Inspire Yourself

I have attempted to write about this topic so many times in the most perfect way with the most perfectly witty title and perfectly constructed sentences.... but every time I try I just can’t convey the same message I want. That’s because emotions are messy and uneven and they like to color outside the lines. When the emotions are good they like to make you feel like you’re Elle Woods getting accepted into Harvard in Legally Blonde. When the emotions are bad, it makes you feel like Josie Grossy in Never Been Kissed when she got egged by her date on prom night.

The ones that make us feel particularly Josie Grossy are the self-inflicted negative feelings that have triggered us to think that we aren’t “good enough”.

Before I go any further, I want you to do something. I want you to make a list, mental or physical of five things that you love. Got it? I’m sure some of these things include your partner, your family, your job, lifting, movies, and anything else that makes us incredibly happy. But how many people wrote down themselves? Probably not many. If you did, you have a superpower that many people would love to have. When it comes to love, most of us forget to love ourselves. I am particularly guilty of this.

If I had to make an assumption of why this happens, I could come up with a number of reasons. We had a poor childhood, we had toxic relationship after toxic relationship, we compare our successes to everyone’s highlight reels on Instagram, the list could go on. I think those are all fine reasons, but they give us an excuse to wallow in self-pity instead of learning how to love every fiber of our beings.

I have done so many positive things for myself over the last year, yet I choose to fixate on all of the things that aren’t my favorite. I get caught up in bad days where I’m unhappy with one small thing and allow it to transcend into a larger problem than it actually is. For me, it easier to give myself a cop out in case I fail. In my brain, if I don’t focus on the success and I highlight what could go wrong instead, I won’t seem like such a failure if everything does go wrong.

This is so incredibly non-productive for me.

I know I am not the only one who says “I’m trying!” when someone gives a compliment, whether that compliment is “you’re strong” or “you’re killing it” or whatever else it could be. If everyone else can see the progress you’re making, you owe it to yourself to admit “yes, I am killing it, I’ve been working really hard to do so!”

Somewhere down the line, confidence and being proud of yourself has been transformed into appearing arrogant or cocky. It is not wrong to celebrate all of the good you are doing for yourself and anyone who makes you feel bad about celebrating your success is envious they haven’t found their own yet.

From this day forward I vow to celebrate all of my successes and small wins and to never feel guilty about achieving them.

My hope for everyone reading this is that you become proud of the person you are becoming and have become. Life is messy every single day, but when you learn to fall in love with the process and learn to fall in love with yourself it makes the journey worth it.

I hope you learn to be inspired by your own story instead of everyone else’s. 

Let me check my schedule…

Why do I never shut up about creating a consistent routine?

 Because it works. Until this year, I never valued consistency or optimizing my day to day life. Everything before the age of 25 was a rollercoaster. Because of my childhood being so inconsistent, from living situations to family members to schools, I had believed that to be my “normal”. Convinced that I “thrived” in chaos, I kept perpetuating that idea that unnecessary spontaneity and lack of structure made me unique and interesting. The reality is that it made me messy. My work was messy, my goals were messy, and worst of all my mindset was messy. What I mean by this is without a clear and directed path, anything that I put effort into was still a half measure.

Somewhere down the line, we’re convinced that being secure for the future is somehow lame. I remember being surrounded by people who would spend their whole paycheck 20 minutes after receiving it. I was never taught the value of the money that I earn, what to do with it, and how being smarter with my time can benefit me for the future. Most important of all, I was never taught how to value myself and my time.

In the current social media age, most people we see on Instagram are vacationing every week and “living their best life” every weekend. We live in a day and age where people are earning salaries by legitimately recording their day to day lives and posting them online. It is incredible what we have the capability to do because of the technological age we live in with just a little bit of drive. To me, “living my best life” is creating a lifestyle where I can do what I love and nothing ever feels like work. Having the freedom and the means to be able to work from home, grow and expand my business, and save for the future is what makes me excited to get up every day. That right there is why I value my consistent schedule.

After spending about 10 years working for other people and supporting other people’s goals and dreams, it is finally so nice that my entire focus can be on growing myself. So I focused on creating a schedule that allows me to effectively grow. I have dedicated times to do the work that pays my bills, focus on finding creative outlets, learn and expand my knowledge and to be able to enjoy my downtime. This clear-cut path has made it so much easier for me to channel my creativity and feel energized about what I’m doing every day.

The overall message here is that you have to find what is important to YOU. What goals do you want to achieve in a year, five years, or ten years? Once that is defined for you, map out what it takes for you to achieve that. It will become crystal clear from there what is important and what isn’t.

Expectations vs. Standards

Adversity - the common denominator that I always seem to find when I meet someone new in the powerlifting community. We’ve all overcome our own forms of adversity to be where we are today. There aren’t many people that want to continuously break themselves down day after day under heavy ass weight that haven’t experienced some level of misfortune in their life. 

Who you were and how you deal with it leads you to who you are and will be. So, who am I?

I spent a lot of my time growing up alone. I had one parent who was too high on drugs to notice my existence and one parent who decided their time was best spent elsewhere. I was a child of divorce where neither parent wanted or could take full responsibility for me. My grandma took responsibility of my childhood until the age of 10 when she passed away on Christmas morning. I can still vividly remember going to Dairy Queen with her every Friday and watching movies in a fort in the living room and drawing “No Smoking” signs and putting them in every room she walked into in the hopes she’d quit. She was such a heavy influence on me from such a young age and I’ll never let those memories escape me.

So, what happens next? I managed. I got myself to school, I made it to every volleyball practice I had, I made myself food, and I learned how to be as self-sufficient as possible for a 10 year old. My grandma made sure I knew how to take care of myself almost as if she knew I would need to one day. 

If we fast forward a little bit and skip on things like being taken to court by my family over money, moving roughly 15 times in a matter of 6 years, being 12 years old and stashing drugs for a parent, and many nights of staying at friend’s houses because I couldn’t go home for one reason or another, we get to the high school years. Instead of learning how to be better than what I was around growing up, I made the choice to surround myself with people that made me start to turn into everything I hated. I spent more days skipping school than I did going. I drank, I did drugs, I stole, and I got in trouble with the law a lot. There was a time that I could’ve went on a full-ride scholarship to play volleyball, but I messed it all up and succumbed to what I thought I had to be because “that’s just how everyone in the family is”. I lowered my expectations for how I should be because I didn't think I could possibly be anything else. In psychology, there’s always the nature versus nurture debate. Are you pre-wired to be a certain way, or are you molded by your upbringing and your experiences? In my 17 year old brain, I thought there was no way I could be any better than my family before me. I was destined for the same bullshit they did day in and day out. Wrong. 

Let’s fast forward again. Who am I now? I’m strong, not just physically, but mentally too. It took a lot of years and mistakes to get here. I’m 25 years old with more life experience in those short amount of years than some people twice my age. I grew up hard and fast. Would I change anything about that? Absolutely not. If I look back on it, the years I spent alone at a young age living life every day showed me that I have the drive to do what I need to do to be successful. It wasn’t until I let people in that didn’t want me at my best that I strayed from that. It took me waking up in a different state trying to live a life that I thought was what I was supposed to be living to realize how unhappy I was. So, I took control and started living the way I wanted to.

Where does powerlifting fit into this? I found powerlifting at a time in my life where I still didn’t know who I was. I was still drifting in different cultures trying to see which one had the best fit for me. Until I put the barbell in my hand, everything else felt like fitting a square peg into a round hole. My childhood taught me how to do the work necessary to get where I need to be. When I could’ve easily bowed out, I didn’t. When I could’ve stopped trying because that was easier, I didn’t. I still have that same mentality now. For me, easy isn’t rewarding. I want a little bit of grit and a little bit of struggle. I want to know what I’m made of and to be better every day. 

Unlike those I surrounded myself with early on, the people I have around me now are a lot of my motivation. They make me want to push harder and be better. They aren’t afraid of my success and they help me when I start to doubt myself. A lot of who you are is who you choose to be closest to and what you’re willing to go through to get to what you want. We have the ability to choose who we surround ourselves with. Have you picked people that are making you want to level up in all aspects of life?

So, what will you do? Use the adversity as an excuse to live a life that’s “expected” of you, or will you use it as a motivator to be better than anyone thought you could be?

Intent

When it comes to setting goals for yourself, there’s a process. You set a goal, you set a timeline, and you figure out the steps necessary to get from point A to point B. I think where someone falls short is doing these things without intent. They set a goal without a real thought behind what it takes to get there or they don’t want to do the steps necessary to get to where they need to be. 

Setting big goals and making big changes can seem daunting. Having a process and taking small steps every day to be better and get closer to that goal is a little bit of solace in the chaotic journey to what you want. That’s what it takes. 

 Are you willing to do the things that aren’t so fun that lead you to your ultimate goal? Or are you uninterested in the process and just want to reap the benefits without any work? If your answer is the latter, your “goal” isn’t something you actually want.

 You have to be just crazy enough to set a strong goal for yourself and to see it through day in and day out. You have to be realistic enough to know that each step along the way may not be one step forward, but sometimes a side step or a step in reverse. You have to be passionate enough to know that sometimes it takes all that you have to get to what you want. 

 Being intentional means living your life and pursuing your goals with purpose and being deliberate in your actions. Who is there to blame if you’ve done nothing to get you to where you want to go? No one but you.

There will be times where you feel like you’re spinning in circles and you’re stuck where you are. You aren’t stuck as long as you’re doing the small things every day that add to the bigger picture in the future. Life isn’t going to step out of the way of your goals and sometimes we have to work around what it throws at us. But how incredible does it feels to get closer to that goal knowing you had to work hard and deal with unfavorable circumstances in order to get there? That is the most rewarding part of it all. 

 This is true in powerlifting and in life: nothing can be done and done well without intent

Girl Walks Into A Powerlifting Meet

I’ve been to my fair share of meets. I love traveling and supporting friends and lifters that are competing, I love getting the chance to talk with people I only otherwise see on social media, and I love being able to see people get hyped up over their own accomplishments. Lifters from different parts of the country travel to see some incredible displays of willpower and heart as well as to feel apart of something larger. Powerlifting and powerlifting meets are truly beautiful in that way. 

 As always, with the good comes the bad. I’ve been to terrible meets. You walk in and can feel the ego and superiority complex right at the threshold. Everyone is in their own little corner of the warmup room, mean mugging anyone they think will be competition for them. Mini cliques are forming and passing judgment on the people across the room that don’t fit their mold. Everyone is sizing up everyone and refuses to be helpful to anyone they think can best them. Is this what we want to spend 8-12 hours doing? Even further than that, do we want to spend days and months with that same mentality while angrily scrolling through social media? Does that truly help anyone’s mindset or success in the long run?

I’ve been lucky enough to be at some pretty great meets. At these meets I’ve seen unity and common ground. I’ve seen competitors of the same weight class and caliber sitting together and laughing. There are coaches and lifters standing together talking between attempts, bouncing ideas off each other, loading plates, wrapping knees, and even going as far as to go get food or drinks outside of the venue if it’s needed. Out on the platform, spotters and loaders are cheering on every lifter as if it was their best friend and the crowd is on fire with support and attentiveness. Everyone is being treated with the same fairness without favoritism and elitism. THIS is what it’s about. 

Majority of powerlifters are broken. Not necessarily just  physically, but most of us have some reason to want to push ourselves in the way we do. None of that means that we can’t support someone else in the same journey that we are on. In this sport you can be competitive AND supportive. There is no reason you can’t be gritty and a little jaded while also being genuine and helpful. Is there someone at the meet that our totals you? Good. Use that extra kick in the ass to get better, but don’t refuse to help load their plates because that somehow makes you inferior. 

Newsflash: there will always be someone better than you in one aspect or another. Diminishing someone else’s value and skill set will never make your strengths get any better. You know what will make you better and make everyone around you better? Being a good person and spreading the mentality that we CAN all work together for a common goal and still want to be a strong competitor. 

Next time you’re at a meet, in the gym, or any setting where you have the capability to help people, do what you can. That mentality and action spreads like wild fire. You can ultimately be the one that starts the domino effect of promoting a stronger community where you’re at. Be the person who stands out and doesn’t fall into the trap of hoping for the worst for someone else. What will you do to make a difference? 

Principles

I have not always had the mindset that I could do anything that I put my time and effort into. For a lot of my life I have just done what is necessary to get by and that was good enough for me. I didn’t have anyone to tell me that if I try just a little bit more, that I could do something great. I didn’t have anyone holding my hand along the way or guiding me down a certain path, or being there to pick up the pieces if I failed. That’s okay, it has helped me become who I am today.

The one thing I learned very early on is that I am not bound to any stereotype or bias based off of who I am. I am not bound to be any certain thing because of my gender, where I come from, or what I do or don’t have access to. It is entirely up to me to become what I envision myself to be.

There are two principles that I live my life by. One is to be able to call myself out on my own bullshit. You can be told time and time again the proper advice and the things you can be doing better and never actually hear it when it comes from someone else. When you finally are able to realize what it is that you’re doing to hold YOU back, that’s when you’ll transcend past what you put in your way and start being able to get where you want to go. The second is to not limit myself from things based off of what I’m told I can or cannot do. I am a firm believer that if anyone tells you that you can’t do something, it is usually their inferiority within themselves manifesting an outward expression towards someone who can do what they can’t.

By nature, I’m incredibly stubborn. If I’m told I’m unable to do something, I want to prove that I can no matter what it takes. Stepping into the world of powerlifting, I feel like I am constantly at a battle to prove that I can be the best and that I am just as capable as anyone else, if not more capable. It is my choice to walk around a little jaded and with a small chip on my shoulder in order to continue to keep pushing myself forward. Is that the smartest thing to do? Maybe not, but it’s what I need to do to ensure I am always pushing myself forward.

It’s not just the amount of work that I’m putting in that will dictate the outcome of what I can or can’t achieve. Everyone is working hard and pushing themselves. The thing that separates those who will succeed from those who won’t is the unwavering belief that you CAN do the things you’re setting your sights on. This might seem like some cheesy motivational bullshit to most, but believing you can do something is the first step to ACTUALLY being able to do that thing. Since when did it become cool to think you’re inadequate? What purpose does that serve you in the grand scheme of things?

Somewhere down the line, it’s become lame to try hard for anything. Why? Fear. The fear of maybe not accomplishing something and looking stupid. I can 100% without a doubt tell you that I am constantly afraid of looking dumb, but that fear does not outweigh my need to pursue something that I want. I would rather try and fail over and over again before actually succeeding than just giving up without trying and without knowing what I’m capable of.

No one is perfect and negative thoughts will enter our minds no matter what we do. It has been an uphill battle teaching myself to use words of affirmation when talking about what I want to do instead of words that allow uncertainty to creep in. The way you talk to yourself in your own mind is what matters most. Make that voice the loudest and most confident in yourself.

At least once in your life, someone will tell you that you can’t do something based off of some ridiculous reason. Will that person impose their unsupported beliefs about your lack of capability on you? Or will you continue to work hard for the goal you set to attain? Stand with conviction in direction of your goals and bulldoze past anyone that tells you what you can or can’t do. Life is exactly what you make it - so make it entirely yours.

Moments In Between

Weight loaded on the barbell is in our hands for only a few moments. A few moments of adrenaline and all of the hard work you’ve put in comes to fruition. In those moments you can forget about anything else and only focus on one thing: moving the weight. 

The thing that happens sometimes is we forget what got us to that moment of total zoned-in focus to be able to hit that PR. If we make the lift, we celebrate it as we should. But when we fail, we think of all the things we did technically wrong or we blame poor judging or our weight cut or any of the other 10 reasons that hide what we lacked. The things that matter most are the cumulation of events that got you in the position to hit a PR or step on the platform. 

The times that you said “if” or “can’t” provides you with an out to excuse a terrible mindset and work ethic. Because if you said two months ago that you can’t do it and then you fail, it’s okay right? You already said you couldn’t do it, so you proved yourself to be correct. Do you still love being right in that case? When you allow your mind to have an out or have an excuse, you’re giving yourself permission to not live up to your goals. 

What if for just a second, you told yourself you could do it. How would that change the way you approach your goals? Negativity breeds negativity and thinking “can’t” thoughts will only continue to spiral you down more. Just thinking positive thoughts alone will not always get you the results you want, though. Sometimes you will fail, and that’s okay. That’s not a “I can’t do it” moment, that’s a “I can’t do it... yet” moment. So you failed, what now? What will you change to ensure it doesn’t happen again in the same way? 

You are not the weight on the bar. You are the moments in between. You are the result of how you respond to self-doubt. You are the way you react to tough times, feelings of inadequacy, and how you continue to move forward despite every setback.

Do you want to be the person that falls apart when faced with adversity? Or do you want to be the person who’s perfected the side-step that gets you around adversity and face to face with success? Make your choice and live it.