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If you would have asked me even six months ago, I probably wouldn’t have been excited about the topic of health and habits because it is something in my life that I have been kind of dancing around for a very long time. I think that you can dance around your health for so long until it’s your check engine light comes on, right?
One thing that I’ve realized in my journey as a woman, as a mom, as someone who has struggled with fertility, and as an entrepreneur is that the way that we feel in our bodies affects how we show up in every aspect of our lives, whether it is relationship, career, parenthood, or friendships. The way that we feel in our skin changes our level of confidence. It changes the way that we qualify or disqualify ourselves for things. It shifts what we believe to be possible for us as human beings.
I am not shy about sharing my celebrations of my body, but also my struggles with my body and I have for over a decade. What I love about talking about health is that it looks different for everyone. To me, I believe that there is no one size fits all, but there are tools and strategies and things that we can adopt into our lives to really enjoy our own journey towards a healthier version of ourselves.
So with that, I want to share what I’ve been doing on my own health journey and steps I’m taking to feel like my best, most vibrant self.
How Do You Want to Feel?
I always choose a word of the year and this year my word is vibrant. It wasn’t that I wanted to look a certain way or see a number on the scale or fit into a pair of prepregnancy jeans. I wanted to feel something.
We often talk about success and our goals as things that people could see and recognize, but what I’ve found is that a lot of times when we arrive in places in our lives where we’re not happy or things don’t feel the way we anticipated them feeling, it’s because we were focused on what it looks like and not what it should feel like.
I want to really ask yourself, how is it that you want to move through life? How do you want to feel in your body in your day to day as you tackle the things on your calendar, as you chase your children, what do you want to feel?
The Why Matters
I’ve realized that in my own health journey I focused so much, so often on the what and the how, and they never stuck. And the reason they didn’t stick was because the “why” was never strong enough. If the why was only to fit into a certain pair of pants or to wear a certain size or to look a certain way, it’s no wonder it never stuck.
When I thought about this year and what I envisioned for it, and this feeling that I wanted to embody, I had to come home to a really strong “why”.
My why has shifted through the different seasons of my life. Earlier on during my fertility journey, my why was to be able to carry a pregnancy to term. Now my why is to be able to chase the toddler and feed the baby. And we often don’t take a moment to pause and ask ourselves what is my “why” right now? Why do I want to feel a certain way? Why do I want to feel better? Why do I want to feel energized?
Press play to hear the three layers of my why – the key to a motivation that will keep you anchored even when one layer of the why isn’t strong enough some days.
Three Layers Deep
In talking more about the why behind any goal (health or otherwise), I encourage you to make it three layers deep. If you are someone like me, who sometimes struggles to follow through, I need to make my why anchored down so deep that I still show up.
So for me right now, some of the layers of the depth of my why right now include that I want my kids to see that health isn’t optional. I want my kids to see that health is a priority. That it’s a part of our lives. That movement is something that happens because we make it happen.
My why is that I want to feel good in my skin and beyond just feeling good in my skin, I want to feel good in my clothes. I want to feel free to move and dance and chase and run.
My why is that I want to have the energy required to get my book out into the world, this two year long project that I have worked so hard on. I want to have the energy that it takes to show up in a way that will spread the mission and the message that were so important that I spent that long on it.
When you make your why three layers deep, if there’s a day that one of those layers isn’t sticking or strong enough, the other two will pull you through.
More from This Episode
This episode digs into how I’m staying curious about my health and learning about my body, what specific things I’m adding to my routine to achieve my goal of feeling vibrant, and plenty of evidence-based research surrounding health and habits to inform the start of your own health journey. Press play on the episode wherever you get your podcasts.
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