Week 12, Day 7. Waning motivation? Amy says no way!

I really haven't been blogging.

The past week and a half has been incredibly stressful. I've been trying to get paperwork finalized for moving into a new apartment, I've been working more at Green Bowl, and some situations that are work-related have had me gripped with raging headaches every weekday since I wrote last.
I also had contact with at least one person whose very presence fills me with shameful, guilty, and frustrating feelings.
All that threw me into a funk that I am just now dragging myself out of.

I happened to mention to Amy that, lately, I don't always feel so confident about the reality of my goal (seeing my belly muscles/being bikini-ready).

I mean how many times have women heard, "Real women don't look like that" or "Don't compare yourself to the women in the magazines"?

But but but...I WANT to look like the women in the magazines! My own version of it, at least!

So, in the back of my mind, I've had this default setting that I'm probably not going to have the results that I dreamed of.  Occasionally I would get these flashes where I KNEW I was, going to succeed at this, because I was accomplishing my goals and seeing results.

But all of that kind of melted into thin air after the past couple of weeks I've had. I was really feeling down about myself in general. Money was tight, and that always makes me feel like a failure.

Yesterday, I found myself in a state that my therapist would have called depressed. I was really feeling like a loser. All my thoughts were about how pathetic my life is, and that things will never get better.

Because of Martha Beck, I can never have those thoughts again without realizing that I'm telling the story of my life from a professional victim's point of view. And, other people might write it very differently.

So I started looking at the story of my life very differently. As Martha Beck suggests, be the Hero of your story! As I began to tell my tale from a  perspective of luck and abundance, I started to feel so much more capable and full of life.

For example, my first story of myself would have gone like this:

Poor girl, grew up in an abusive home, barely scraped her way through college in hopes of having a better life, only to work for low paying jobs that required her to work hard for the rest of her life, never really achieving anything more than almost mediocre.

My hero story sounds like this:
Determined from the gate, this young woman did not let hardship get in her way. She fought her way through undergrad with painfully little support and began working in a field that she loved. Despite the low pay, she continued and excelled at that work by finding a fantastic part time job. Once she got comfortable making ends meet, she started the work of discovering more about herself. She began setting goals and achieving them. She shared these successes with friends and began to notice that the people that filled her life were loving and supportive. She continued to meet people who stunned her with generosity, helping her along heer way. She went on to set wildly improbable goals, like competing in a fitness model competition and pleasantly surprised herself at the outcome of these goals.

The stories are both of my life, but told in very different ways. The victim story inspires me to lay in bed until it's over. The Hero story inspires me to have faith in myself. Find out what I'm capable of!

That brings me to today.

I mentioned my failure to believe in my goals to Amy, and she blew me away.

But before I say what Amy did, I have to say what she supported me through these past two weeks. I went from having a razor-sharp focus and unbeatable drive to accomplish this goal to self-medicating with food on a couple of different occasions. This is THE OPPOSITE of what I was going to accomplish. Eating my feelings was so far off the map of getting to see some definition in my abs.

Just, no.

Then I did it some more, probably because I was telling myself what a loser I was for succumbing.

Amy was awesome. Once, it was a celebration, twice, it was hmmm, what's going on here, and three times it was, "Betsy needs some help."  So, she helped me. She talked me through my next headache-induced meltdown. I realized I didn't need to self-sabotage. I COULD fight my way through this!

And I wasn't going to let myself blame my failure to follow though on anybody else. That's another victim story.

So, now I can say what Amy did today. She brought up visualization. I can't believe I haven't been doing that. It's one of the most basic pieces of achieving anything. So I'm starting that, morning and night, and maybe a midday recentering as well.

THEN, she brought up the possibility that I enter myself in a fitness model competition fo sometime in 2012. I was stunned. My original goal was to compete, somehow, someway. But I scaled it back because I thought, "I'm just not capable of that. That's crazy."

But here we go! I'm all about it, and it will give me a deadline to work toward, so I will have a much harder time falling off or forgetting what my goal was.

I think I did forget my goal this past week. I couldn't remember why I shouldn't have coffee, or why I should really stick to my meal plan. I forgot why I was doing this.

But here we go again! I'm all fired up and I love competition!

Tomorrow my goals are simple. Get up at 7am. Visualize. Eat. Prepare meals. Stop at grocery store before work. Eat on time. Take Kerry's class after work. Do strength training routine. Take shower. Eat. Be in bed by 9:30pm. Visualize. Sleep.