Rumspringa...My Tracy Anderson Transformation: Day 53: Overcoming Fear of Failure

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Day 53: Overcoming Fear of Failure

(Sarcastically) Golly, great way to start the 1st of November, World Vegan Day....I had work early today so I decided I'd do my workout when I got off. Well, then I ended up working late, visiting my bf on his lunch break, getting dinner. By the time all this was done I was pooped, and didn't want to workout. Well, I did my toning work, but no cardio today. However, I learned yesterday that an hour of cardio is really not too bad. So I can easily make up for my missing cardio tomorrow.

I will say that doing an hour of cardio made a difference as I woke up this morning and though I don't have a scale could definitely tell I had lost weight!! I probably won't do an hour a day of cardio 6 times a week, but I'll shoot for every other day and work my way up! It was really encouraging to tangibly see my hard work pay off though, and to have a real solution come to fruition! So if you haven't given an hour of cardio a try and you want to experiement with it, I say go for it. If you're body is ready, you'll enjoy it. If it's too much, no worries! Kudos to you for having the courage to experiment.

We're so trained to fear looking the fool aren't we? I know I am. I remember in elementary school I went to a roller skating rink. The announcer then told everyone to skate backwards. Many if not most people got out and watched from the sidelines. I had not developed any reservations or self-consciousness at that tender age, so I tried to skate backwards. Some girl from the side lined yelled "You can't skate backwards!" That was the first time I can recall someone saying something like that to me. This random girl (who I'm sure didn't know any better) said something to make me feel bad just because I was trying. I didn't do ANYTHING wrong, yet here I was being criticized for no reason at all other than being fearless and being myself. Honestly, my throat is getting choked up just thinking about it. At that time, I think I was so confused by her statement because I'd never experienced someone being mean like that before. I rememeber looking up at her, but I can't remember if I got out of the rink or not.

I can tell you that all these years later, it still affects me. Not on an everyday basis like I think about this one incident all the time, but certainly little incidents like that have added up in my life that fear of embarassment and fear of failure are very predominant themes in my life. I'm not sure what it takes for wounds like these to heal. But I can say from experience that taking it one day at a time, baby steps of accomplishment add up to a positive momentum in the right direction. I rememeber at the beginning of Meta for example I really had a fear that I couldn't get through the workouts. I had a fear of failure and embarassment even though no one else was around to judge me except myself.

Even before I started level 5, I rememeber previewing it and being scared (fearful) that I wouldn't be able to do it (failure). However, I learned a big lesson from that level. I learned that when I perceive something is difficult, it's best to at least give it a try because sometimes it's not as hard as I thought. Certainly there was no reason to have FEAR over it. Nothing bad was actually going to happen! Now I'm able to approach levels and new challenges in TAM by reminding myself that I do not need to be perfect to succeed. Once again, I just need to try, and learn, have kindness for myself, patience, faith, and keep moving forward.

5 comments:

Michelle StylesNovember 2, 2011 at 2:42 AM
Trying is SO important. It is all about failing forward. YOu don't have to be perfect.
Hooray that you can see why I say -- do an hour's DC. It does melt fat.

I know about those little incidents. I can remember a sadistic PE teacher when things about body types started appearing. She looked at me and said -- Michelle, you will always be fat and have to struggle. I bet your parents are fat. It was a totally inappropriate thing to say, particularly to an 11 year old who was just hitting puberty.
For her, the ideal body type might have been a runner's but not for me. I do have curves but that doesn't mean I am fat or would never be fit. Body image can be affected by so many things. And random comments do have the power to hurt even many years later.
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LeahNovember 3, 2011 at 10:53 PM
Michelle, your words are like a bowl full of comfort :) AND, I totally thought of you when I saw the next day how my cardio had paid off, and understood how and why you were able to do that hour of cardio! Cheers!
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LeahNovember 3, 2011 at 10:55 PM
"Failing Forward"...I LOVE that
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NinaNovember 7, 2011 at 6:27 AM
People can be sooo rude. A random comment can haunt your for the rest of your life. I know exactly what you are talking about as I got rude comments like that a lot when I was younger. When I hit puberty I got pimpels and everyone just made mean comments about my face or back. It still haunts me from time to time and my self-esteem is very low. Maybe it sounds ridiculous but doing my Meta helped me a lot in getting to like my body a little bit more every time. Sometimes I miss the times when I was young and fearless. As an adult unfortunately we are all filled with fear and embarrassment for doing something new. Thanks for sharing your story!
One-hour cardio???? I accomplished that just one time and it felt great but since that one time not anymore, but I am trying even if I am looking ridiculous dancing and singing through my living room ;-) wow one-hour! Congrats!!!
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LeahNovember 8, 2011 at 8:16 PM
Nina, thanks for sharing your story too and for cheering me on. I feel pretty amazed at the one hour of cardio myself ;)
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What has Made This Time Different?

I have attempted to try to stick to an exercise routine so many times in my life, and yet I've rarely made it past a week or two at the most. This time has been a whole new experience, and this is a list of the reasons why (subject to change). Perhaps one or all of these will resonate with you too:

1) I have a simple, mental, visual analogy to help me focus on the bigger picture: In the past I've dieted and exercised and wondered why am I not losing weight? The key was that I wasn't consistent. The truth was that my efforts were sporadic rather than stacking one on top of the other. So it felt like I had exerted so much energy (which I had), but because it was not one foot in front of the other, my efforts did not stack up to any actual results. This made the most sense to me once I understood the the visual analogy of climbing a wall. My goal (lose weight/get fit) was to get over this wall. My attempts to get over the wall included climbing up (working out, dieting). However, I was constantly climbing back down the wall without realizing it (getting off the dieting, not exercising). Over time, I was exhausted from climbing up and didn't understand why I had not yet made it over, after all I had put in a lot of effort. It was then that I realized that every time I stop exercising, I am not picking up from where I left off the next time I start up again. Instead, I have to start from the very bottom of the wall. The steps up the wall do not help you climb over unless the are consistenly moving in a forward direction upward. While this may seem simple, and easy to understand intellectually, it was something I had to understand in the form of an epiphany. It was the first step to me being able to be consistent with my Tracy Anderson Method.

2) Make the goal about following through with the actions, rather than just focusing on the end results: Now that I understood that consistency was such an important factor in being successful with my goal, I had to figure out how to actually be consistent when I had never before been able to. It was so hard for me to imagine getting past level 1, because in my previous attempts I had learned how to do a few days of level 1, feel defeated, take a break, and then start over on level 1 again once I felt like I just couldn't take being overweight any more. My brain only understood how to stop and start over, so it just couldn't imagine what it felt like to move forward to L2-L9 and beyond. So, I made a commitment to myself that I did not even have to do the levels if I did not want to, but that I would play the videos every day as though I were doing them, just for the sake of my brain understanding what that would feel like. Amazingly enough, this triggered something in my brain so that it could at least entertain the possibility of experiencing the program beyond level 1.

3) Don't tell anyone I am learning to establish an exercise routine, until I'm on a roll. I understand using someone as an accountability buddy, and I do think that is helpful. But for me, I found that when I told people I was starting to exercise I diverted energy away from my goal (establish a regular exercise routine). So when I used to tell people, "oh I'm starting something new" people kindly wanted to know how it's going, how much I've lost, all these reasonable questions. For me, that added an extra pressure that I just didn't need. I didn't want to be accountable to anyone but myself, and I because I am someone who worries too much about what other people think, it just served me better to start the journey on my own and learn from my own experiences, learn to trust myself and my own instinct, and feel free to experiment without fearing judgements from others.

4) Don't make any changes to diet initially, but instead first focus on making exercise a regular part of my routine. Learning to exercise regularly and consistently & eating nutritiously are both lofty goals in and of themselves. To do both simultaneously has never ever worked for me. For my brain, my emotions, my inability to adapt to change, it was far too large an undertaking to attempt diet exercise simultaneously. For me, exercise is the easier place to start because it feels more in my control. There are only two choices (to exercise or not), and it is completely up to me, and not influenced by much else. On the other hand, food requires more preparation what with shopping, and storing and cooking, and taking food with me places. Exercise is just once a day whereas eating is something to work on multiple times throughout the day. Another thing is that if I attempted exercise and diet at the same time, if I did poorly in one area that day, it wiped out any good work I did in the other area (in my mind), and made me want to give up on BOTH. Exercise is the place to start for me.

5) Accept that my objectives are long-term and therefore no matter how hard I work, I will not be skinny in a month or two. But a year from now and for the rest of my life I will be.

6) Keep a blog or journal. For me, blogging has enabled me to see that some days are challenging, but there are also other days are easier. It is easy to forget the good days when I'm just focusing on the negative one at hand. Blogging allows me to go back and remember the positive things I've gained and learned along my journey.

7) Exercise with a buddy in the beginning to help make exercise a daily habit. While I didn't tell anyone about working out until about 2 weeks after I'd started, after that when I told my friend she was excited and wanted to try it out too. We exercised together for about two weeks, and that helped me establish a routine of exercising first thing in the morning consistenly.

8) Immerse myself in the success of others. I read others' blogs and success stories and facebook and the TA forum. www.masteringthemethod.com was such a great tool because it was the first visual I had to understand that this was going to be a journey and a process. It is so easy to see the "before" and "afters" and think that 1 week or a month of commiting will take me from before to after. Being able to see the "during" as well made such a difference to my brain because it was like the missing piece of the puzzle to understand this is not in any shape or form an overnight, overweek, or overmonth process. It showed me the bridge from "before" through "during" to "after".

9) Watch and re-watch and watch again Tracy's informercial and multiple visits to QVC. Especially the first month I watched them almost every day. Seeing the informercial is the pique of excitement in the beginning of a new exercise routine. Watching the infomercials help me remember the feelings I had in the beginnning and reminds me why I began this journey in the first place.

10) Trust Tracy, yourself, and those who have come before you, and have faith that while you can't imagine it today, each step you take will lead you to your after as it has for so many others.

11) Let go of being a perfectionist. Being a perfectionist prevented me from succeeding 100% of the other times I've attempted to exercise. It was vital to learn to only do whatever my personal abilites are and nothing more. Understanding and believing that I would build from wherever I was starting, as there is no need to exhaust myself physically and mentally by exercising beyond my capabilites was again instrumental. The very first time I tried metamorphosis, I was beyond defeated and in tears as there was no way I was gonna be able to do 40 reps of all the leg exercises as she did. I initially would pause the TV after every exercise attempting to complete 40 reps like Tracy was going. Helllllloooo, Tracy is in shape and she invented the method for goodness sake. I never exercised and was carrying around at least 50 pounds that didn't need to be there. Because I couldn't be "perfect" I thought I couldn't do the method. This was completely false. Finally, I figured out that I just had to do whatever reps I was able to do while she was doing the same exercise. Then when she moved on, I moved on to the next move. Suddenly my abilites were increasing, just by doing my personal best. It was the same thing with the cardio. It was important to me to play the whole tape, but that didn't mean I had to be jumping the whole time. Instead, I would step touch or march in place, drink some water. The point is that I got to experience what 30 minutes of cardio would feel like, and eventually be able to build up to it. I can now do an hour of cardio :)

...to be continued

90 Day Metamorphosis with Tracy Anderson

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Day 53: Overcoming Fear of Failure

5 comments: