WHEN OUR EXPECTATIONS BECOME OUR GYM PROGRAM

I love lifting weights!

Being in the group fitness environment for so long, at times I lost my love for lifting heavyweights.

I would either get too busy at work or too busy at life to make it down to the gym and for me… 

there is no better meditation than putting my headphones on, cancelling out all the noise and just lifting weights for 90 minutes.

I usually put on a coaching video or a podcast to help educate myself in the time I was getting away from things

And because of that, I’d always come away with new ideas or new motivation to pursue something I would not normally go after.

You see lifting weights for me served me in 3 different ways.

The first was physical which is pretty obvious.

I liked to lift heavy and I wanted to maintain my size.

The second was to learn

The podcasts and audio coaching helped me do that

But the third was to self reflect and get back to who I am.

This is where I would think of new ideas and start chasing new ideas. My mind was clear and I could think like myself again.

With responsibility comes expectations and with expectation, there is responsibility.

There’s so often in life where we will get completely overwhelmed with expectations either set by ourselves or by others.

If it becomes too much for us, it turns into a heavy burden and when it’s a burden, it’s extremely hard to take it off.

At times you can feel like you’ve got a backpack on and the expectations of yourself, work, family and even life

Are put in this backpack and you carry it around everywhere you go.

It’s almost like when you take one of them out, another one goes straight back in and you feel like this weight is never going to come off

So I’ll just do what I can to deal with it and move on.

But over time it does get tiring and at some point, you just want to give up.

For me, lifting weights helped me deal with it.

It gave me a safe place of my own to not only process things

But get back in touch with who I am.

When expectations are placed on our shoulders it’s very easy to lose who you are and do things to please other people.

The world we live in demands certain expectations of every individual no matter who you are

But at the end of the day, you can only control what you can control and that is why getting back in touch with self, is so important.

So today I ask you, what are the expectations you find are sitting on your shoulders?

What expectations are you carrying around in your backpack which is becoming heavier and heavier each day?

And what do you do to get back in touch with yourself and handle what needs to be handled?

The natural response to deal with things that become burdening is to run from them.

The only problem with that is, they’re still there when you get back.

Find something that really makes you happy and brings you back to who you enjoy being and then pick that bag up and start emptying it from that mindset.

You’ll feel a lot lighter and less stressed because of it.