Hello and welcome to The Own Your Health podcast,
I'm Cyndi Lynne and I can't wait to
help you step into your health power.
Today we're talking about what the
health are you waiting for?
So this is a time of year that I hear
loads and loads of reasons of why people don't get
started on their health journey. Why they put things off.
And it's not just the simple excuses of
why someone didn't feel like exercising this day.
It's really the whole journey to health.
I'm going to give you two reasons why I think this
happens and then tell you exactly what you do about it.
First of all, we treat health as
if it's a destination or an event.
And in fact, we often apply health practices to
getting ready for an event, a wedding or a
big work event or a class reunion.
That's a classic.
And we think about getting healthy for that event
and associate health with an event or in a
deadline, a destination that we want to get to.
So if I'm healthy, when I get healthy, I'll do this.
When I get healthy, I'll get a new wardrobe.
When I get healthy, I'll start to travel.
But really, health is every day.
It's how we show up, it's how we behave,
it's how we feed ourselves, it's how we move
our bodies, it's how we celebrate, it's how we
take in information and process all of these things.
And I think because our health is all of that,
that's probably one of the first reasons that we wait.
And that is in our mind, we
make being healthy this big, nebulous thing.
There's so many pieces, we don't
really know where to start.
And for most of us, we haven't
defined what healthy looks like for us.
So it's sort of this.
So I eat everything right?
And I have to exercise every day and I have
to read all the right books and I have to
not watch tv and I have to avoid stress.
And all of these things are concepts and
ideas, but they're not actions, they're not specific
goals and objectives that we can carry out.
So we'll come back to that.
But the second reason that I think that we very often
think of health as an event or a destination rather than
what we do every day, is that we make health and
being healthy very black and white, good and bad.
This food is good for me.
This food is bad for me.
Drinking is bad for me.
A glass of wine is bad.
Oh, okay, maybe a glass of wine is good.
Maybe two glasses of wine is bad.
We kind of don't really define
for ourselves what we want.
Going back to that first situation where we make
health, this sort of nebulous thing, so that when
it comes down to making choices in our everyday
life, we see things as black and white.
Yep, that's healthy.
No, that's not healthy.
This is good to eat.
That's not good to eat.
This kind of exercise is good.
That kind of exercise isn't good.
Everybody should be doing yoga.
Everybody should be meditating.
I don't know how to meditate, so I'm
never going to be able to do that.
I'm never going to be able to be healthy.
We tie this black and white and perfection to
being healthy, when in fact, perfectionism is probably one
of the most opposite points of healthy there is.
Okay, so what do we do about all of this?
First of all, rather than having this
big, nebulous, undefined idea of health, sit
down with your journal and decide.
Make a choice, write it down and
decide what being healthy means to you.
Now, it doesn't mean that this has to be the
definition you have for the rest of your life.
And in fact, if you have a lot of very
unhealthy habits right now, your health goal may look just
incrementally better for someone who lives fairly healthy on a
day to day basis, your incremental changes may take you
into a whole another level of health, okay.
So what does health for you look like?
You can define it in terms of practices, or
you can define it in terms of your outputs.
Do you want to be flexible?
All right, how do you achieve that? Is it yoga?
Is it stretching?
Is it some other kind of activity?
Do you want to be strong?
How do you achieve that?
Do you want to fit into certain size clothes that?
Do you want to have really good skin?
Do you want your acne to clear up?
Do you want your eczema to clear up?
Do you want your hair to stop falling out?
There's a whole range of desires, and for
each person, it's going to be very individual,
it's going to be very different.
So one person's health goals may be the next person's
pie in the sky impossibility, but you need to set
your goals where they make sense for you.
Like I said, it doesn't mean this
is going to be goals for life.
It's just going to be the
next steps that you're taking.
Because this is an ongoing, iterative process for
life, not a destination, not an event.
If you can't think of specific activities in each of
the sort of areas, each of the health areas.
Think about what you would like to look and feel like.
What do you want to read?
What kind of activities do you want to engage in?
What kind of people do you want to be around?
What kind of clothes do you want to wear?
How do you want to feel when you
wake up in the morning? And then work
backwards to what activities do I know about?
What things have I done in the past that have
helped me feel that way or look that way or
behave that way or engage with people in a certain
way and set down these health goals?
Now there may be 5,10, 20.
If you're very specific in what you want to
do, those are your goals and you're just going
to work on one or two at a time.
Occasionally there will be things that come into play
and sort of intermesh together, and that's fine.
Then you can work on several.
But if you want to create good practices, if
you want to create good habits, you're going to
start with one or two in focus there.
The next thing I want you to do is
look at these not as black and white as
in I exercise today or I didn't exercise today.
I want you to look at them as a continual
where one side is that kind of perfection, that isn't
necessarily the best thing to think about, but one side
is like, you did it all right.
You hit everything today for that goal. And
the other side is absolute couch potato.
Now keep in mind, if couch potato is your
goal for a particular day, that's okay, too.
But think about this continuum.
So maybe it was pouring rain and you didn't get
out and walk the hour that you normally do.
What did you do?
Did you do the rebounder?
Did you do some inside activities?
Did you run stairs?
Did you, what did you do for movement?
Acknowledge what you've done.
Give yourself credit.
It's not black and white.
I either made the goal today or I didn't.
This is the goal.
This is where I'd like to be.
What did I do today to get myself there?
All right.
If you set a goal for yourself to read one
chapter a day in either a pleasure book that you're
really interested in or a health related book that you're
really interested in, maybe you got five pages read.
Maybe you got into the book and realized, oh,
my gosh, this whole book only has five chapters.
Maybe I need a different tool to measure.
It's not black and white.
Work towards it.
Continue doing it.
Because the benefit of this is that unlike when fitness for
an event is your goal, once that event is over and
any unsustainable practices started are going to fall right off and
chances are you're going to feel not so good about the
situation and you're going to end off in a less desirable
place than you were when you started.
And I see this in clients all the time.
It's two steps forward and three steps back,
and two steps forward and three steps back.
And it's frustrating.
And people want to give up.
And I think about where they've been and what they've
done and how far things have slid, and they use
that as a reason to not start again.
So I encourage you to start again with a different
attitude, with very much concrete ideas of what you want
your health to look like, of what health means to
you, not anybody else, not what's in the magazines.
You can certainly get ideas.
Sometimes it's hard to even
think about all the possibilities.
And this definition can evolve, it can change, you
can add to it, you can take from it.
If something doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
These are all options.
But start with an idea of what health means to
you and then figure out what the continuum is.
If you're used to having three or four
glasses of wine in the evening, maybe stopping
that habit altogether is not going to be
sustainable for you, either physically or psychologically.
Maybe you have to cut back.
Maybe you have some nights where you don't have wine.
Maybe you have some nights where you
have one glass of wine that is
moving positively towards your health goals.
The same with food.
Very often we use one bad meal or one bad choice
as a reason to just kind of scrap the rest of
the day and start tomorrow or start next week.
We're waiting for the perfect time.
We're waiting to start over.
There's no need to wait because
your body is rebuilding, recreating and experiencing
its health every single day.
So find your goals.
Find how you want to define
health in each of those parameters.
Absolutely.
Pick the continuum of what's the best for
you and what's potentially the worst, and make
it your goal to live in between those
and more towards the best when you can.
Okay, now for those of you who spent so
much time in perfectionism, this probably sounds frustrating.
It probably sounds like I'm not going to get anywhere.
What does it all mean?
What's the whole purpose?
But ask yourself if it really doesn't have a
purpose, or if I've just taken away the means
by which you beat yourself up when you're not
making all of those perfectionist goals, and that would
be my goal, to take that away from you.
So if this sounds intriguing to you and you'd
like some help figuring out what your health goals
are or what questions to ask, after all, asking
better questions always gives us better answers.
Kind of don't know where to start.
You're thinking, yes, this makes a lot of sense.
I would be happy to sit down with you for an hour
and work through this, and I'm going to put a link down
below where you can time with me to do that.
Now, if you've been doing something like this for a
while, if you've had your goals, if you've been working
toward it and you've hit a few snags or there's
a couple of areas that just really, really stick and
you can't figure out what your continuum would be there,
I'm happy to help you out with that as well.
Again, grab an hour with me.
We can sit, we can talk through and
figure out what health means for you.
Now, if you like this content and know someone
else who's going through this same sort of pattern
of what the health are you waiting for?
Absolutely forward it, share it with them, and
if you liked it, please rate and review
because that helps more people see my content.
So until next week, until I get a chance to talk
to you in person, let's go out and own it.
