A Better You – The First Step: Acknowledge Where You Are Now

A Better You Series #4 – Acknowledge Where You Are Now To Begin With.

You Want To Make Something

You want to make something happen, something important for you. Starting a business, get fit, build a family, create something valuable or get promoted.

Or you simply want to change your life for the better – earning more money, closing more sales, serving more people, feeling more confident, and perhaps changing the world.

Something Is Holding You Back

But there will always be something holding you back from achieving it.

You tried many ways but nothing sticks, nothing seems to change.

Some past episodes with heavy emotions or sudden incidents push you off track and you have been momentarily lost your way.

The Real Problems

The real problem you might be experiencing is not feeling good enough – about yourself, about others, and about life. Which you intend to cover up.

The other problem is that you do not have a solid strong foundations in life, the basic needs are not well taken care of. Which you just can’t do or feel more.

The Body Basic Needs

The 3 basic needs – If your sleeping habit is poor, you are eating food that does not nourish your body, and you are not paying enough attention to your body by not being active, these will lead you to no where closer to your goals.

You may have done well in covering your survival needs, making sure you have food on the table and able to pay your bills, your family’s bills, and the team’s salary.

But does these came with the cost of sacrificing your body basic needs?

Psychology & The Identity of Self

Also, the psychological price to pay for the demanding workload with expectations and the obsessive thoughts on being successful.

PS: How do you identify yourself? If you identify your self worth with your net worth, how much you earn is how valuable you perceived you are. If you are not earning well, this leads to anxiety and higher possibility in turning to substance addiction.

Addictions Lead To Downward Spirals In Life

Unhealthy addictions – alcohol, smoking, drugs, food, and excessive work are acted as a form of coping mechanism to escape or numb from the present reality.

Which leads to downward spiral in achievements and personal health.

If this continues, you might started to feel worse about yourself and life in total. Life seems to be more and more meaningless.

Acknowledgement & The Next Steps

To begin with, acknowledge that life sucks at this point of time is a good start.

Then, what can you do about it?

[Practice]

Start By Acknowledge Where You Are

With Your Sleeping, Eating, and Moving Habit.

Write or type or speak it out, here is my example.

My Story with Sleeping

The alarm ring again, I click the snooze button. It rings again, I snooze. After some cycles of ring-snooze, I finally surrender and get myself out of bed. That’s how my morning started one year ago. Sleep deprived was my main issue. In that one year, I would sleep mostly in between 3am to 4am and wake up in between 7am to 8am. 2am is considered early to go to bed for me.

Now it is never the case I would allow myself to sleep at this time unless it is under emergency circumstances. The latest I need to be on bed is 12:30am, between 10pm to 12am is my sleeping time. I would be awake from 6:30am to 8am.

My Story with Eating

Second to that, I used to binge eat on sweet stuff – chocolate and crunchy junk food. Whenever I felt uncomfortable and stressed, I would reach out for these food. People who are close to me would know how sweet my tooth is and I would eat all of them in a blink of an eye.

It is until recently, I intentionally stop purchasing these foods, instead replace them with nuts and seeds. Consciously making decision to consume lesser sugar and refined carbs daily. And, adding supplements into my vegetarian diet.

My Story with Moving

There is one thing I am proud of, my daily walk with mum in the nature, either in the morning or during the evening. If there is a drizzling rain, we would hold up umbrella for a shorter walk. That continued for a year and it has become a daily routine now.

I remembered there were times where I don’t feel like moving at all, just binge watching drama or videos at the room, which increase my fats level in overall. It is when I heard comments about the fats I gained from my brother, I decided to do something about it.

Today, besides the daily walk, I am working on improving my fitness level by adding cardio and high intensity interval training into life.

You can also acknowledge about the life status and life aspects – feeling, financial, career, relationships, health etc.

Thank you for reading.

Have a good reflection,

Vic Qi Pan