Stuff happens. We try to lose weight and we fail. We injure ourselves. We try to give up smoking and find it frustratingly difficult. We decide to start exercising – and it doesn’t happen.
The temptation is to keep trying to make these changes in the same way. Weightloss centred only around what we eat. Taking up exercising using will power as the driver. We pull a hamstring, rest it, maybe have a massage or physiotherapy, return to exercise only to pull the muscle again.
When things go wrong, asking the question, ‘What happened before what happened happened’ can give a much better insight as to how to move forwards with our goals.
So instead of sitting in a heap of self loathing following a lengthy session with a once full tub of Haagen Dazs, if we examine what lead up to the mighty scoffing session, we can make a plan to help avoid that event happening again.
Being in control of what we choose to eat means having a plan – and Murphy proofing it. Murphy’s law: anything that can go wrong at sea generally does go wrong and sooner rather than later.
Therefore a now empty chocolate wrapper bar can be viewed as yet another failure or as a spur to ask what happened before to drive us to overdo the Cadburys Dairy Milk – and make a plan. If it fails, then make another. Were weightloss easy, we’d all be sylph like.
And the same goes for dealing with breaking all addictions. Go back to the causes of why we are doing what we are doing and rootle about there until we have a good Murphy Proof plan of campaign.
As regards injuries: the police no longer call accidents accidents, they call them incidents. Here the question of what happened before is harder to answer. Whilst getting rear ended by someone when stationary is not easily explained away, accidents directly caused by us or snapped achilles tendons and so on do have a cause lying with us. Often the cause lies in eye or inner ear imbalance, something that never occurs to people or the professionals that are normally seen. To just give up activities because of injury is running away from an existing problem. Find the problem and work consistently to solve it, and not only will we resume the lost activity, we will return to it stronger, quicker, faster and much more injury proof.
For example, one of my clients fell downstairs, aged 19, and nearly tore off both feet. She was neither drunk nor drugged. There was no apparent cause. This client was playing netball for the County at the time, so was agile and athletic. It took some digging, but eventually we worked out that at the age of 4, she’d been in a very horrible car accident in which she’d banged her head so hard, it left a small dent in her forehead. As a result, all sorts of things weren’t working optimally – especially her eyes and her breathing. So what happened before she fell downstairs? She’d suffered a severe head trauma some 15 years earlier. Now we are sorting all that out, she is back playing netball again and exercising regularly.
Past traumas, just because they happened ages ago, cannot be ignored if we want to be exercising happily into our dotage.
So: what happened before what happened happened??