How to Be Happy in the In Between
A friend of mine recently posted this on Facebook: I am at a point in my life where I want to learn how to love the body I have all while working toward the body I want. But how do you do that and live life?
The first two words that flashed in my mind were discipline and forgiveness. You can’t achieve goals without discipline but you have to be able to forgive yourself for the moments you lacked discipline in order to dust yourself off and keep going. While these two words can make it sound so simple, it takes a lot to actually accomplish this balance.
I think this time of year, a lot of us struggle with this. I know I do! #NewYearNewMe, am I right? That hashtag is at the root of why I don’t believe in making traditional New Year’s resolutions myself. Why do we need a “new me”? Aren’t we pretty great already?!
However, I do love the idea of a new year: a fresh start and a clean slate. I view that week between Christmas and New Year’s as a period of both relaxation and reflection. A time to look back on what I’ve achieved and what I want to accomplish in the future.
This brings us back to the original question: how do you love where you are while working toward where you want to be and still live life?
See Imperfections as Strengths
If I asked you what your least favorite trait or physical characteristic was, I bet you’d have no trouble telling me. What if I asked what your favorite was? That might get a little bit harder! We place these unrealistic expectations on ourselves, then wonder why we have a hard time loving ourselves the way we are. Call me crazy, but it reminds me of the Serenity Prayer:
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
I find that the things about myself I have the hardest time loving and accepting are the things I can’t change. If you thought about it hard enough, I think you’d recognize the strength in those things you view as imperfections. For example, I hate the scars from my multiple surgeries. I cried looking at them after my first surgery and hate the way they look. I am very insecure about anyone seeing them, especially the ones generally covered up by my clothing. Yet I’ve learned to accept them as symbols of survival and the strength I’ve gained through my cancer story. A friend of mine had always hated her legs, especially her thighs and calves. She felt they were too muscular and made her look “manly”. Through weight training, she has learned to love what they are capable of and the physical strength they possess.
Take Care of Yourself
You know the old saying “Do unto others as you would have done unto you”? The problem is that we treat the people we care about better than we would ever think of treating ourselves. In fact, we are usually our own toughest critic and say the harshest things about ourselves. It’s time to start treating ourselves the way we deserve to be treated!
For me, treating myself better means physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. I feel at my best when I’m well rested and tend to handle stress and anxiety better after a good night’s sleep too. Nutrition and fitness tend to go hand in hand for me. When I work out, I crave healthier food and when I eat healthier, my workouts seem more rewarding. Never is a workout more excruciating than the day after indulging. I also started seeing a therapist when I began feeling more like a cancer patient than a cancer survivor. I’ve continued to go every few months, just to have that extra support system in my back pocket. The therapy helps me check in with myself and daily devotions help keep me uplifted.
Whatever treating yourself looks like to you, make it a habit! It’s so much easier to love yourself (at any stage) when you treat yourself with kindness and respect.
Establish Routines
Speaking of making habits, create daily rituals that bring you joy. As much as I love hitting the snooze button in the morning, this is not the type of habit I mean! I start work really early in the morning (hence, the snooze button) but I love getting up an extra half hour to drink a cup of coffee and read the daily devotionals that I touched on above. Not only does this help wake me up and give me a boost of energy, but it helps center me and makes me appreciate the here and now.
When you’re working toward something you really want or you’re looking forward to something in the future, it can be really hard to practice patience. That’s why it is so important to incorporate the things you love into your daily routines. That cup of coffee before work isn’t going to help me get the body I want (or even love the body I’m currently in) but it will help me enjoy that moment and be more prepared to take on the day ahead of me. When it comes to living and loving life, it really does come down to the little things. Incorporate enough of them and they all add up!
Set Actions, Not Ambiguities
All of the above tips focus more on loving where you are now, not working toward where you want to be. However, if you don’t have a plan, you likely won’t get very far. I think this is a large part of why most New Year’s resolutions don’t amount to much. People tend to have an ambiguous vision of what they want or a goal but no plan of action. For example, one of the most common resolutions seems to run along the lines of “eat healthier” or “lose weight”. What does eating healthier mean? Eating more veggies? Cutting out sugar? Going keto? How much weight? One dress size? 25 pounds?
If you really want to make a resolution, set a tangible goal. Not just tangible but measurable and realistic. If you haven’t been running in 6 months (like me!), a more realistic goal might be training for a 5k, not a half marathon. Besides, who says you can’t set a new goal if you accomplish the first one? Once you have set your goal, determine how exactly you’re going to achieve it. If your goal is to run a 5k, you could set a training schedule or run three times a week with a workout buddy. Your plan doesn’t have to be perfect! You can always reevaluate and make adjustments, but any plan is better than no plan (well, almost).
Recognize How Far You’ve Come
We could all be better at giving ourselves more credit for our accomplishments. This can be really hard when the end goal seems so alluring but far away! Yet, it’s the hard work that makes achieving the goal feel like such an accomplishment. This is why a measurable goal is so important: if you don’t know where you started, how will you know how far you’ve come?! Take pride in the progress! Celebrate the small victories!
Every single one of those small wins is going to help you feel more love toward yourself today. If you have a minor setback, remind yourself of those victories and the strength it took you to achieve them! Derrick Rose said it best this NBA season when he said, “Every loss is a lesson. Every lesson is a blessing.” And if anyone knows about overcoming obstacles and setbacks, it’s D. Rose (sorry, my worlds sometimes overlap).
Stop Comparing
Finally, and most importantly, don’t compare yourself. Not to others, not to timelines, and not to the pressures of society. We are all guilty of this! If you say you’re not, then you’re lying. It’s human nature!
I have wasted a lot of time comparing myself to others. I have one sibling, a sister, and I constantly compare myself to her and her “achievements”. In my eyes, she’s always been the more successful one. My therapist once asked me to name the things my sister had that made her more successful than me. When I was done listing them, she asked me which of those things I wanted for myself. It turns out, there weren’t actually that many! That doesn’t take anything away from my sister’s accomplishments or make her any less successful. It just means that I was holding myself up to someone else’s expectations and comparing myself to their progress! What’s right for her isn’t necessarily right for me.
For the longest time, I also had this vision in my head of where I should be at various points in my life. If I hadn’t achieved the goal I (and society) had set by those points, I felt like a complete failure. Talk about sucking the happiness out of life! Once I let go of these preset notions, I felt a heavy weight lifted off my shoulders. Earlier this year, I made a huge career decision that many might have viewed as a step back. I’ve learned though that everyone’s definition or vision of success doesn’t look like mine and I’ve never been happier with where I’m at!
What unrealistic expectations do you set for yourself? Have you ever fallen into the comparison game? How do you find the balance in loving yourself now while working toward the future you’re envisioning?
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