Today is Day One...Again. And that's a-ok.

TODAY IS DAY ONE!! Again. And it won't be my last day one.

"I haven't failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." -- Thomas Edison

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts." -- Winston Churchill

These two quotes embody the idea of having a growth mindset.

I don't know about you, but when I fail at something, I can easily get hung up on negative self-talk that sounds like:

"I don't know why you thought that you could do this."

or

"This is really hard, Rebecca. Maybe it isn't for you. Maybe you don't want it bad enough."

It's hard when we don't follow habits and targets that we set for ourselves. It's easy to just quit when things get challenging or when we mess up. What's harder is starting over. Especially when we have to start over again and again and again.

There are lots of ways to work towards establishing a new habit. And many folks tout the benefits of a "don't break the chain" kind of mindset implying that if you mess up even one day then you have somehow failed at your goals and, even worse, some imply that you have failed as a human being.

But I'm here to tell you that I mess up. All. The. Freaking. Time. I could take the approach that I suck at doing the things that I need to do to reach my goal like meet my protein, lifting, cardio, sleep, or water goals when I miss one or more of them.

Orrrrr. I can remind myself that I'm early in this game in the grand scheme of things having only started seriously lifting less than 2 years ago. I can remind myself that the amount of executive function tasks and time commitment that it takes to meet ALL of these habit goals every single day while still attending to everything and everyone else in my life are MASSIVE. I can remind myself that little changes every day add up over the long haul. 

Today is day one again because I overate on calories and drank alcohol yesterday, I didn't move my body, I hardly had any water, and I didn't get enough sleep. Today is also day one because it is the day I decided to go all in on this goal and hire a competitive bikini bodybuilding coach.

I've resisted doing this for long time now and was beating myself up quite a bit for being so resistant but also for feeling inadequate about finding it challenging to do all of this on my own. 

On the coaching application, I was asked quite a few questions that made me take pause and realize a number of things including my biggest limiting factors.

Some of these limiting factors include:

1. Faith in my abilities to accomplish this goal. This goal takes tons of mental work and executive functioning tasks! 

Solution - I never thought I'd be able to run a marathon, let alone qualify for the Boston Marathon or run Rim to Rim to Rim. I reminded myself that I did these things though by running little by little and building knowledge, skills and confidence. Learning a new sport or skill takes a lot of time. This is normal. Set backs are going to happen. Resilience and persistence are what will get me to my goal.

2. Committing 100% to this goal and putting an actual date on the calendar.

Solution - There is a local show on October 7th and I'm available that day. I'm committing today to give this goal an actual shot.

3. Perceived lack of outside support and accountability. With running, I had an amazing friend group where I used to live. These friends held me accountable for showing up to training runs and encouraged me to sign up for races. They were always there for me when I had questions and helped with writing training programs, nutrition, race day details and so much more. I don't have any close friends where I live that compete in bikini bodybuilding and that's hard.

Solution - I have a great friend who lives in Tucson who competes and she communicates with me all the time through Marco Polo and text. She shares her knowledge with me. She shares her life stuff with me. And she checks in with me regularly to help me with accountability.

I'm hiring a coach who's job is literally to hold me accountable for all the many little habits involved.

I have a few gym friends, including my former personal trainer, who help me with accountability by just being there, shooting the shit with me, and looking for me to show up regularly.

I have an incredible husband who supports me in anything I do as long as I still make time for us. He promised to keep helping me with meal prep and reminding me of my habits when I get sidetracked (which happens often).

And, finally, my sister already marked her calendar with my show date so she can cheer me on from the audience!

4. Money.

Solution - This isn't a cheap sport. Period. But if I want it bad enough, I'll work overtime to cover the costs or spend less money on damn planners! (God, I love a beautiful planner. They are so full of hope and opportunity!)

I've spent some time in the last several months also feeling "less than" because I haven't jumped into a competition sooner. I feel like I've been a lot of talk and not a lot of action. But while filling out that application I realized a few more things and then gave myself some grace...

First and foremost, I may be old enough for reading glasses for my presbyopia, but I'm still damn young in this sport in terms of years of training.

My First Year of Strength Training (Starting June 2021):

I signed up with Lifetime Fitness for my 47th birthday and literally started with a single 30 minute personal training session once a week in June 2021. And if you ask my trainer Werner, he will confirm that this is indeed all the time I spent in the gym early on. I was still running occasionally and my goals were two-fold: be able to do a body weight pull-up and establish a routine of lifting regularly. By October or November, I was lifting 3 days a week with him and 1-2 on my own. And I hit that pull-up goal by then too!

Early in this first year, my sister was diagnosed with breast cancer. This was incredibly hard for me emotionally. I was terrified for her and for her teenage boys. She is my one and old sibling. She is my biggest supporter and my best friend in the whole world. She is my baby sister.

I always knew she had incredible physical endurance and strength and is hella strong mentally. She freaking qualified for the Boston Marathon the December after giving birth to twins via c-section in May earlier that same year. All because I told her she simply HAD to qualify then so that she and I could run Boston together because I didn't know if I had it in me to ever qualify again. (Some sister I am! Haha.)

She handled her diagnosis and everything that went with it with the most incredible mindset of anyone I know. She is my hero and I'm so glad that she is on the other side now of that rough journey. (Knock on a shit ton of wood that it stays this way!!)

In this same time frame, I sold my home and Trevor and I lived in his toy hauler for a month or so with a dog, bunny, and cat while we finished making the house on his property livable. This, in the middle of the Arizona summer. Meanwhile, I was also studying for the Pediatric Pharmacotherapy Board Certification exam, which I passed in October 2021. Trevor transitioned out of his full time job to go out on his own in November. We got covid in January. And I did several endurance horse races this year as well.

My Second Year of Strength Training (Starting June 2022):

I had a year of personal training under my belt and a pretty solid lifting routine so I transitioned out of personal training to an online lifestyle coach. I did my first real mini cut before going to Europe with Trevor for a couple of weeks, which threw things off. I didn't get back into a good nutrition routine before traveling to Tucson in September to help my dad after his knee surgery. I was getting used to eating fewer calories with a weekly "cheat meal". And in this process, I learned that language and changing my routines matter a ton for my mindset.

Not tracking and calling meals cheat meals led me to developing a scarcity mindset around those meals. I felt like I had better eat anything and everything even if I was full or it wasn't my favorite food because I wasn't going to get another cheat meal until the following week. I learned that for me personally, I'm better off acknowledging (and continuing to track) everything that I'm eating than to pretend that it didn't happen.

A large part of my "why" of doing this to begin with is to develop/maintain a healthy relationship with food, to appreciate what my body is able to do for me, and to make alcohol small or non-existent in my life again. (I went years without drinking when I was training for road races.) Appreciating that I can ease up on my rigidity while acknowledging that it is happening by tracking and being mindful of my variance in plan helps keep my mental fortitude in check. I refuse to lose myself in this process and I took a step back on the nutrition side of things at that time to examine what was actually happening versus what I wanted to happen.

During this entire time, I was also writing a continuing education chapter for an Emergency Medicine focused book for board certified pharmacists. This extracurricular activity on top of no PTO from work for 6 months due to being so short-staffed, working Thanksgiving and Christmas, and picking up extra shifts at work about did me in.

All of these goings on (and the knowledge that ADHD has a genetic component) is what led me to a psychiatric evaluation and ultimately a diagnosis of ADHD. That discovery and then my quest to learn everything about ADHD and how to restructure, review and reframe my entire life put a concentrated effort on nutrition on hold for a bit. Though I never fully stopped trying to reach my targets...

All this to say again that I'm relatively new to bodybuilding even if I'm not knew to athletic endeavors so it's going to take me time and some failures along the path to my goal. I had unexpected stressors that popped in my life, as we all inevitably, do and resilience is what matters more than being 100% perfect.

The process of stepping back and getting curious enough to examine all the factors that are in play help provide a framework to determine what works and what doesn't for us as individuals. Thinking that we can follow someone else's plan or a cookie cutter plan will likely not work. We are all different in what works for us and fuels us. Reflecting and evaluating can then lead us to make revisions that can help us get to where we want to go. Looking back takes time and I don't do it often enough. But every time I do, I learn something new that I can then apply moving forward.

Throughout my whole life, I have bounced from passion to passion, hobby to hobby often not fully embracing one before jumping to another. I was...check that...I am...honestly, a bit scared that I'll lose the fire I have around lifting before I reach this goal of fully going through the process and getting on the stage. I love and appreciate my body in a way that I never have before and I don't want to lose this. I don't want to quit and move on. And in order to keep this fire burning, I need a goal. I need a competition. I need a date on the calendar to target. I need a countdown. I need a purpose. I need it to stay interesting.

I'm done with my chapter and the one horse race that matched up with my work schedule this year got moved to a weekend I work. This will hopefully allow me to focus on this goal for the next 24 weeks. 24 short and important weeks.

And so here we are! Day One everyone! The day that I am embracing actually setting a target date and hiring someone to help me with all of it so that I can take a lot of the executive functioning tasks off my plate.

I can simply execute and then have the rest of the time I would otherwise spend hemming and hawing about how to do this or that and put it towards my many other goals and passions! Organizing my entire house and horse stuff. Organizing my photos. Spending time with the hubs and my loved ones. Riding my horses (within the confines of my training plan through August). Climbing for bravery sake. And reading.

My consult with my potential coach is on Thursday. Wish me luck and I'll keep you all posted! If I feel she's a match, then my good friend and I will be on the same team with the same coach, which will make this adventure all the sweeter.

Two week social media break

What did I do on my two week break from work and social media? Well I sure spent a helluva lot of time in my own head - I can tell you that much. 😂 Sometimes it was nice to be in my own company. Sometimes the songs in my head really got annoying. Sometimes it was lonely. But surprisingly, it was never boring. In the space that was previously filled with funny cat videos and learning more about ADHD or sharing my latest flexing gym pics, I found other ways to occupy my time. 

I originally wanted to set out on this 2 week break from work and Instagram with big plans and lofty goals to get massive amounts of things checked off of my 23 in 2023 list or my big photo album or minimizing all my stuff projects. 

But I scaled back and told myself that I would be doing no such thing. No big goals. No lofty expectations. One goal. Just don’t go on Instagram. Don’t post. Don’t spend time looking at all the latest funny reels. Just be. Be at peace with myself. And see what happens.

Boy, I’m gonna tell ya that was harder than expected. One good thing was I kept up my workout routine. Much of my day was taken up automatically by my 5+ times per week weightlifting routine that’s followed by 20 minutes on the treadmill. Next, I would head home and do all the usual care task stuff. Make food, tidy the kitchen, shower.

But I couldn’t help but place pressure on myself to take advantage of this time off and “get more done”. Originally, I had taken this time off from work to participate in an endurance ride. But I hadn’t been training Arya enough to warrant putting her into a competition where I would likely not be able to hold myself back from pushing her to a top ten completion. Super not fair for her since the most we have ridden as of late is 10.6 miles. I’ll tell ya though, the last 3 times I’ve taken her out she has NOT wanted to go back to the trailer. She legit U-turned whenever we got within 1/2 mile of it and started heading back out. I had to forcibly steer her back to the trailer. So that’s a great sign for our future together in endurance! If I can just get back into it enough…..but that’s an issue to discuss another day.

One thing that massively helped with my mindset was…painting…

Have you ever taken one of those classes where an instructor walks you through the process of painting a picture? Did you know you can do this at home following tutorials on YouTube?? I swear YouTube has a video for everything!

Trevor and I decided to do this as a date activity one night. We enjoyed it so much that we painted 2 more during my time off. Though I’m not entirely sure how long it took each time…we completely lose track of time while painting…it probably took at least 3 hours each time - not including set up and clean up.

The thing about painting is when you are a beginner like me, you have to just let go of perfectionism. When the artist instructor says to tap the canvas with your mop brush to make leaves of a tree and your tap looks like a blob, it’s incredibly hard to not be disappointed in yourself. My trees will not look like the instructor’s trees. They just won’t. At least not with lots of practice first.

In bodybuilding as in many things in life, we are told to “trust the process”. Each time I do this activity I wonder how on earth this is ever going to end up looking like a tree, a waterfall, a cat, or whatever. And every time I start to get frustrated or annoyed, I take deep breaths and tell myself to let go and just trust the freaking process. Nobody is going to judge me on these beginner paintings. Nobody really cares how they turn out. I mean, do you dear reader? Haha. Hell, it’s not like I’m trying to accomplish anything at all with these except to have fun in the moment. To enjoy the journey that is involved in creating something out of nothing. And what do you know?? This shit really does end up looking like a tree or a waterfall or a cat after all is said and done! It’s quite amazing that it does, honestly! 😂

I tried to take this lesson and apply it to other things I worked on during these two weeks. 

After my divorce, I had a goal of never ever having credit card debt again and climbing out of debt. I have made massive improvements in this area and only have $7,000 left in student loan debt. I owe money on the 20 year old LQ horse trailer we got last year. And I’ll eventually need to get a new vehicle. But we have made massive improvements to our property all on money that we have saved and then spent bit by bit as we’ve gone along. And though it’s taking time, the anxiety I used to have around money in my previous marriage has significantly dissipated. Money still makes me anxious, surprisingly similar to the way painting a picture following a video on YouTube makes me anxious. But I’m breathing through it and trusting my process. 

I changed the way I track my expenses a couple of years ago. I now use an app called YNAB. When I made the switch from Mint and an excel spreadsheet to YNAB, I deviated from the way I first did my finances after my divorce. I set up the expense categories in the way that the YNAB folks say to do it. I watched all their videos and tips and followed how many of them do it.

Knowing what I know now about how my brain works differently than others, I decided to go back to trusting my own process and I revamped my categories to the way I did it before. This was a pretty big undertaking as I had to go through all our categories for the past two years when Trevor and I first merged our money.

But already I feel better. I KNOW I can have a better understanding of our financial situation because I was able to do this before. I’m leaning into the confidence that I gained a few years ago and am excited about being able to get back to having a one page summary view of our income and expenses per year the way I had it before. 

Budgeting and painting are just two of the things I’ve been up to these past two weeks. 

Will share again more soon! Be well, my friends! ❤️