I believe that one of the fundamental reasons women don’t get healthy is that they simply do not have enough support in their lives to help make it happen. It is our natural and instinctual state to come together for connection, friendship and inspiration. Yet we rarely make that a priority in our life.
Many times in my practice I have heard a client lament on not having time to see her friends, and yet oddly unwilling to move it up the priority list. Women today lead over-isolated and overstressed lives and it has got to change if we truly want our health and happiness to be different.
You see, I think getting healthy is less about will-power and “being good.” It’s more about asking your self, “what is it I really want and what kind of support will I need to get me there?” When in the world did doing it alone and taking care of it all by ourselves become the norm? When did we decide that we didn’t need anyone? When did we make it okay to give ourselves away?
If you want to reach a health goal – getting a handle on your cravings, experiencing steady energy, quitting smoking, moving your body, making time for yourself, anything… you’ll need lots of support to make that happen. Why? Because if you’re anything like me, you can always find something better to do like filing, cleaning the kitchen sink or rearranging sock drawers before you’ll actually get your butt out the door to exercise.
Or you’ll find that you don’t “feel” like it because it’s cold out, you’re too tired, too busy, or in my case, I’ve found a bizarre fascination with really bad television shows which eat up most of my evening and then I wonder why I have no time for myself. Relying on yourself to do for yourself is simply too difficult if you haven’t been exercising this “for myself” muscle.
So now I’ve spilled the beans. How did I get to start working out and taking good care of myself? By getting support I needed. I call the Goddess Hotline (an informal network of my friends who I can call anytime for support and inspiration when I’ve temporarily forgotten my fabulosity), I make sure I’ve got time scheduled with my personal coach, I invite friends over, I tell people what I’m up to, I take a class that inspires me, I ask someone to check-in with me, and I make sure I set up unreasonable amounts of support around me so that there is no room for me to wiggle out of my commitments. If you make choices based on your commitments vs. how you feel that day, you are much more likely to follow through.
And you know what? It’s not enough to have one best friend to be your support person. When you are aiming for something big – like losing the 25 pounds you’ve carried around all your life, letting go of sugar addiction or falling in love with your femininity and womanhood, then you need BIG TIME support. You need to call in the heavy reinforcements. Besides, it’s very difficult for one person to be your end all support. They have a life too.
So be unreasonable! Just do something without reason. Do you really need a reason to have tons of support to achieve your goals in your life? You may say yes. We come from a long history of feeling undeserving of our success and women naturally like to have reasons for doing things. Well I say, be fantastically impractical and just do it. Be like Nike – the Ancient Goddess of Victory. Start inching back to the woman you were, before you forgot yourself.
Here are some ideas to get you going:
• Create a buddyship with a few friends – Meet or call each other regularly to help make things happen.
• Create a Goddess Hotline – Set boundaries and when you call each other have a set time to complain and then a set amount of time to contemplate solutions.
• Hire a coach – Simply put, coaches shorten your learning curve.
• Take a class – Sometimes all you can do is show up and see what happens. There are tons of classes in your community, if you are willing to look for them.
• Hang around people who have already been there – This is the same distinction of hanging around people who are more successful than you are. You naturally begin to “up the ante” for yourself and begin to do more for yourself, because you know you CAN.
Karin Witzig of Wild Woman Wellness™ Health Coaching has been in a private practice and a Speaker in the New York metropolitan area for nearly five years and has a national clientele of courageous women breaking out of their food ruts and energy-lulls. She specializes in making getting healthy highly pleasurable, practical and fun. She can be reached via http://www.wildwomanwellness.com