How are you going to show up in 2022?

How are you going to show up in 2022?

Mindset is everything. Attitude is everything. Our hopes for you this year is to bring more awareness to your mindset in how you are approaching your health, your fitness, your sessions, and life.

When I was going through one of my certifications I learned that society really shows up one of four ways in their life and sessions. And there’s an old saying that says,” How you do one thing is how you do everything.”

Let’s examine this more deeply. The four categories that people fall into are as follows.

Willing and able

Not willing but able

Willing but not able

Not willing and not able

Let’s break this down with examples of each category so you can clearly ask yourself honestly which category you will fall into the majority of the time. Obviously we all have our days where we get thrown a curveball and that’s why I love the book The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz, and it’s been a resource I always come back to for almost two decades. The first agreement in his book is always "do your best" and he follows that up with the idea that your best will vary. Your best when you’re sick is different than your best when you are well. Your best when you’ve gotten heavy news that might stir up emotions will be different then when you are mentally flying high. Your best may be different when you are fueled properly, had enough sleep, and taken time to recover. This is where we must not get caught up in comparing one day to another and treating each day like its own container.

With that being said, you want to take ownership and responsibility for how you are showing up generally overall and make adjustments from there.

1. Willing and able: means you are ready, eager, and prepared to do something and are capable of doing it.

2. Not willing but able: in this energy you may find excuses, give backlash to your trainer, or not honestly be fully committed with your head in the game and focused on where you want to go. But you are in fact perfectly capable of doing it even though your mindset isn’t open and ready.

3. Willing but not able: you’re ready, open, and eager, but maybe you’re getting bombarded with an intense workload, you have injuries, you’re caretaking an elderly loved one and it’s affecting your schedule. Here you just do what you can do even if it’s not as much as usual.

4. Not willing and not able. Not open, eager, and ready and not able whether it’s a physical limitation, a personal grievance, a sickness, or various other reasons.

So now what? If you want to really create the best results in your health journey this year there are a couple of small things you can start to do. First, ask yourself if you have realistic expectations or has “diet culture mentality” (we covered this in last week’s blog: Diet Culture. What is it and how can we reframe our mindset around the programming from it) caused a discrepancy in your mindset. And ask yourself before each session honestly which of the four categories above are you falling into each and every day. You may even go a step further and put a post on your bathroom mirror or set alarm reminders in your phone that say an affirmation such as “I choose to be as willing and able as I can be today”. It’s amazing what these little extra mindset exercises can shift in what’s possible for you over time.