There’s no magic.
It feels sad just writing that, but I think we need to have a conversation about what magic really is.
I think many of us imagine magic to be a pill or a drink. It’s the fairy dust that Fairy Godmother sprinkled on Cinderella that turned her rags into a ball gown.
We always think of magic as something that is given to us. It’s something external that’s consumed. Or in Cinderella’s case – something that was dumped on her.
We’re going to break some hearts in this conversation, but what if you were told that the magic is inside you, but you’re too busy looking outside of yourself to see it? What if you were so busy being an asshole to yourself that you were actually preventing yourself from seeing the good that you can do?
We are really good at pointing out our flaws, but terrible at saying I did ‘x’ really well today or I really like ‘x’ about myself.
I say this often – I’m not expecting me or you to love every single thing about ourselves every single day, but we’re not terrible, we just believe we are because of the garbage that we absorb regularly.
I still get asked how I did it. It is the weight loss. It is competing. It is finding better coping mechanisms for my mental health. It is navigating my eating disorder. It is some times “stopping at one cookie”.
Many times when we are thinking of what our goals are, we’re thinking of them initially in a vacuum. We put them (and ourselves) in a bubble of perfection. I must do this, I should do that, there’s no reason I can’t.
First, try taking yourself out of the bubble because life is real and the Internet is not. Ironic that this is online reading, huh?
I want you to consider all the things that you are for a minute, all the roles you hold. This is something I do in my screenings and I talk about in my workbook. I promise it’s not just some hippy shit.
So, think about them for a second.
Now think of your goals and that timeline you have decided to accomplish them in.
Do your goals feel overwhelming when you throw them in a blender with your roles?
What would happen if you extended your timeline?
Just like a house, shitty foundations fall apart and that means the structure on it collapses.
When I think of my weight loss, I think of how I eased into it, which in the long run made it easier for me. I made small adjustments at a time. I did research. I experimented. I found things I liked and things I didn’t.
When I decided to compete, I had already been already living a healthier life for a few years, and I looked at competing as a challenge to change it up and push me out of my comfort zone. There were still things I was new to, like lifting – I had to learn that. But this was an opportunity for growth.
The transition from getting healthier to competing is a good example of creating the foundation to do more challenging things. Don’t get me wrong there were some bumps along the way. Some lessons learned. Some lessons that I continue to work on. But if someone ever tells you that they don’t have anything that they continue to work on then run, really fast and in the opposite direction.
There are many approaches to accomplish your goals. But if you continue to see or feel failure, then it’s going to take some self-reflection to determine your why all over again, your timeline and why it’s not working with you and your strategies so far and whywhat you’ve been doing hasn’t been working.
It’s there nothing wrong with changing your approach when you realize it’s not fitting you anymore. There’s also nothing wrong with changing the goal if you realize that it’s not serving you and adding to your purpose too.
But there’s not magic pill or shake or dust that anyone can give you to make the stars align and your reality be what you want it to be.
You create your reality.
You create your magic.
