I want to thank my readers who asked if I was still on track with my blog and workouts.  I am!  There was a glitch on my site and my new posts were not appearing on the home page.  I believe it is taken care of now.  To all of you who sent me messages asking how things were going, thank you.  If you hadn’t asked I probably wouldn’t have known anything was wrong.  The post are now up so I hope you will go back and read them.

I had an amazing talk with a good friend of mine last week.  We were talking about getting and staying on track and he said something that really resonated with me and I think it will be beneficial for all of you as well, regardless of where you are at in your life right now.

I was telling him how in the past I have always felt like things need to be difficult for me in order to feel like I am accomplishing anything.  When I was losing weight I felt like it needed to be hard.  When it came to finances I felt like even though I have plenty of money I still feel like I should be struggling for some reason.  In my speaking career I have felt like there should be times where I don’t have a lot of events booked so that I work harder.

Turns out I can be an idiot.  Life doesn’t have to be a struggle.  More times than not we make it a struggle so that we have an excuse in case things don’t work out like we plan.  If we make losing weight hard we have a reason to give up.  “It was just too hard.”  “There must be something wrong with my metabolism.”  “I don’t know what’s going on with my weight.”  We build excuses for ourselves based on not only our own experience but the experiences of others as well.

My friend listened intently and then said this.  “I don’t care.”  I was a little taken aback.  How could he not care after I had just spilled my guts to him.  The answer is simple.  It doesn’t matter what you’ve always done, what matters is what you are doing now.  Things don’t have to be hard just because that’s the way it’s always been.

He then took a sheet a paper and drew a line on it.  He pointed to the left side of the line and said that the left side reprresented the past.  He didn’t care that I had won The Biggest Loser.  He didn’t care that my parents had gotten a divorce or that I didn’t do as well in school as I should have.  He didn’t care anything about those things and neither should I.  What happened in the past doesn’t have to affect us today.  If I am going to be truly successful I need to draw the line and move forward.

I have talked for hours about the importance of not reliving the past.  For some reason the first place I go when things get tough is straight to my past experiences.  Not the good ones that show I am capable overcoming, but the bad experiences that lead me to  think “See, this is what you do all the time.  Now you have done it all over again.”

It’s time to draw that line.  I have had tough times in the past but I have also had good ones.  Times that showed me that I am tough and that I am an overcomer.  For all the bad times there were a lot more good ones.  The good ones are the ones we need to draw strength from.  The bad experiences are like an anchor that is weighing us down.  Until we pull that anchor up we can’t move to a better place.

I hope you will join me in drawing that line and striving to not cross back over.  Let’s draw from the positive things in our life and stop setting ourselves up for defeat by reliving and speaking the negatives.  We have too much life to live to allow ourselves to be weighed down with those negative anchors.

DRAW THE LINE!

See you tomorrow!

being consistent, Biggest Loser, diet, Frustration, life lessons, Matt Hoover, Persistance, Self Discipline

This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010, 1:56 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.