You Choose

Choice is one of the most powerful forces on our earth. As humans we are gifted with the ability to choose our path with the millions of little choices we make day-to-day. I think that's a beautiful thing.

We've talked about choice before. I talked about my experience with the little choice to not have a piece of cheesecake and how our habits make up our life. I encouraged you to change the choices you make on a daily basis, to bring them into alignment with your goals.

Today I'd like to talk about why it's important that *you* choose to make the changes in your life. It can be easy to succumb to peer pressure and in some cases that pressure can be positive. But if you don't make those positive choices for yourself, you won't stick with the new behaviors and thought processes. That's just the truth of human nature.

It all comes back to intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. We've talked about that before, briefly. Extrinsic motivation is when there's something outside yourself that is pushing you to make your choices. This may be a spouse or doctor who is concerned about your health, it may be a parent or a friend, it may be that you're not happy with the person you are right now, or it could even be that you saw something inspiring on TV. All of these things are external - they're outside yourself, putting pressure on you. These are great for getting you started, but once the pressure is released there has to be something that holds you to your decisions so you keep making the choices to become who you want to be.

That's where intrinsic motivation comes in. If you have a reason that is all your own, that comes from inside yourself, then your intrinsic motivation will keep you going on the path you chose. The key there is that it has to be a path you chose. You have to be the one to make the decision for yourself and for your own reasons.

Today, take some time to examine the choices you make on a regular basis. What big decisions are driving those little decisions? Have you chosen your own path, or have you allowed someone else to choose for you? It's never too late to change the direction your life is taking. You only have to choose.

Healing Like a Sequoia

When a redwood survives a fire - and they almost always survive - it heals giant slabs of wood over the scorched portion of the tree. Redwoods are strengthened by the tragedies they encounter and in fact need otherwise devastating forces like fires in order to survive as a species. Fires thin out the weaker trees that would take needed resources away from the redwoods, and the seeds of this giant tree race can only open up when subjected to the extreme heat of a forest fire.

When our hearts go through the fires of life we can choose to deal with them poorly, wrapping ourselves in darkness and defensive bandaging, never exposing the wound to the light of day. This will cause the wound to fester and create bitterness in your heart, as we discussed with yesterday's HURTS acrostic from Paul Tsika's book, "Sequoia-Size Success."

Today, let's look at how to handle those hurts properly so we - like the trees - can heal stronger than ever before, using another paraphrased Tsika acrostic: FORGIVE

F - Face up to your responsibility. Stop accusing other people for their part in the hurts you've sustained and instead take responsibility for your part in the hurt. Perhaps you could have reacted differently or perceived something differently, or perhaps you have locked yourself into the role of victim or mere survivor of your hurts. Whatever the case, admit your responsibility in the situation.

O - Open the unhealed wound and expose it to the light. Bring your pain, openly and honestly, to God and ask for healing and - where applicable - forgiveness.

R - Release total forgiveness toward those who have hurt you. Keeping someone "on the hook" actually keeps you hooked into the pain. It's natural to want the people who hurt you to meet justice, but the only way to really heal is to let go. You have to relinquish your desire to make them pay.

G - Guard what you receive. Remember when we talked about being careful with your association? This becomes especially important in terms of healing your hurts. You have to make sure to reject ideas like your right to revenge, and only accept the ideas that coincide with your goal of forgiveness and healing.

I - Invite God to love you through your pain and use you to extend that love to others. God wants to heal you, and only his perfect love can heal you perfectly. When you've experienced that kind of healing, you are then better equipped to reach out to others with the same kind of love and healing. Invite God to start this process in you.

V - View yourself the way God views you, not as the person your pain wants you to become. Pain wants to convince you that you are unloved, alone, and unique in your pain. If you let your pain dictate your response to situations, you will end up isolated. Instead, remind yourself that you are loved, wanted, and protected by God. You have been given great grace, freely and lovingly, and there is no reason to reject that grace.

E - Embrace your life as a healed person, a cracked pot through which God's light can shine. There's a practice in some Asian cultures of filling in the cracks in pottery with gold. This makes the otherwise useless pottery into something beautiful and more valuable than it could have been before the brokenness occurred. In the same way, God wants to fill the empty spaces left by your pain. Pain happens, fire happens, hurt is a part of life, but God wants to take that and make it into something truly beautiful and more valuable than ever before.

Healing is possible. Whatever pain you've been through, however long you've held on to it, healing is possible for you. It's a process, and sometimes a painful one, but the result is truly beautiful.

Fire, Forgiveness, and the California Redwood

The mighty Sequoia, also known around here as the California Redwood, is a plant that can endure anything. Nobody knows how long they can live or how tall they can grow because they keep growing until tragedy strikes and they are cut or knocked down. These trees grow around, through, and because of the trials they face. Most impressively, the redwoods survive - and even thrive on - fire.

Fire is a devastating force to a normal forest. But to a Redwood, fire is just an opportunity. The first branches of the redwood tree grow high above the highest flames of a forest fire. The tree's thick, sappy bark is fire resistant. When fire does damage the trunk of one of these magnificent giants, the tree immediately sets to work growing a slab of wood even thicker than the rest of its protective bark. Each time a sequoia survives a fire it becomes even stronger than before.

What can we learn from this?

Have you ever been through fire in your life? Maybe you were burned by job loss, or maybe someone you really trusted turned out to be untrustworthy. There are a million ways that we humans go through the proverbial fire in life. Fire hurts. It creates large, open, blistered wounds. It makes us afraid of situations similar to the one that hurt us. Like the redwood we must learn to grow stronger and stand taller as a result of the fires in our lives, instead of allowing them to consume and devastate us.

How?

Right now I'm reading a book by Paul Tsika titled "Sequoia-Size Success." In it, Tsika explains several principles of success in life that we can see demonstrated in the gargantuan trees that have lived hundreds of years. One of these principles is that you must learn to heal deep wounds. I'd like to share an acrostic from Tsika's lesson today - with the explanations paraphrased.

If you react to the fires of life and the pain they cause in an unhealthy way, these "heart burns" lead to lifelong spiritual and emotional bondage. Using the acrostic "HURTS" we discover:


H - Horrible experiences combined with
U - Unbiblical perception creates a wrong pattern of thinking that is mired in self-centeredness and self-pity. This leads you to
R - Raise up a stronghold to shield yourself from further pain. You cut yourself off from everyone, insisting that no one can understand you because you are the exception, that no one should come near you because you are the exception, and that it's perfectly healthy for you to be living like this because you are the exception. As you perceive yourself as the one exception in the world, you also start judging people more harshly. This creates a situation where
T - Troubles are wrapped up in darkness where light and love cannot reach in to heal the hurts. Because of this, the pain only grows deeper. Heart burns become
S - Soul Burns that are then perpetuated through the generations as you pass on your bitterness toward a person or group by constantly rehashing the pain you experienced.

Mistreated or poorly dealt with "heart burns" affect all of your relationships.

With God, we become closed off and tormented, unwilling and unable to accept the love and grace he has to offer.

With ourselves, we become hateful and angry, creating self-sabotaging habits and self-depreciating thought patterns.

With others, we become locked in a state of emotional immaturity, making us needy, suspicious, and fearful.

The good news is that we, like the Redwood, can heal from these terrible wounds if we will only learn to forgive.

Overuse Injuries Part Two

Yesterday we talked about how to avoid an overuse injury (don't be stupid), but sometimes that's easier said than done. How can you tell when you've injured yourself, and when you're just sore?

The number one differentiation between an injury and regular soreness is that injuries greatly limit movement. Sometimes there will be swelling, sometimes the area will look injured (redness, bruising, disfiguration), but sometimes there's no way you can just look at it and see that you're actually hurt. However, injuries limit movement more than soreness does. Regular exercise related soreness will make movement a little more uncomfortable, injury will make it darn near impossible.

If you have a regular stretching routine that you use for cool-down at the end of a workout - as you should, if you're being healthy about your exercise - this is probably when you will discover your injury. Stretches that would normally be difficult because of your soreness will bring you sharp pain and your body won't want to comply with the movement you're trying to accomplish.

For example: my traumatic tendinitis of the hip. One part of my stretches on distance days involves laying flat on my back (on my living room floor) with my heels on the ground, then lifting my legs up and pulling my knees into my chest to stretch my lower back and hips. On Sunday, because I had injured myself, one of my legs simply would not lift off the ground and I felt like someone was stabbing me right where my leg bone connects to my hip.

Once you've identified your injury, it's easy to know how to treat it. With the exception of major fractures or breaks, most overuse injuries call for the same treatment as a sprained ankle: Ice, elevation, and rest. Knowing this you can determine whether your injury requires a trip to the doctor, or just an ice pack and a pillow.

Overuse Injuries Part One

An overuse injury is exactly what it sounds like: an injury you get because you've over-used a muscle, joint, tendon, or ligament. Overuse injuries include twists, sprains, pulls, fractures, and tendonitis, among other things. If you're overweight or just beginning an exercise program, you're especially likely to sustain an overuse injury.

Overuse injuries sound scary. Mine is called "Traumatic tendonitis" but it's really just that my tendons have swollen because I over used them and they couldn't cope. I also managed to sprain and strain a few of my muscles. (ouch!)

It's very common for people under 35 to sustain overuse injuries because they aren't fully in tune with their bodies and limitations yet. Being so young, we bite off more than we can chew and frequently under prepare for the task we are trying to take on. That's certainly what happened for me! I know that my body starts really protesting what I'm doing when I've been walking for ten miles, but I decided to go 14 anyway. I didn't take along extra water because I didn't want to carry the extra weight, which meant that after 4 hours of walking I was quite dehydrated. I also didn't take into account the effect that the sunlight and temperature would have on my body when I decided to walk 14 miles on a particularly hot day and later on in the day than I'm used to. As a result my body started seriously protesting with sharp pains and muscle spasms at mile 6.5, and I still had to walk back to my car.

By the time I'd gotten to the car (bringing my walk to a total of 13 miles), I was biting my lip to keep from crying and looking even more like an idiot in front of everyone else on the trail. Even lifting my foot over the tiny amount of space between the ground and the floorboard of my car put me in excruciating pain. On top of that, I was dehydrated and my blood sugar had plummeted because my body was working too hard to push through the agony and keep walking. I sat in my car knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that I had injured myself - and it was probably pretty bad.

How do you avoid overuse injuries? The short answer is: Don't be stupid. If I had taken the time to check the weather, packed extra water, or accepted that at my weight and after only 7 weeks of having an exercise habit 14 miles is still pretty unsafe, I wouldn't have injured myself so badly. If I had listened to my body when I noticed that I was slowing down and feeling woozy at mile four, I wouldn't have made the injury worse. Instead I plowed through and pushed on, telling myself things like "no pain, no gain" because I didn't want to just wimp out.  Listen to your body, and learn the difference between wimping out and being safe.

While you're learning your body's signals and limitations, do your best to always have someone with you when you know you're going to be exercising intensely. Sometimes other people can pick up on our body's limits before we can. In my case, I couldn't find anyone who wanted to go 14 miles with me and my husband was sick. I knew that it wasn't safe to go 14 miles alone, but I did it anyway because I didn't want to let other people's limits keep me from my goals. If I'd had someone with me I have no doubt that they would have called attention to the fact that I'd started to limp, and I would have considered it a more serious problem and turned around at mile 4 instead.

Moral of the story: Overuse injuries are common but completely avoidable. Be smart and safe about the way that you're exercising.

Drama

Would you say that you're surrounded by drama? I'm not talking "To be or not to be" drama. I mean the kind of drama that every high school girl says she hates and somehow ends up constantly involved in anyway. The he said, she said. The single element that keeps reality TV alive.

Urban dictionary defines drama as (among other things): "A way of relating to the world in which a person consistently overreacts to or greatly exaggerates the importance of benign events"

Drama is a huge negative in terms of your health - in all areas of your life! 

Spritually, drama separates you from God because there's no room for overreaction when you're close to someone who's all about grace and mercy the way God is, and there's no room for grace and mercy when you're set on making every issue into the end of the world. 

Emotionally, drama wreaks havoc on your ability to properly process and react to normal life situations. When you're used to a life of drama, the smallest thing is a federal offense. This drives other people away from you, isolating you on top of everything else. 

Financially, constant drama can lead to poor choices and overly emotional decisions. This can be as small as making an extravagant purchase on your credit card or as big as divorcing your spouse. 

Mentally, an excessive amount of drama can limit your ability to think logically in the future and give you a warped sense of reality (which, by the way, will only lead to more drama). 

Physically, drama raises adrenaline levels unnecessarily, burns off blood sugar way too fast, produces unresolved tension in your muscles, inhibits your ability to sleep well, and creates stress. Stress leads to a host of mental, emotional, and even medical problems, some of which can become life threatening if left unchecked. 

All of that isn't even the half of it! 



All in all, drama is bad! Most people understand this, yet so many still find themselves stuck in a cycle where everything is always falling apart around them and everyone is always out to get them. Sound familiar? It can be hard to recognize in the moment, but if you're constantly surrounded by drama there's a good chance you're the source of it. 

Whether you're the source or just the victim, you can take hope in the knowledge that it's possible to limit and even stop the drama in your life. You can take control of the situation and stop the cycle. How?

1. Remove dramatic media from your life. You are who you hang around and books and TV are just another way of hanging around people you've never actually met. Reality shows, romance novels, and most sit coms are so full of drama! In fact, if you blacked out all of the drama in a romance novel, all you'd be left with is the sex scenes - which amount to porn, which negatively affects your life in a lot of ways. We'll talk more about that another time. Consuming dramatic media alters the way you react to situations around you because it alters your perception of what's normal. Remove the dramatic media, and you'll see a huge chunk of the drama happening in your life simply disappear. Here's some identifying common themes in dramatic media, to get you started:
1. Infidelity
2. Lying
3. Gossip
4. Revenge
5. Constant lack of trust between characters.
2. Check how reasonable your reaction is. Think of someone you know who has been a moral compass for you. Maybe it's your mom, your grandma, or your pastor. Generally this will be someone whose presence would make you completely uncomfortable with swearing or lying. Once you've figured out who this person is, ask yourself "what would _____ think of my reaction to this?" If that person would tell you that you're being unreasonable (maybe they'd say "calm down" or "take a breath"), then it's time to choose a different response.
3. Assess the value of your words/actions. Is what you're about to say or do going to *actually* help anyone? If you tell Stacy that you overheard Ashley talking bad about her, you'll just hurt Stacy's feelings and make Ashley mad. That's not helping anyone. If what you're about to say or do isn't going to create something good for the people involved, don't say or do it.
4. Mind your own business. Really. Keep your nose (and your mouth) out of other people's issues. Let them sort it out on their own unless they ask for your help and you can genuinely improve their situation. Don't make things your business when they really aren't. For example, your friend's ex-boyfriend's behavior really and truly doesn't become your business if she's not in physical danger - no matter how much her feelings were hurt. 

Generally, these guidelines can be summed up with a simple rule of thumb: If what you're about to do or say is what someone on TV would do or say, don't do or say that. Your life isn't a TV show, you don't need to create plot points to keep your ratings so you can go on existing. 

Protecting your mental space

Have you ever competed against someone? Maybe you were on the football team in high school, or maybe you're part of a sales force that's very competitive today. Maybe your competition has been limited to video games or card games with your pals. Whatever the scenario, most of us have been in a competitive situation at some point in our lives.

Remember trash talking? Trash talking is fun, when it's done in good spirit and received lightly. Watch a 12 year old boy playing with his friends sometime, and you'll see just how entertaining trash talking can be. If you've competed, you've probably been trash talked at some point or another and you know that it's all fun and games until someone takes it seriously. Once that talk gets into your head, the game is over. You might as well walk away the moment that seed has planted itself in your brain because once it's there, all you'll hear for the whole game is that one guy's voice. You'll lose the game and walk away saying: "He just got in my head."

The same is true of opinions.

Everyone has an opinion and most people's opinions don't agree. There's nothing wrong with that and nothing you can do to change it, because it's just a fact of life. Not everyone is going to agree with or understand your opinions and the way you do things. Because of this fact of life, it's important that you protect your mental space. Don't let other people "get in your head."

Here's where I apologize to you, my friends, because I did not do this well enough. My schedule started getting more packed in, these posts started requiring more from me in terms of research and time, and I let someone's opinion get into my head. There was a suggestion that I was putting too much into this blog, into you, and that I should back off and not post so often. I let that get into my head, and I'm sorry for that.

How do you protect your mental space so other people don't get in your head?

1. Know your 'why.' We've talked about this before. It's so important to know why you're doing what you're doing in the way that you're doing it, so that other people who don't understand or agree with you can't come along and accidentally scootch you off your chosen track. I started this blog for you, to help you and support you as much as I can by posting daily encouragement, advice, etc. You are my why. 
2. Don't get a big head. When you're in an exciting phase of life and everything seems to be going your way, it can be easy to get an inflated ego about the whole thing. You start to think you're the focus when you're not. My friend's opinion got into my head because I lost sight of the fact that this blog isn't actually about me. I use my experiences, my knowledge, and my personality to help you, but it's not about me. It's about you, your journey, and helping you toward your successes. 
3. Question everything. Advice shouldn't be rejected outright. It's bad for your relationship with the person who's giving the advice and it's bad for your personal growth. But advice shouldn't be taken at face value either. Always look the horse in the mouth. Evaluate whether the advice is actually applicable, and whether it will get you closer to or farther from your goals. Take time to think about it. Once you've decided whether the advice is really valuable to you, then you can either apply it or toss it out appropriately. 
4. Don't be afraid to say 'no.' It's okay to - politely - tell someone to back off. Don't let other people take the reigns in your dream. I recently had a friend who heard that I was writing a book and started trying to direct my efforts for me, telling me what messages I should include and how I should deliver them. The things my friend said were good points! The messages were things that needed to be said and my friend knew exactly how to make the most impact with those messages. But it wasn't really in line with my vision for the book. I tried to gently change the topic but she persisted, and so the time came for me to tell her "you have great ideas, and I appreciate your desire to help me, but this isn't where I'm going with this book." Don't be afraid to have these conversations. The friends who truly care about you won't mind being told to back off now and then. In fact, they probably prefer your honesty! 

It's important to protect your mental space so that you can reach your goals. You'll never get where you want to go if you're constantly being pulled in every direction by where everyone else thinks you should be going!

Surviving Friendly Fire

At the beginning of our journey together we talked about how important it is to have supporters. These are the people who are in your cheering section, the people who are running with you and encouraging you, and your coaches. These people love you, they believe in you, and they want you to succeed. In some cases they're even willing to help you succeed!

But what about when the people you expected to support you are actually the people who are the least supportive? What about when your sister, best friend, parent, or spouse doesn't believe in you? What about those times when your own family and trusted friends come against you for what you're trying to do?

I love my family, and I love my husband's family. However, there are a few family members - and their friends - who seem to think that I'm just full of it. No matter what I'm excited about, what's going well for me, or how happy I am to see them, these people always have something negative to say to me.

"Who in their right mind would want to run a marathon? 26 miles? No, thank you! I'll leave that to the crazy people."

"I can't believe you're *still* on that diet thing. Just have some cake!"

"Don't you ever wear normal clothes? You're making the rest of us look bad!"

"Six kids? Honey, wait until you have your first one, then you'll change your mind."

"Why are you always working? It's like you don't have any time since you started that business. Microsoft is hiring, y'know, you should apply there."

They see every one of my victories as something that I've done specifically to make them feel badly about themselves or to prove that I'm better than them. In their minds they have created a world where my sole purpose in life is to hurt them or look down on them, despite the fact that the decisions I make actually have nothing at all to do with them.

It's worth noting that these people are unhealthy, struggling financially, and generally very unhappy with their own lives. It's worth noting this because people who are not succeeding will always find a reason to hate the people who are - even if those people are their own family and friends.

It's likely that these people don't even realize how cruel they are being. They don't understand that their constant put-downs about my decisions make it harder for me to want to be around them because my heart is hurt that they would think of me that way and that they would willingly be so venomous toward me. They may not even know that they're saying anything negative, because negativity is a habit for them. Still, it creates a situation where every interaction with them puts me on an emotional battleground. Talking with them makes me feel isolated, unloved, and the depression it pushes me toward sometimes takes days of effort to recover from.

These are family members! These are people who are supposed to want me to succeed and who are supposed to be happy for my victories. These people are supposed to be my supporters. But they aren't. In fact, most of the time they run in direct opposition to my goals. Consciously or unconsciously, they work to sabotage me. When I do get invited to a family event, it tends to be very food-based and there's usually no food that is in line with my health goals. If I don't eat they get offended. If I leave early because standing around listening to the negativity with nothing but chocolate cake to eat is just too much for me, they see it as me bailing early because I think I'm better than them. I know, because they've told me as much.

It's unfortunately common for family and close friends to be the last ones to jump on your bandwagon or join your cheering section. What do you do when the people who should be supporting you are against you instead?

1. Remind yourself of why you're making the choices that you're making. What are your goals? What are you working toward? When you're under friendly fire it's important to remember why you're fighting in the first place.

2. Separate yourself. Love people from a distance. Contrary to popular opinion, trying to address the issue with these people will frequently result only in more hurt feelings. Once I saw the behavioral trend in these family members, I started declining more invitations to join them for events. I love them dearly, but it's not emotionally and mentally safe for me to be around these people on a regular basis or for an extended amount of time. As much as it makes me sad to have come to this place, I have to separate myself from the people and situations that would sabotage me as often as possible.

3. Shield yourself. When I do go to a family function, I usually bring food that is in line with my health goals, as well as something to distract myself with. I'll bring a book, or some of my crocheting, so that if everyone gets too overwhelming for me I can find a few minutes in a quiet corner to re-orient myself.

4. Create new association for yourself. This one is the most important one. It takes seven yes's to counteract the subconscious effects of one no. This means it also takes seven statements of encouragement and belief to counteract one family member making one negative statement about your goals one time. If you're dealing with a lot of negative from friends and family, it's that much more important to find supporters outside of your friends and family. Surround yourself with people who have the same goals you do, who will support and encourage you in those goals, and who will provide the cheering section you need. Having these people in your life will help you detox from the people who should be supporting you and are doing the opposite.

This week, work to build and strengthen your support network so that you can survive any friendly fire in your life.