Get Your Steps In

When I am not obsessing about the subconscious mind (another blog about that later) and the imprint I am leaving on my children and how to tackle my subconscious beliefs, I am often thinking about how I can spend the day with my two-year-old, and how I can make the most of our activities so as to maximize the number of steps I take in a day. I know, so selfish of me. But you have to understand, I don’t have a lot of me time, so while I am sure I can make time to go to the gym and workout (and I do), I’d rather reorient my thought process to dictate that the steps I take daily—running around with him, walking the lake, going up and down the stairs for something else—to be the allotted number of steps, the right amount of aerobic stimulation, that would please not only my fitness tracker, but me too and make me feel like I’ve worked out.

I read The Code of the Extraordinary Mind a while back and there was a study (also mentioned in Emotional Agility, which I finished reading a bit ago) done on some maids regarding fitness. The general consensus was they all believed that they did not work out; they did not see the work they did, the movements they made (wiping, stretching, tucking, washing, etc.) as activity that would be considered fitness, or fit the surgeon general’s allotted amount of movement a day. One group was told to continue on as usual and one group was told that the work they did, the amount of physical activity they participated in at work, did, in fact correspond with the SG’s fitness chart. Upon close of the study, the group who’d been told that what they did counted, had lost a certain number of inches in the waist.

The short of it: they changed their mind about what constituted fitness and in so doing, lost weight. They changed the relationship they had with the process, released the prescribed notions and singular path to achieve a desired outcome and got results. Now of course, this got me to thinking: What do I believe? How much of what I believe has kept me in the place that I am, feeling stuck and stagnant? What steps am I taking to get to where I want to go?

A daunting question if one attempts to tackle it all at once, which is my tendency. I want to change my life? OK. 1,2,3. Done. But there’s no presto-chango button, no magic pill to swallow to make you bigger or smaller.

There’s only one step at a time. There’s only process. There’s only coming to terms (read: wrestling) with what you believe, changing your perception, your perspective and walking that out in truth and tranquility.

Sounds easy enough, right? Try telling that to 33 year-old me who has been believing what she believes for more years than she can remember, has zero idea on how the thoughts have been so ingratiated and doesn’t really want to change because its all she knows, but needs to change if she wants to get where she’s desiring to go.

You see my dilemma.

So, I’m on this journey. To more and better and reclaiming my definitions. And it’s hard. Downright challenging—to the point where all I want to do it quit, revert, take steps back to comfort.

I’m reorienting, re-calibrating my positioning, realizing: it’s all about what you believe. What you have the faith to see. The steps you take to get there.

Because, life.

So, get your steps in. How will you reorient yourself to see every move you make as a calculated and perhaps divine step in the right direction—even when it feels like a misstep, a mishap or a mistake? I’ve wrestled very deeply with this thought and am still wrestling. But I am choosing to believe. Choosing to see, like that Michael Jackson video, the light in each step I take as perfectly planned, illuminating, guiding me on this journey to the me that I already am, waiting to say, hello.