When All Else Fails

In the movies there is always a red button that when pressed something big is about to happen. Something blows up or the world ends as we know it when that little button is finally pressed. We dread the red button as it represents doom and no going back. Things will be different and we will need to rebuild. Yet sometimes we do really need to press the button.

Let’s face it most of the time changes are the result of us avoiding change so much that all else has officially failed. We are left without choice so we might as well change it all. Even then though we still hesitate to press the red button that will send a shock wave of changes throughout out our life. We imagine the worse and see the difficulty and strife this will cause and we think about it some more. Surely we don’t need to be this harsh and there has to be another way to fix things and have it all right?

When we have tried everything we know to do and a few things we guessed at might work at solving something and that doesn’t work either, what do we do? That was this big question but yet I really struggled with it namely because I knew at least for me not all had failed. Deep inside I knew the answer was the one thing I just didn’t want to do. I had not made it a priority. It was hard or I wasn’t committed. Make any label you want on it the heart of why there wasn’t progress was me. All else had failed because I wasn’t ready, committed, capable, motivated, making it a priority, putting in the work, you name it.

How many of us want to lose weight? There are a lot of people every day who start a new diet or say they will start it Monday and yet we are a nation of obese and overweight people putting our health at risk for more severe situations every day. We know we need to lose weight. We realize it’s not much fun squeezing into our tight waistbands every day. We say we’re going to do it. Yet we don’t or we do it a little bit and then stop. We blame the diet, hectic schedules, stress, and more. All else failed so it must not be meant to be.

Losing weight isn’t easy. I have struggled with it myself the last few years and I know a large part of that is my own unwillingness to be disciplined and consistent about it against everything else going on in my life. The heart of the matter isn’t that we are overweight but that a lot of other changes are also required in our life to not only give us the time we need to focus on health changes but keep them going and be successful at them. So we can’t just start a diet on Monday and expect to lose a lot of weight if we also haven’t worked to apply changes to the stress we have in our life, scheduled time to work out, worked out how we’re going to keep on track at work, how we’re going to get the laundry done, lunches made for the kids, homework completed and everything else that has been in the way to this point. All else in our life is balancing on a fine silk thread as it is and we wonder why our diets are not resulting in weight loss.

See the problem isn’t that we fail at diets or that we’re are just not able to lose weight. The problem is changing that scenario requires us to change all the other dependent things around it too. All else didn’t fail, we just saw the amount of changes needed and felt deflated by it all. We thought losing weight would make everything else better instead of the other way around where we create the environment that supports the health changes we want to make. It’s a lot of change. It’s a lot of work. It’s not quick or easy sometimes.

Change has a ripple effect throughout our lives that sometimes we’re not sure we want to have happen. My goodness I just want to drop some weight to fit better in my jeans! Yet to have that be long lasting and actually improve my health is a whole bunch of other changes. I need to change my schedule to make sure I have a dedicated time I go workout consistently. I need to change my grocery shopping and figure out how I’m going to balance family needs against my diet. Then there is the whole meal preparation system so I’m not suspect to revert back to old habits. What will I do when the day comes I don’t fee like working out or I want a Hershey bar so bad I am irritable? It’s not just me starting a new diet Monday without anything else changing too.

So as I looked at this post I realize all else doesn’t fail but rather all else changes. All else must change to support the tiny little change I want to make in one area of my life. All else changes with it. It is a web of changes that all leads to the support of a goal, dream or change I desire. It is still on me to make that happen but it is also on me to realize I didn’t fail any other time I tried. I just didn’t see all else that was tied to it. In reality there really isn’t just a small change but rather a string of changes that happens in anything we do.

Approaching another lofty goal of losing weight has me thinking things differently these days. After starting out the year strong and then reverting back in March of this year I spent a lot of time thinking about how to do things differently and that was the reason this post sat so long in my drafted items. I realized my entire life had to support the goals I was chasing not only in terms of losing weight but in all the goals I had for myself. I couldn’t chase a dream of having something wonderful in my life and not be working on all the other changes that were needed to support that dream coming true. I had to be all in and all else had to change to support what I was doing, where I was going and what I wanted.

Realizing this was more than changing how I ate, I signed up for a free personal 12 week work out schedule with my company’s gym trainer. I worked with them and my family to figure out a schedule I am using to work out more consistently. We began making more changes to what we ate every day. I worked to reduce my beloved coffee that I drink way too much of every day. I even started to change how I balance working full time with running Dragonspit Apothecary. Sometimes small, sometimes drastic but everything related to support what was needed in my life, where I wanted to be and how I wanted to feel.

Switching not only my mindset but realizing the linkages between things in my life has felt refreshing. It’s made me realize all else does need to fail before we get to the point we make those sweeping changes necessary to do it completely. We press the red button in our life and go forward knowing all else did fail but we’re ready to rebuild it differently now. It also makes it less possible to see failure occur because I have the structure in place to keep me going. When that happens we are not only better positioned to meet our goals but we are living naturally to make it easier to achieve.

Are you ready to press the red button in your life?

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