Taking Personal Responsibility

Taking personal responsibility.

If there's anything I've learned in my decades of being an athlete (yes decades, I found my gymnastics report card from when I was 5 the other day), it's that the only way to succeed is to take full responsibility for yourself.  Have I always done this?  Nope.  But I'm getting much better at it.  The big reason for failure?  Excuses.  Here are two kinds that are a sure fire way to failure (both of which I've been guilty of).

1) Excuses in training.  Dear god these drive me crazy.  Now I'm pretty immune to complaining, because I do complain from time to time, but as long as you get the work done, I don't care.  Complaining is different from excuses.  Complaining sounds like this "UGH I DON'T WANT TO DO THIS!" which is what I say before every squat set over 3 reps.  Excuses sound like this: "I didn't get enough sleep last night and that's why I failed my last front squat set!" or if you're a weightlifter/CrossFitter "My hands hurt so I can't do my snatches!"  I think part of this is we expect to be and look awesome every day in training.  Training is just that, it's just getting us ready for something bigger.  It's not a competition.  Who cares why you didn't hit that snatch or couldn't go faster on your row? "My legs are tired from moving into my new apartment this weekend!".....Nope still don't care, just do the work.  And if you can't do the work, quietly adjust the weight/reps, and move on. 

Even if you don't vocalize your excuses, they're toxic.  You're protecting yourself from failure, but in doing so, you don't move forward either.  Failure is the best thing that could happen to you.  It makes you better.  It teaches you things.  Stop trying to protect yourself mentally from failure.  I'm learning there's a life beyond 6 months from now and I have my whole life to fail and figure things out.  As I'm sitting at my desk in a leg brace, still rehabbing my fairly fresh ACL, I can tell you I'm pretty familiar with failure.  We're pretty much bffs.  My training sessions are full of failures (failed lifts, failing to squat using both legs equally, failing to dip in my push presses without compensating by pushing my hips back) but they all teach me things.  Yesterday, I finally got fed up catching my lifts to my right, so I spent about 30-45 minutes doing single leg exercises on my left leg on top of my programmed lifts, and I plan on doing those a lot more.  My failures got me to take action to become a better lifter, and down the road I'll appreciate that.

2) Excuses why you'll never succeed no matter what.  Guilty of this one big time.  I'm a 75kg weightlifter.  I'll probably always struggle to make weight.  I also have the longest femurs known to man.  Now I could keep that in the back of my mind every time I struggle with a squat set (try every set?), or I could decide that I just need to work harder on my core strength to MAKE UP for my long femurs.  Go the extra mile.  Also realize that in your weaknesses there are also strengths.  I'm 5'10''.  That's pretty tall for a female weightlifter.  I also have an insane pull because of it.  I'm going to put my strength with my weakness and use both to my advantage.  

Putting limitations on ourselves prevent us from succeeding, whether we realize it or not.  Especially when it comes to nutrition, mostly because society has made dieting this big hit or miss mystery and most people don't know what they're talking about (just cut carbs!).  I know a bunch of people that come to me saying "Nothing works!  I'll never lose weight!"  I even read an article an extremely overweight woman wrote about her struggles in her marriage dealing with her weight, did her husband not believe the research out there that diets don't work?  Wait, what????  The right diets work.  Just not whatever you did.  

I got a big slap in the face when I contacted a nutritionist to set up my macros the first time I started IIFYM.  I told her "I'm eating 1900 calories a day (just calorie counting, no macro counting) and I'm gaining weight!  Wtf!  She came back with a big long list of reasons why I possibly wasn't losing weight.  Hormones, salt intake, supplements I wasn't tracking, creatine.  Cool, all things that weren't really my fault.  She finally weaseled out of me the fact that my cheat meals on Saturdays with Greg were in fact the biggest binge eating sessions in the history of binge eating (even when she asked me what I ate, I downplayed it, left out certain foods, or summarized one of the more conservative binge eating sessions we'd had).  Greg called them cheat meals.  I now call them binges.  They weren't healthy.  The problem was, I was perfect every other day of the week, then on Saturday, after starving myself for 6 days, I'd eat everything in sight and put that entire calorie deficit back in my body and then some, and call it a cheat meal.  My body held onto every single little calorie.  And I gained weight.  Crazy huh?  It was entirely my own fault.  I wanted to ignore the fact that I had anything to do with my weight loss frustrations.  I put my cheat meals in a box and pretended they didn't exist, then cursed the gods because I was working hard the rest of the time and not losing weight (that's not how it works, that's not how any of this works). Facing myself head on has made the process much easier.  And now on the weekends when Greg wants to go crazy with the food, I remember what my nutritionist told me, and that the laws of physics (and thermodynamics?  that "energy" I just ate doesn't just disappear into thin air, it has to go somewhere) don't go out the window for 2 hours on Saturday just because I wanted a pint of Ben and Jerry's with my pizza and chips and salsa and cheese sticks.

My Keys to Happiness.......For Now......

"When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life.  When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.  I wrote down 'happy'.  They told me I didn't understand the assignment, and I told them they didn't understand life." -John Lennon

One of the biggest goals in my adult life is to chase happiness.  Not the temporary have fun at the bar kind, the sustainable permanent kind.  Happiness is an emotion, and emotions can be fleeting from day to day, but I've been determined to find an equilibrium. 

Here have been my obstacles, and all three have been diagnosed by a doctor.
1) Depression
2) Anxiety
3) Clinical OCD

So it seems I have my work cut out for me, huh?  But hard work staring me in the face has never scared me before, so the following is a list of things I've done in attempt to improve my quality of life.  I'm nowhere near perfect, but on good days I'm pretty darn happy, and on bad days, I just get stressed, but my brain doesn't spiral out of control like it used to.  In other words, I've taught my brain how to "be in shape" and the results have been amazing.

1) Talk to a therapist.  No seriously do it.  This has been almost a constant in my life for the last 5 years.  There have been times where I felt good enough to not see anyone, but for the most part it's always something I've gone back to.  I went to see an OCD specialist here in Louisville some time last year.  Their exposure therapy basically cured my OCD for the time being, but I developed a great relationship with my therapist.  She might or might not be younger than me (she's still in school), but I like the way she thinks.  Plus I think she finds me interesting instead of making me feel judged because I don't fit some mold.  I don't see her very often now, but she's still there if I need her.  And we catch up every two weeks or so, just to tweak things and give me things to work on.  I think it's extremely useful to have a third party to talk to.  Someone whos looking from the outside in on your life and can give you objective advice.  You don't even need a clinical diagnosis of a mental illness to have one. :) 

2) Don't be afraid to ask for help.  This kind of piggy backs on getting a therapist.  None of us were meant to make this journey on our own.  Think of it this way, the more help you ask for, the more different types of inputs you'll have in your life.  Learn from every direction possible.  Your mom's advice is going to be very different from you best friend's advice, but ask for both.  Who knows, a combination of the two might click with you.

3) Do your research.  I alluded to this yesterday in a facebook post, but I truly believe we should all be doing more research in the field of psychology, not only to better understand ourselves (which is probably the most important part I got from my research), but also to understand why other people do what they do.  Most people DO NOT UNDERSTAND THEIR OWN BRAINS.  Once you come to accept this, it's easy to stop trying to rationalize all the evil in the world.  There are some people out there we weren't meant to understand without in depth scrutiny (most of my friends are pretty complex people, for a reason.  They intrigue me and I didn't understand them when I didn't know them as well).  There are also pretty simple people out there.  Jealousy is an extremely simple emotion.  It takes a complex and in control person to deny jealousy in their field of emotions.  Most simple people DON'T KNOW THEY'RE JEALOUS.  They just act on it.  Their emotion is so primal, they have no understanding of why they do what they do.  As soon as I realized the girl at the gym was treating me like crap because she saw me as a threat, it makes it much easier to ignore.  She isn't even self aware enough to realize it's jealousy.  I don't always ignore it totally (I'm still human, things still get to me), but it does make it easier. 

Read a book.  Follow a psychology page on Facebook.  Subscribe to Psychology Today.  Something.  I think a better understanding of the human race benefits everyone.

3) Exercise is your best friend.  I know I know you're like "But Laura!  You're a coach and an athlete.  That's so easy for you to say."  You know what I say to that?  Fake it till you make it.  I don't just try to impose my habits on other people because I think my habits are better.  I try to spread fitness because it's one of the most important things you can do for yourself.  It's funny how we'll readily spend money on clothes and fast food to make ourselves feel better, but taking care of ourselves long terms is a tough priority.  Exercise has been one of the top reasons I've stayed relatively sane over the last decade.  There are both physical and mental changes that happen when you begin exercising.  The benefits are endless.  And most of all, these benefits will allow you to live longer and more comfortably.  If I'm truly dedicated to becoming a happier person, exercise will 100% become a part of my daily routine.  Except on Sundays.  Sundays are rest days.

4) Nutrition is SO important.  There's a reason I didn't lump this in with exercise.  Because you can have one without the other, and both are equally as important.  I don't think I realized the full extent to which nutrition impacted me on a mental and physical level until recently.  When you start fueling your body the way it was meant to be fueled, all sorts of things balance out.  Your hormones find a nice homeostasis, your inflammation goes down, headaches decrease.  I'm all about balance, and if there's a way my body can become even more balanced, I'm going to do it.

5) Balance is key.  Now I realize this is going to look different for everyone, but this is what it looks like for me.  I excel when I don't put all my eggs in one basket.  It's always when I have multiple things in my life to focus on that I tend to do better at all of them.  You always hear about how disciplined college swimmers have to be.  They'll freely tell you that swimming 20 hours a week has forced them to have great time management skills and actually keeps them motivated outside the pool.  And when the swimming stops, the motivation stops.   After swimming year round for almost 10 years, I've learned that having a balance between work/school and sports is key for my success.  Currently my balance is between a full time engineering job and weightlifting (and a little bit of coaching).  All three of these things keep me motivated.  When I start losing motivation in the gym, a client might come to me with their successes in the gym.  Or maybe when I have a good night at the gym, it gets me motivated for work the next day.  I seem to have found a nice balance that keeps me in a cycle of motivation.  And when the day comes, and I'm healthy enough to do doubles again like I did in college, I'll have no problem getting out of bed at 4 in the morning.  I know it'll make me happy.

6) Greg.  Okay, so I can't really share him, but he's a been a pretty big source of my growing happiness over the last year and a half.   I've learned more about myself being in a relationship with him than I have the previous 25 years combined.  I've found a confidence in myself I've never had before.  And that even means sticking up for myself in fights with him.  In previous relationships, I've been put down, cheated on, and bossed around.  Today, if he ever attempted to do any of those things, I'd shut it down so quickly there wouldn't even be a discussion.  So maybe it's a coincidence that I found this confidence when I found him, maybe not.  But I do know these things for sure:  I'm a basically good person.  I deserve someone else who is a good person.  I deserve to be treated with respect.  I deserve to feel beautiful, inside and outside of a relationship.  I deserve to feel like my ideas are important.  I deserve to know that there's someone in this world who is perfectly ok with my awkward habits, weird ideas, and strange obsession with lifting weights.  I'd like to think I could feel this way if I were on my own, and if heaven forbid we break up today, I think I could feel this way, but maybe I'm just lucky he popped into my life when he did.  I didn't deserve it (or maybe I did?  Isn't that what I'm trying to say?), but he's here to stay and I'm so happy about it. 

Am I saying I'm happy every single minute of every single day?  Hell no.  But at least I'm trying.  And I honestly think the steps I'm taking are the right steps.  At this point that's all that matters.