LIVING THE PROOF
My last post was about the secret to making lasting changes in life. And shortly after writing that post we went out for dinner, and had Dom Pedro´s afterwards. Sooo Yum. And while I was trying to slurp up every last atom from the bottom of the glass with my straw I realised two major things. The first was that this was the first time I had had sugar in 10 whole days. And, the second was that it had taken me 10 whole days to realise that I hadn’t had any sugar. It had simply and quietly left via the back door of my life.
My sugar habit had crept up on me silently, fuelled by the almond croissant I rewarded myself with after a particularly tough cycle, while everyone else had poached egg and smashed avo with their post-ride coffee. And despite it being more addictive than cocaine, no-one even raised an eyebrow. And you know how addiction goes, soon you are having a square or two of choccie after dinner…
But 11 days prior to writing that blog post, the arthritis in my hands was debilitating enough for me to act. In pain and desperation, I had Googled the top arthritis triggers myself, just in case ChatGPT was in the pocket of some lobby group.
#1 was Sugar, Sugar, Sugar, everywhere I looked. And # 2 was gluten.
Sheeeez. There went my other addiction – crispy sourdough, to which I remained devotedly committed, despite my gut reacting to gluten with every single bite. I just filed it away in a mental drawer labelled “Inconvenient Truths”, along with the knowledge that the body also processes bread as sugar. Okay, so I had the knowledge. But I had always had the knowledge, I had just chosen to keep the mental filing cabinet closed because I didn’t want to give up sugar.
So what had changed? My arthritis was interfering with my cycling. Time in the saddle (and with hands on the handlebars) was becoming a misery. And time on my bike in nature under a big sky is my happy, empowering, free-to-be place. And sugar was ruining that.
And anyway, the Dom Pedro had made me feel sick.
It was only when I woke up the next morning that I started thinking about the blogpost I had written and that I was having a real life experience of the exact theory.
The theory is that as soon as we try to make changes in life, our body freaks out about moving into uncertainty and starts to influence the mind because it would rather live in fear than face the big black void of the unknown. So it turns up the volume on our negative inner voice in order to hijack our intention to change the status quo. Even if it is ruining our life. And if you respond to those negative voices you will end up make the same choices you made yesterday.
So how do we make lasting change? We have to shed our old self – biologically, emotionally and cognitively and make different choices in life.
But in order to do that you have to make the future tangible or known by closing your eyes and creating a vision of the future in our minds and putting ourselves into the scene so that we can experience it and feel the emotion of it before it becomes real. Allowing ourselves to ´feel the future´ takes away the fear of the unknown from our new intention or behaviour so our body doesn’t reject it.
For me, it was a bit of an inverse connection with the future. The pain of the present had become more uncomfortable than the uncertainty of the future, and for the first time I could feel a future without cycling in it. And actually feeling that loss made giving up sugar and bread easy! In fact it was so natural that I hadn’t even noticed the process of giving it up. I just decided. And I felt so much better without either from day 1 that it just made me wonder why I hadn’t done it before!
So, in a nutshell, you have to create a vision of the future you want and experience yourself in it so the future becomes real enough for you to feel you are already there, with the new intention already in place. Experiencing yourself there makes that future a natural place for your body to go. No drama.
Bye for now,
Have a good week, Love Vanessa
If you are looking for your career path or want to create meaningful change in your life, contact me at 076 778 2787 for a free 30-minute exploratory session.
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