Trying to tone arms without optimizing your thought processes is like trying to drive a car across the country without any gas in the tank. As Seth Godin puts it, the dip prevents most people from reaching their goals.

What is the dip? In a nutshell, it’s the setbacks you will face when trying to reach your sexy arm goal. And most women are UNABLE to get over their dips.

Why does this happen so frequently? Because we live in a culture obsessed with one-hit wonders. When in reality, the key to sexy arm success is the ability to sustain motivation for prolonged periods of time.

You shouldn’t be running motivational sprints, you should be running motivational marathons. So without further ado, here are 4 tips to survive the marathon to tone arms:

1. Use anger for sprints, not marathons. Anger-a form of stress-causes a whole array of biological reactions in the female body. Said reactions will make it extremely hard to tone arms. One reason for this is the secretion of cortisol. No matter how good your diet is and no matter how good your workouts are, if you are chronically angry, your body will burn through muscle. However, if you can control your anger and ONLY use it for short bursts of productivity (i.e., a workout) and then immediately shut it off, it will work to your advantage.

2. Eliminate perfectionism. Non-perfectionists are far more productive-and successful-than perfectionists. Why? Because they continually keep on moving forward despite all those little nagging things that tend to go wrong. Just get the ball rolling and don’t sweat the small stuff. 99% of your results will come from the ability to just keep on going and going, and going.

3. Employ self-imposed deadlines. You’ve been conditioned to respond to deadlines your ENTIRE life, so why not take advantage of this? Moreover, applying a ridiculous deadline will force you to execute on the critical few tasks required for the desired outcome. You could, for instance, give yourself 3 hrs. to clean out your kitchen of all junk food and restock it with sexy arm food. Although you’ll have to hustle, it’s doable! And you won’t have time to get distracted!

4. Expose yourself to what you fear, a lot. If you do this, you’ll become desensitized to whatever it is you’re fearing. Fear defeated! The key here is to not go into shell shock. Make sure you take baby steps so that you become acclimatized incrementally.

If you want to tone arms, don’t go around in circles by only focusing on diet and exercise. You have to optimize your thought processes to ensure long term success. And this is where most women fail. Although clich, it really is all in your head!