How strong is your mind?
Have you ever had a workout or some other project in which you were working on, and then it just slipped away? Of course you have, as we all have! Do not you wish you could just stop things like that from happening? Being able to grow where you want to grow and just go for it 100%? Yes. But how? Imagine that you have committed yourself to start working out. Your goal is to manage 5 workouts a week and you have a plan, which you are happy about and excited to try it out. You start off doing well and it seems to be working, but after a week you miss one workout routine and the week after that, you miss two workout routines and the week after that, you miss almost all of them.
What happened?
It certainly wasn’t the workout that was too much for you. You’ve had a whole week in which you showed yourself you could do it!
Let me introduce you to the idea of inner weight. You see, every time you put off something, its inner weight increases. Since you have missed two workouts, we can say that inner weight has increased. For each day you missed, we can say that your inner weight has increased by the same number of units.
However that does not tell us how much inner weight you have started with to begin with, and since this is an imaginary exercise, it could be any weight at all. But remember you were able to lift it in the beginning, which means your initial inner weight was manageable. At least manageable enough for you to have done it consistently and have followed it throughout the entire week. And you never thought it was an issue before you changed, just out of blue. This was not a tough inner weight to lift at all, so why did not you use your inner willpower-muscle ? How come you were not able to lift your inner world weight? And as a result, complete your workout in the outer world.
Let us consider what would make it impossible for you, to carry on with the workout in the outer world, since after all, we are building our metaphor from there.
Let us say that you have another workout regimen and that you introduced this new workout at the ending of the old one. After doing all sorts of exercises, you might just be too tired to do these ones. Or you might just be tired from working in your daily job. You basically have no energy in your muscles and they need to recover.
Likewise in the inner world of willpower, you might have all sorts of tasks going on. You might have a big disagreement with someone, be stressed out from work and your doctor told you that some health issue may need expensive and risky surgery. Just to take some random, but very realistic factors, which might consume your willpower-muscles.
So when you have to choose between hitting the gym or watching Netflix, you might just feel that going to the gym is pointless, mainly because you have used up all of your inner power. Your outer world grinds to a halt, because your inner world has run out of juice. The weak and unhealthy inner body is preventing you from fully living your life.
Just like outer bodies come in all sizes and strengths, inner bodies come in all sizes and strengths. As a whole, your general strength is determined by your outer and inner strength combined. Hence you need to exercise both inner and outer muscles, in order to be able to perform, because if you do not show up for your workout, even the best workout regimen will eventually fail.
You need to take care of your inner stamina and strength just as much as you take care of the outer. You are going to need both equally, to take care of business. This is like any other exercise goal. A long process of work and deliberation, and just like the outer exercises, you will need to choose carefully where to spend time in. But spending time with building inner strength, will make the impact of a lifetime.
However, we tend to disregard the inner side of our lives , big time. It is almost considered a taboo. In fact, even though we have had all sorts of revolutions in our world, in terms of being healthy in one’s mind, there are still lots of issues to be solved. We feel massively guilty about it, but even guilt should not be discussed, because even that feeling is looked at as being taboo.
We all know how to pretend everything is okay, when we encounter a person who is seriously mentally and emotionally unwell. In fact, we are put aside by that person, if so. We like to pretend it did not happen, and hope nothing comes from that episode. So when we show signs of being unwell ourselves, in whatever form, we hide it. We hide it from ourselves and from others. Denial is a great tool to undermine ourselves. By deleting it like if it was never a reality, we look at it as a non issue and just rationalize away our obvious lack of progress. Yet, as someone who wants to grow and improve, you can not afford such an outlook. You want and need to go beyond such outdated taboos and defense mechanisms, which hold you back. You need to do that, so you can become the self-actualized person you were meant to be, both inside and outside.
#innerstrength | #outerstrength | #willpower | #innerweight | #willpowermuscle