Hi, Z-Health community. Dr. Cobb back with you. Hope you’re having a great week, as I always say.
I had a weird conversation not too long ago and I wanted to tell you about it, because I think there’s a super important point here. I was working with a new client. It was a young lady who was somewhat overweight according to her. We were having this interesting conversation as I was getting to know her.
Every time we spoke, although she had all kind of things going on, she had knee pain, she had ankle pain, she had shoulder pain, she had headaches, on top of that she was a volleyball player and she was not achieving at the level that she thought she should be capable of achieving, but every thing that we talked about in terms of training, she kept coming back to how much she weighed.
Now, in the middle of that conversation, I had one of those teachable moments with her, where I said, “Let’s just take 1 big step back and I want to ask you a simple question.” I said, “Everything that we’ve talked about so far, you have mentioned your weight as the big problem.” I said, “Is that you or is that someone else telling you that?” She got this kind of weird look on her face and she really wasn’t sure how to respond.
Anyway, it worked out well. We had a good conversation about it, but ultimately what I eventually told her, and this is the point of the blog, was quit living other people’s fitness goals, because the conversation that we had, really what it revolved around was she was really into health and fitness, and most of her health and fitness information came from the internet and magazines. She would look at these cover models and go, “I don’t look like that.” What I kept telling her is, “Yeah, but they can’t hit a volleyball like you.”
It was this kind of cool, as I said, teaching moment, but what I run into all the time are people that are living other people’s fitness goals. One of the jokes I make in a lot of our classes is somewhere along the way in the embodiment supposedly of health and fitness around the world, having 6-pack abs became the goal for everyone, which is bizarre to me, because there’s so much more in life with regards to play and fun and sports and athletics and feeling good and feeling amazing.
I had that conversation though not too long ago and then the other day I was reading Mark Twain, and if you haven’t been in my classes, I quote Mark Twain a lot because he’s one of my favorite authors. This is a quote from him. “The 2 most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” I have this up in my office and I think about this a lot, because one of the things that we are sharing more and more this year in Z-Health is the why for what we do.
What I want to encourage you to think about this week is, why are you doing the training that you’re doing? Have you figured out why you want to be involved in exercise or are you just doing it because you think you should? I have always told people one of the best gifts I can give them is helping them understand that they don’t care about certain things. If 6-pack abs you really don’t care about but that’s what’s being pushed on you at your gym or by your friends or whatever, it’s okay to choose something different.
What I’m going to ask you to do this week around this particular concept is a simple exercise. Take out a piece of paper and write down at the top one of your fitness goals. Now most of the people that I know have lots of fitness goals. Most of them, they may be pipe dreams or whatever, but most people have a fitness goal. Write down one and then take 3 minutes. You guys know I always encourage you to set timers because otherwise you can get lost, and if you think it’s going to take you 20 minutes, you won’t do it.
Take 3 minutes. Set a timer. Then I want you to write down this question. What happened before what happened happened? What happened before what happened happened? Then look at your goal and ask that question of it. Where did that goal come from? What happened before that became a goal for you? In other words, who did it come from? What experience did it come from?
Because what I would really love to have happen for you this week is for you to get very clear that there are probably some of your fitness and health goals that really move you, that you will really engage with, because they matter to you. What you will also find is there are probably a bunch of them that you can check off the list already because they’re never going to actually serve as that foundational drive to get you out of bed in the morning.
There’s my thoughts today for you for this week. I hope that you again think about this, you find it interesting.
If you have questions, responses, thoughts about this, please let me know.
Have a great week. Thanks.
