Time To Challenge Your Ideas Around Challenges

When you think of the word "challenge" what comes to mind? Struggles, hard work, negative thinking, set backs....not many positive descriptions tend to pop up right away.  What if we reframe our thinking around what challenges in our lives actually are, and instead of letting the challenge define us, we let our reaction and learning from the challenge shape who we are becoming?
Earlier this year I suffered a running injury, which resulted in my needing to examine some issues in my life.  What led to the injury was a simple matter of over training as I tried to compensate and avoid admitting and exploring some issues in my personal life that I just didn't want to deal with.  Numbing myself through extensive activity, until my body finally decided that if I wasn't going to slow down and figure things out, it was going to start that process for me.  The injury was severe enough to force me to stop running all together for a period of about six (long) weeks, and as a side effect I had to sit out of two races that I had put on my calendar for 2019.  I was faced with a decision - lie down and wallow in self pity and feelings of being a victim, or find alternate solutions and ways to maintain my strength during this period of healing.  I joined the Y and it was the very best thing that I could have found.  A community of welcoming people and so many opportunities for positive experiences and growth which have all come together to make me an even stronger and resilient athlete and person than I have ever been.  This newfound strength has manifested itself in a much better sense of who I am and what my boundaries are both internally and externally.
What I can now see with clarity is that I wasn't ready to run those events that I needed to pull out of.  Even if I had not been injured, my mental state going into them would have caused me to struggle and honestly the reasoning behind doing them was not being fueled by a healthy inner drive to challenge myself.  It was really just my unhealthy need to prove something to someone else, and to try and find reasons to feel good about myself and those are never really great reasons to do anything in life. I know that I will be more than ready to run those events in 2020 and will be coming into them from a place of inner and outer strength on many levels, participating for the joy of seeing what limits I can push and what my body is capable of.  
I have to be honest, at the time when I was sitting out, and forced to slow down, I resented it.  I was angry and scared and unsure of what I was going to do while something that had defined me so closely was no longer available to me. I can now feel thankful for the opportunity that I was given to do the work I need to do, work I never would have attended to had I not been injured.  It is unfortunate that I was in a place where the only way I could slow down was to be forced to, but in hindsight it was the best thing that has happened to me.
I believe that the challenges and unexpected setbacks are gifts from the universe that provide us with the chance to rise up out of ourselves and into the people that we can become.    

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