In a recent post I gave an example of my ex’s son who’s 17 years old and is making some choices in life, which, if continued, could affect his future life in a negative way. As society continues to evolve and deeper learning is uncovered, some obvious wisdom tends to emerge; for example it is pretty widely accepted now that smoking is generally pretty harmful to our physical health. However, smoking is a huge industry and millions of very intelligent people do it. Why? Because it brings them some benefit.
There are lots of very ‘obvious’ nuggets of wisdom like this – we should eat more vegetables, eat less sugar, exercise our bodies more, be kind to people, be kind to animals, save some of our money for our future and on it goes. I’ll probably talk a lot about all of these topics in this blog. But before I do, I want to address some of this deeper stuff that lies behind our choices in life, our motivations.
Most of us intuitively know many of these ‘obvious’ things but don’t follow through on the advice. I mean, that’s the entire reason I am here writing this right now! I have repeatedly failed to follow all this stuff for decades of my life. But does that mean that I was oblivious to it all along?
No.
For instance, I’ve had a great interest in weight training since my teenage years. I loved Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone and I’d watch all their movies and do lots of weight training with dumbbells from around the age of 14. Yet, almost 40 years later, I am overweight, unfit and rather weak in terms of raw, physical strength for a woman of my age. Why is that? Because I haven’t been consistent over the years.
But, WHY haven’t I been consistent?
This is where it gets tricky. The only person who knows your own mind is you. Only you know your motivations, your desires, your fears and so on. It is so easy for other people (including me, writing this blog!) to impart some kind of advice along what one ‘should’ do in a given situation or circumstance, but it is only ourselves that actually know deeply what our reasons are for doing, or not doing something.
I’ll give some simple examples from my own life. I’ll use physical health because it should be easily relatable for most people. I am overweight. Why? Because I was in a calorie excess for a long time. How did I do that? By eating more than my body needed? Why did that happen? Because I really enjoy food and even though I claim to enjoy exercise, I find it uncomfortable and time consuming.
Right there I’ve uncovered something. I’ll ignore the food part for the moment and focus on the exercise bit. Not only did I enjoy weight training as a teenager, but I also loved karate. One of my (much older) brothers was a black belt in Karate and he would impress me with his spinning back kicks. I also loved the old 80’s Karate Kid movies. I first started karate around the same age as I picked up my first dumbbell – around 14 years old.
So I was around exercise from a young age but I stopped and started countless times over the years. Here is one thing that I have found to be true for me personally – when I reach a certain level of competency in something, such as weight training, it becomes much more difficult to make progress. If I start again after a long period of absence, I always start easy and light. I’ll start with short workouts, nothing too intense, light weights, just getting a feel for it again. But within a few weeks or months I’ll have a structured routine in place, my weights will have increased and I’ll be nearing my limits on each exercise. At this point, in order to see a benefit, in order to do more (the progressive overload principle), I need to push myself physically beyond my comfort zone. It’s HARD, and it physically hurts. It’s uncomfortable and I might be sore for several days afterwards. And it’s around this point that my enthusiasm often wanes.
It’s difficult for me to admit, but I don’t like doing hard things! I like easy things, comfortable things, things that don’t hurt, that don’t make me feel bad. This is how I have lived a lot of my life. I could write a post about the comfort zone but I don’t need to do that as there are dozens of books out there already about it, but I know that for me personally, it is one of the reasons I have failed to make significant progress in this aspect of my life in particular.
Now somebody external to me, might be able to say, yeah you need to push out of your comfort zone to make progress. But sometimes, our reasons for doing or not doing something are not at all obvious to anyone else, are very private and something we would not want to discuss with anyone else. I’ll be brave and give another example, also in the physical realm – karate.
I’ve started and stopped karate many times in my life. The highest grade I have achieved is a brown belt, which in the style that I practiced, was three grades away from the first black belt. So, I reached an intermediate stage but never achieved the more advanced levels. The last time I practiced karate was in 2020. I was going regularly in 2019 and then Covid hit. My club tried to continue the teaching by doing lessons over zoom and for a few months we were trying to follow along in our living rooms. Once the lockdown lifted there was some return to the dojo but I could never get into it, and I haven’t been back since. That was around 4 years ago.
But what was my real reason for not going back? Was it the difficulty of the physical exertion that I described with the weight training? Actually no it wasn’t. Oddly enough, when I had a really tough workout in a karate session I actually enjoyed it and came away feeling great. I didn’t like bruises from being physically hit but that’s a separate issue.
The actual reason that I quit, and I must preface this by saying that the only reason I can even write this is because I am writing this blog in an anonymous fashion, is because for many years now I have experienced what is known as ‘stress incontinence’. For whatever reason, when I cough, sneeze or have some sharp impact such as that which comes from jumping, doing a forceful kick or indeed any very fast or forceful movement, I will pee myself a little bit! Over a 90 minute karate session, this could and did happen a great many times!
I’ve had this issue from probably some time around my thirties and it has got progressively worse as I have aged. I know it affects many women but it is something that not a lot of people like to talk about because it’s embarrassing! I dealt with it by wearing pads in my underwear but if you have ever experienced this feeling of peeing yourself in any situation other than being seated on a toilet, it is (at least for me!) a horrible experience! I felt dirty, I always would worry that somebody would notice something, and ultimately, I simply could not give my all to the sport.
In karate, credit is given to the student not just based on their physical ability to carry out the various moves, but to the spirit in which they perform. If you can’t get your knee above waist height because you’re not as flexible as you were when you were 25 but the Sensei can see that you are trying your best, you are still doing well. But I could no longer try my best, I was always holding back, and I started to hate karate. So after the lockdowns lifted and the classes were so different anyway, I simply stopped.
This is obviously a very private thing to talk about. Many of my friends and family ask me if I am going to start again. I usually fob them off with some kind of ‘maybe’ answer but only I know the real reason. It’s not something I’m going to openly talk about with anyone else.
The point of this post, is that only you yourself know your reasons why you do or don’t do something. Sometimes we don’t want to admit to ourselves the reasons behind our choices in life, but often times, turning to others for advice is not the best course of action because nobody else in the world knows you and your mind like you do. Only you can search within yourself to reveal your own motivations, fears and so on.
Going back to my ex’s 17 year old kid who smokes a lot… only he knows his reasons. He knows it is bad for him and he can’t really afford it. He has said many times that he wants to quit but he hasn’t yet. It is very easy for people (including myself, who has never smoked) to judge and to dish out advice, but even when taking what seems to be ‘good’ advice from others, we must delve into our own minds and perhaps ask ourselves the difficult questions.
Now I can’t talk about smoking as I have never smoked, but I can talk about food. I have already said that I am overweight and that in part is due to a sedentary lifestyle sat behind a computer with little exercise but it has far more to do with what I have eaten. Once again, this is not because of lack of knowledge. I have also been deeply interested in nutrition from a relatively young age. It’s because I chose to eat too much of the wrong things, and I did this over and over again many times over many years.
But again, the question is why?
Only I can answer that for myself. I have a number of reasons and almost all of them are to do with emotional factors rather than physical ones. Sure, I love food and there have been many times when I am eating something so delicious that I can’t get enough of it. But if those occasions were then balanced with healthy eating the rest of the time, I would most likely be at a perfectly acceptable weight right now.
No, having done a lot of the introspection for myself, I know that I turn to food for comfort in a wide variety of situations. Stress, upset, boredom, and sometimes I am pretty sure I have deliberately eaten in a very ‘bad’ way as a kind of punishment to myself because I was holding onto some kind of self loathing at the time.
Have you ever found yourself asking the question, “I know what to do, why can’t I get myself to do it?” If you have then unfortunately you are the only person who can answer it. Many of us do intuitively know the right thing to do in any given circumstance but knowing it and doing it are of course two very different things!
In this post I’ve really only touched very lightly on what drives our choices in life, but the point I want to make is that nobody else can tell you what drives you. You have to find out for yourself, and you can only do that if you ask the right questions of yourself and actually allow yourself a little quiet to hear the answers within.
