who fucking cares? It's about you. How do you feel about you? You got to focus on your relationship with yourself. Your true self and your true self is valuable regardless of what fucking weight you put on the bar. I'm not going to tell you that your feelings are wrong because our feelings are data, but if you notice yourself having certain feelings, you had to be mindful of what kind of message are your feelings trying to send you? And I think your feelings are telling you, Hey, I don't feel like I'm worth it now.
(09:44)
I'm looking for evidence of that. I don't think I'm a worthwhile person. See, see, CI missed the squat, death. I knew I was a worthless person. So it's an invitation to reexamine your relationship with yourself. Maybe it's your inner child. That's what I always guess, because usually it's childhood trauma that is the source of self-worth issues. Not always, but a lot of times it goes back to childhood trauma. So I think it could be worthwhile to have a little meeting with your inner child, your younger self, and be the adult that he didn't have to reassure him that he's a worthwhile person and tell him all the things that you wish an adult had told you when you were that age. Whatever your first wound was to your self-worth, that part of you still exists and it still exists in that wound, and if left unattended to, it can become this thing where he's saying, I feel worthless, and then you in the present are looking for evidence of that because you could totally reframe it.
(10:59)
If you had a better relationship with yourself, a personal, a growth relationship with yourself, like a growth mindset, then you could talk to yourself differently and be like, well, we missed it this time, and that's okay. We'll get it next time. You have to be mindful of the way that you talk to yourself. I found it really helpful to start talking to myself as though I'm talking to my inner child, I'm the adult, but I'm also talking to my inner child, and that's helped me to stop being quite so mean to myself. I don't want to be an abusive piece of shit who says mean things to a child, and you kind of have to think about that every time you say mean things to yourself, you are saying it to your inner child. Find ways to remind yourself that your value is intrinsically tied to this one thing.
(11:43)
Yeah, that's why I think we need to have multiple hobbies. The gym shouldn't be your only hobby. It's good. It's a good hobby to have, but it should not be the only hobby because then you over identify yourself with it. Collect hobbies like Pokemon, the more hobbies you have, the more dopamine you have. If you stop being able to work out tomorrow, you need to know you still have reasons to exist. Exactly. That's why you got to have other, I've noticed with clients who, when they get injured, if they over identify with their workouts or if they over identify with working out as their one hobby, and that's where they get their self-worth from, they get injured or shit happens, life happens, and you can't make it to the gym for a week or two. You need to not have a complete mental breakdown when that happens.
(12:40)
Thank you so much for watching or listening to this episode of The Coaching Corner podcast. Again, I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. I hope that you found this conversation helpful in thinking about your own setbacks that you experience, whether it's in the gym or in other aspects of your life. Keep in mind that you are so much more than the things that you do. You're so much more than your performance in the gym or what your physique looks like. You as a human being are special. You are worthy of love, and don't ever forget that. Even if you miss a lift, doesn't mean that you aren't a worthwhile person. I'm proud of you, and I can't wait to hear what your thoughts are on this episode. Leave them in the comments below this video if you're watching on YouTube. And once again, don't forget to subscribe to the channel and to follow the show. If you're listening on your podcast app now, I'll see you in the next episode. In the meantime, make sure that you eat your veggies, drink your water, eat your protein, and prioritize your self-care. I will see you soon.
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