Tag: positive mindset

Lessons from 2021 – December *or* Changing My View of Failure

As many of you know, I manage two different blogs: OwnYourWobble and Mentagility.  Both of these blogs deal with aspects of critical thinking and I’m finding that the subject matter is beginning to overlap.  Initially, Mentagility – my first blog – was designed to be more business-minded, focusing on productivity and leadership.  However, I found the need for creative expression in a more personal way and began OwnYourWobble to share more personal struggles with others who find themselves in the same predicament.

My post on Mentagility this month really resonated to an OwnYourWobble situation so I’m sharing this here as I think this applies to both aspects.

I hope you enjoy, and wishing you all a very Happy New Year!  The original post link is here: https://www.mentagility.com/failure-a-changed-mindset/

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In writing my post for this month, I like to begin in the prior month and ‘channel’ a few residual thoughts from my just completed post.  I note areas that I didn’t include but are of interest to me at that time and this gives me a little creative loop.

(Note on the image for this post: When I was selecting my featured image for this post, I searched for a picture to denote “failure.”  I thought that the “shame” image was very telling on how our society perceives failure as, perhaps, something to be ashamed of?  Isn’t that interesting?  It is my goal with this post to change our view of failure into something more positive. I hope you continue reading.)

The following were my hastily typed notes from last month and in reviewing these notes I found them to resonate for me in December. Here they are:

Changed my mind about a few things…this came to me by inspired thinking

1.) We must break before we can build

2.) Trusting our own personal timing and ‘flow’

3.) Make decisions from an ‘abundance’ mindset

4.) The importance of sincerely seeing the beauty in ourselves first

This month, I did follow this guidance in my personal life and struggles to improve my feeling of health.  In my weight loss journey, I began to feel very restricted which began as a physical sensation and evolved into a mental frame of thinking.  With the surge of COVID-19 in the Northeast, we began to once again be isolating into a quarantine.  This external driver created another internal loop of my normal behavior to ‘cope’.  Instead of using this coping mechanism, however, I elected to choose a different path: Self-love.  I listened to myself, considered my known situation, and gave in to the removal of perceived restrictive behavior.  Because I gave myself the Grace to be in the moment, I turned a corner in how I viewed my personal journey.  This decision reflected #4.  I saw myself as a person, not as a thing to be belittled.  I spoke to myself as I would a friend, not an enemy.  This is how I gave myself ‘Grace’ or a higher feeling of love than I had ever known before.  My decision considered #3, my abundance mindset, because I saw the entire journey to health as a journey, not a destination. I considered everything that I have in life and was so grateful to actually have this struggle because there are so many struggles that could be considered worse.

I began to see the significance of the timing of my struggle which ticked my #2 idea.  The timing of the holiday season could not be denied and was key to my understanding of how I wish to achieve my health goals.  Everything in our lives is timing; I am beginning to see timing as my Divine guidance and have begun to be more of an observer of life and letting things ‘flow’ from me and not necessarily ‘to’ me.  I’d like to live life more like thinking that “the ‘to'” is taken care of already by what I put out to the world.  I finally realized that I can only control my behaviors in the moment which stem from my beliefs.  Our beliefs are extremely important to mentagility so I’m very cognizant of how they originate … and my interpretation of them.

This leads me to #1:  We must break before we can build.  When I discuss ‘break’ in this sense, it is not a literally breaking of things or of self.  It is more of a breaking of beliefs that no longer serve me.  It is my judgement to what serves me which is why it is important that our judgment be free of bias or the “trappings of life”.  When I have a belief that does not feel good, I really began to examine the belief from a few different perspectives – mainly, internal and external.  What internal measures am I consciously or unconsciously using? What are the external factors?  I review these areas without emotion so that I can more scientifically assess them.

reality-2426203_1280If I have an emotion within the belief as I did in my recent struggle, that emotion is to be addressed first so that I can better understand the cue that life has given me.  Emotions are neither good nor bad; they are cues to my personal beliefs about a given situation, both known and unknown.  This unraveling of your emotions takes time which we may believe we don’t have.  (That is also a belief that is based on your behavior, isn’t it?)  We actually do have time because, Dear Reader, this is the reason we are living.  It is not doing a job and earning a good salary.  Nor, is our purpose to necessarily being a good parent.  Those roles and purposes are trappings of our lives and where or how we grew up.  We are all in our personal situations as a type of classroom where we can learn.  Classrooms take all shapes and sizes, interactions and events.  I believe that as long as we realize that there is a benefit in all things, we can actually begin to see the positive which helps to give a certain belief and begins the rebuilding process.

Here’s the thing.  I’ve tried this journey before and have failed at one point or another.  Rather than learn from ‘the’ past failures before, I berated myself for them and, thus, doomed myself to repeat them in one form or another.  By accepting failure as an example of what isn’t working – and de-personalizing the failure – I’m creating a healthier ‘me’ in the long run because I no longer focus on what happened but on the lessons I learned as a result.  It is our belief or perspective that helps us see past the emotions and understand and accept these failures so we can continue to learn.  And, in that, a failure isn’t anything other than a missed cue or a needed change in one’s perspective. Peace, and may you, too, fail in your goals so that you can learn more about yourself in the journey.

“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” – Robert F. Kennedy

 

 

The Addition

Last month I wrote about my realization that in my struggles to improve, I believed I needed to be less than…something.  The idea of subtraction to fit in was what I learned and believed to be how “things get done.”  I no longer believe this to be true and, actually, this idea is a very dangerous road of misunderstandings, self-betrayal, and my own death. 

[Note to Gentle Readers: What follows is a tale of my journey to a wonderful realization that I wish to share with you. It is my tale on how I realized that, by struggling with being physically smaller, I became mentally smaller. In writing this blog post, I sought to identify this feeling and found this very valuable information from HumanParts.com: In part, Brianna Wiest writes that “Your “small self” is a combination of habits, behaviors, and beliefs you adopted from those around you. You interpreted their needs and preferences and took them as your own. You assumed certain traits for defense, or safety, or because you just never took a minute to stop and think: But is this really who I am?” I had never thought of life and growing up quite like this. I hope you read and enjoy this article. Allow me to continue….<3]

About 2004-ish, I was given a diagnosis of psoraisis for a small “spot” on my leg.  It looked like a patch of skin no bigger than a dime that would not heal.   With a history of cancer in my family, I trotted off to my local dermatologist.  Unconcerned as the diagnosis did not include the skin cancer I could have sworn I had (delusions, anyone?), I just continued my regular lifestyle.  I was told you just need to live with it or use X or Y cream/salve/lotion.  Yeah? No. Move forward ten years.

In about 2014 where my psoraisis and health were left unchecked, that small patch became larger and slowly expanded, creeping up my calf on one leg and encircling it like a boa constrictor.  Like the movie The Blob, the mass just continued to grow and slowly spread over my lower extremities.  Doctors, creams, salves, etc., did nothing to stop the spread.  I gave up and just let it run amok as a perk of getting older and wore long pants.  I no longer got pedicures, embarassed at the condition of my legs.  In my purely physical evaluation of my condition, I concentrated on the external “result” of my disorder.  What I failed to understand is that psoraisis is not a skin disorder per say but an autoimmune disorder that comes OUT through the skin.  In other words, these eruptions were the tip of my health iceburg and, while my doctors gave me creams for my legs, they really did not delve into my role and how I might help myself.  This went on for about two YEARS and my psoraisis spread to my other leg, front and back of my lower legs, elbows, arms, and hands.  Still living with it as I gave up on steroid wraps, salves, bathing, sunlight treatments….<sigh> I noticed the first lesion on my face and ears. That was the final straw because I could no longer cover up the eruptions with clothing or gloves.

Cue 2016 and the cancer diagnoses.  This was dropped right in the middle of my health Wobble but I was unaware of the impact and how this served as a pivot for me.

Rather than continue on the familiar path I had worn thin through the years , the cancer served to divert me into a new health initiative.  I was so scared at how this foreign thing was in my body and I lived my life unaware that it lurked.  You see, my thyroid biopsies came back clear so to have found cancer during my parathyroid surgery was almost like winning the lottery for me.  This discovery while I was “under the blade” resulted in an immediate thyroidectomy decision by my husband.  (I cannot imagine how my husband must have felt being called in to a consultation room by my surgeon and told that I had cancer and he needed to decide right then and there what to do. He made the right choice for me.)  After recovery and radioactive iodine treatment, I was left with my normal modus operandi: How can I control my health through diet because, obviously, my ballooning weight needed to be subtracted because that was the problem and caused my cancer and unhappiness about myself.

What I failed to consider is that my over weight is a result.  No, not the cause.  A result.  I liked this way of thinking because I could then shift my own sense of blame (and resulting shame.)  I live with a never-ending source of shame, manufactured by yours truly.  I think it stems from being afraid to disappoint people.  (What? Where did that come from?  This is a new thought and just came into my mind as I type. I will put a pin in this because this may give later insight.)

I began to try to unravel the cause of my cancer and health, and relied on my tried and true “subtraction” method because it had been just so successful thus far.  (Hindsight? No, it hadn’t.) I was determined to manage my thyroid through diet along with my psoraisis.  I began a regimen called the AIP protocol which I implemented partially for about six months.  My health worsened, the psoraisis flared into huge red patches with silvery coatings.  The doctors gave me more creams because any drugs may be an issue considering my cancer and that the psoraisis was localized to my lower legs.  It was then that I began ramping up my medical visits to larger clinics, naturopaths — anyone who had an idea.  I was looking to remove whatever it was in my life that was causing me such physical and  emotional distress.  By the fall of 2018, I was depressed, living on very few food items that I enjoyed, and just feeling like I was a full and out failure.  Yes.  I am a failure because I could not manage my health and well-being, the body I was given for this lifetime.

Then, I had my vision.  [Gentle Readers: If you are wondering about this, please read my prior post called The Subtraction where I discuss a very odd dream.] In thinking about it, I still become emotional although the dream is a few years past.  This is how powerful an important “vision” can be…it is what is driving me to create this blog.  I felt in my vision so relaxed and confident.  I KNOW that this was me if I were in another life or path.  Me, if I had lived my life without such a degree of shame and blame…both on myself and those around me.  I decided that I liked feeling confident and relaxed and wanted that to be my full-time feeling.  I began toying with managing my diet not be subtracting anything but by adding healthy habits and keeping all of the other habits, too.  My thinking was to let those habits that I disliked fall away as no longer necessary once I had a better “addition.”  So, instead of removing sugar, grains, dairy, fats, etc., from my diet in an immediate and drastic “shift”, I began to add a piece of fruit to my diet.  That’s it.  I stopped mentally shaming myself when I preferred a bowl of ice cream.  As long as I ate my fruit, I met my goal.  I then decided to add a slice of bread to my diet.  Like my mother, I love bread…the old German kind with full grains.  Some of my most favorite memories is my mother and her bread.  I still visit and bring her a loaf or two of Heidleberg Bakery’s bread.  (Note: Must have toast for breakfast.)

I began seeing diet as a road map and not a punishment and, in January of 2019, joined Weight Watchers (now Wellness Wins), and, by June of 2019, I’d lost about 50 pounds.  The plan made sense and became second-nature to me.  Then, I hit the Wobble….and skid right down through it into a pit of my own emotional garbage.  I’m still here…struggling to maintain my weight loss in the middle of quarantining.  But, my struggle?  It’s a good thing as I am using the time to create a sense of ease for myself.  I’ve gained weight…and I’m okay with that, too.  I just refuse to subtract as a means of improvement.

If you’ve gotten this far in your reading, thank you. In my struggles to achieve, I’ve recognized that a good plan, daily check ins, and being kind to myself are key.  These will be my new additions and I’m looking forward to being able to do more “adding” to my day that will include more physical activities that I would enjoy.  For today, we have a cold, frosty morning.  I plan to finish my coffee, enjoy a nice slice of toast and send good wishes to my mom and sister so that they, too, find a sense of joy and peace in this world.  Hey, why not add it to your day??