Tag Archives: sheer willpower

My Secret to Extreme Exercise Commitment

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I had lots of excuses I could have used to skip my workout this morning.

My folks are in town and our guest-suite encompasses my usual workout area. We have a full schedule with more family visits planned. I have stayed up past my usual bedtime most of this week, and there is work to get done before I can fully relax and enjoy the weekend.

But I was committed and I woke up at 3:30 a.m. and did a 30 minute meditation before getting up at 4 to get my hour-and-a-half workout underway by 4:30 a.m.

My guess is that many of you think that is just plain crazy.

So I asked myself, “Why am I so committed to getting my workout in?”

There are definitely things that contribute—I’ve set a physical and time-focused goal that I want to meet, I want to be an authentic example of striving for optimal wellness for all you fabulous readers and my clients, and in all honesty, I want to maintain and improve how I look.

But the true reason that makes my eyes flutter open at 3:30 a.m. without the aid of an alarm clock and gets my bum out of a very warm and appealing bed is the anabolic physical energy I get from moving my body, which impacts every single area of my life.

Feeling physically well has not been something I’ve been able to take for granted since I was about 10 or 11 years old. I was a sickly and sensitive kid that suffered from food allergies, and later chronic back problems and migraines.

Truly this was a gift in disguise as it forced me beginning in my early 20s to begin learning to pay attention to my body and the role and responsibility that I had in creating wellness. In the quest to feel better, I learned about nutrition and exercise, but the challenge was not in learning what to do, it was in the doing.

Typically, out of sheer willpower and often desperation, I would make what felt like austere changes long enough to start feeling better—and then I would slip back into the old, more comfortable patterns, only to start the cycle all over again.

The most obvious symptom of this was that my weight regularly vacillated 20 to 40 pounds.

Why wasn’t I able to make the changes stick?

Because in order to create the physical energy that enables me to do and be the best possible version of me, I had to shift my emotional energy—my thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about Who I was, what I was capable of, and what I deserved. I had to tap into my spiritual energy—my sense of purpose and the meaning of my life.

But ironically, I also needed the physical energy to effectively tap into the emotional and spiritual energy. While I had worked on the different elements separately, it wasn’t until I brought them all together that I began to see true changes in my body, mind, and spirit.

For me, it is my physical energy that has the greatest impact on what I can accomplish in my day, how I show up in the world, my ability to respond instead of react, to see the big picture and let go of the outcome, to have absolute faith and confidence that everything is always working out for me—and you.

When my body gets out of balance and my physical energy slips, so does everything else. Physical energy truly is the foundation of my life. My commitment to healthy eating, moving my body, and rest impacts everything.

What can you do to look at the affect physical energy has on your life? What is one small change that you could make that would boost how you physically feel? How does feeling better impact your ability to be the best possible version of you?

Together we can do it!

Photo by graur razvan ionut / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Are You Getting Adequate Rest?

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Getting adequate rest is vitally important to being able to maintain physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual energy. Do you ever feel so tired you have to force yourself to stay awake? Do small problems sometimes elicit big emotional reactions? Do you get things done through sheer willpower even though you’re exhausted?

You may not be getting adequate rest.

I certainly saw a huge leap in my ability to react appropriately, get things done, achieve physical goals, and see situations more clearly when I made getting adequate rest a priority and worked my life around that. And I see those things deteriorate if I don’t consistently follow my self-prescribed guidelines for getting enough sleep.

What I also noticed, however, was that getting tied to a specific number of hours of sleep or type of rest created limiting beliefs about what I could and could not do. If I didn’t get that magic number of hours of sleep one night, I would expect to feel bad and struggle the next day. And so I would.

But did it have to be that way?

One day I asked myself if getting that certain number of hours of sleep every night was a Universal Truth, meaning it is True no matter who, no matter what? I recognized that it wasn’t. I could actually point to several high-functioning people who consistently got less sleep and did just fine.

This meant that a certain number of hours was then generally true for me. Those magic hours were still the goal I wanted to shoot for, but that if for some reason I didn’t get those hours it didn’t automatically mean that my day would be an energetic struggle. In other words, I could occasionally get less sleep and still have a great day.

So I began changing my thoughts about sleep. If I naturally woke up in the middle of the night, I asked myself what I wanted to do. Did I want to get up and accomplish something? Relax and meditate? Ponder what I would consider the perfect solution to a situation? Or just bask in appreciation of my life and the world?

And occasionally things come up in the evening that mean I don’t make my bedtime, and sometimes, I just make a different choice.

In all of these situations I give myself permission to do what feels right and still get up and feel vibrant, alive, and eager the next day.

I still strive to consistently get that magic number of hours of sleep every night, but my goal now is to get adequate rest—whatever that looks like on any given night. And I can monitor my energy levels to let me know if I’m tilting toward needing more sleep.

What does adequate rest mean for you? How does getting adequate rest impact your energy levels? Where might you be creating limiting beliefs about the amount of sleep you are or are not getting? How does getting adequate rest impact the quality of your life?

Together we can do it!