Change is scary
Injury is scary. Health conditions are scary. Change is scary.
Accepting it, is even scarier.
Most of us, we don’t like change. We don’t like things disrupting our routines, changing what we do and how we move. We hate it! And what we especially hate, is when it is out of our control. When what we want to do and what we can do don’t match, life gets difficult, and things become very frustrating.
If you’ve ever been diagnosed with a new health condition you know the feeling I'm talking about, the one where you feel lost and uncertain about everything and what that means going forward and what that means to your body. The same feeling you get when you get injured, and you’ve gone from playing 11-a-side football every week to being on crutches.
Life starts to suck real quick.
We live in a world now where instant gratification is rife and we want to be able to return to who we were overnight, but when things happen to our body it takes time because all our tissues have a different healing process and timeline.
Once you get over this shock, the real work begins, and you start to realise it’s a long journey back, which of course is even more frustrating. But did you realise there is power in accepting the journey? Power in accepting that it will take time and it will be worth it.
Because change takes time.
We’ve all seen those articles about how to build habits and they always preach about targeting those little changes rather than changing everything at once, and they’re right. Trying to change everything at once is not going to work so we’ve got to start small and starting small can be as simple as taking a step back and accepting the new path you are on. Once we do that we can look at long-term aims and short-term goals and trust those short-term goals make all the difference. They make you feel good, they make you feel like you have achieved something, and they help you stay on track with those long-term aims! Who doesn’t love ticking something off?
Change is scary, but when you make a plan that is right for you, realistic and achievable, things start to make more sense. We’ve got to be the tortoise in this situation and not the hare, because at the end of the day once we accept the path we are on and go to a speed that works for us and our body, things will start to fall into place.