We have come to Part 4 of the Series on “Creating Sustainable changes in your health and fitness journey”. Here are the previous posts, in case you missed out any:
Today we will address the environment aspect.
Step 1: Assess
Perhaps your environment is congenial to making progress on your 'health and fitness' goals - you may have friends or family members who are fit, serving as an inspiration for you or perhaps you were brought up in an environment where practices to stay healthy were prioritised.
Else, you may be in an environment which is not in your favour - friends and family living sedentary lives, and perhaps not giving importance to good nutrition habits.
Either way, it's important to have a clear understanding of your environment. Consider yourself lucky if you find yourself in the former as it will be easy to propel yourself forward on your journey.
But don't be disheartened if you find yourself in the latter. There is still hope for progress, depending on how you look at your situation.
Step 2: Accept
End of the day, it is what it is, isn't it? Instead of resisting or complaining, accept what is. This is important so you can direct your energies to creating.
Step 3: Create
Whenever I have wanted to improve myself in some area of my life, I would look out for a community of people as interested to grow in that area as me. And if I failed to find one, I would simply create one.
The conscious living group , daily meal log group, acts of giving group all came out of my desire to make improvements in the areas of personal growth, nutrition and community service.
Having the association of like minded people on my journey, made it possible for me to make progress even though my immediate environment was not very favorable for my goals.
You can use my life story for creating such an environment for yourself, to thrive in. But if you feel you can't find the right community or can't create one, then no worries. Plenty of good comes from moving against the currents. You learn to pay attention & stand up for your own needs, you build resilience, learn to get creative & find a way to make things happen.
Recently, I was reading one of Derek Siver's books and found one of the chapters particularly insightful & relevant to this post. In that chapter he talks about what it means to be resourceful & compares 2 different mindsets. Here is the comparison:
A: "There are no good live music venues anymore."
B: "I made us a new venue."
A: "I have tried everything."
B: "I found a book from the 1970's with some unique ideas I am applying to our marketing."
A: "I don't have time to do it all"
B: "Two of my fans help with promotion , one edits my videos, other runs my website."
A: "There's just no way"
B: "I figured out a way"
I found that interesting and something to think about deeply.
Bottomline: When your environment is not working for you, your attitude & mindset can make all the difference. So learn to look at your environment in an empowering way and make the most of what you've got.
With that, we come to the end of the 4 Part series on ‘Creating sustainable changes on your health and fitness journey’.
I will continue to reinforce these ideas that are key to helping you make changes that stick, in subsequent posts. Until then, do make an effort to apply what you have learnt on mindset shifts, habits and managing your environment
Excellent Purnima. Sustaining your writing and keeping it interesting with anecdotes is very good. Cheers!
AAC!