I almost gave up and then this happened…

I was at the gym earlier this year, pre-Corona and my trainer gave me the task of hopping on the elliptical for 30 minutes. It sounded simple at first until I realized that my legs were on fire after 3 minutes. Don’t let my skinniness fool you because I’ve been so out of shape for years, it’s ridiculous. I just knew there was no way I would be able to finish. I glanced over at the machine next to me and the timer read 26:44… There’s no way this lady was on this machine for 26 minutes and was still going – unfazed and here I was, ready to pass out. I then noticed that she was pedaling forward and I was pedaling backwards… I stopped and switched gears and found that going forward resulted in less burn. Thank goodness. There was hope again. I made it to 10 minutes.

The show Botched came on the screen and with no headphones, I was following the closed captioning as I kept pedaling. Sidebar: this show is CRAZY! This woman went for a nose job and ended up in a coma as a result of it and still she was going for more surgeries. She got her lips done and they swelled up to what seemed like ten times their normal size. When a friend suggested that she stopped having cosmetic surgeries at the expense of her life, she said and I quote “It’s my face and my body so I will continue to have these surgeries if I want to.” Talk about fearless… While that’s a story for another day, I looked up and realized I was on that machine for about 23 minutes and had not noticed the time going by…

Because revelation can be found in just about everything, I started thinking about the fact that I could have stopped at 3 minutes because it did feel uncomfortable and who likes to be sore and in pain? But until I took my eyes off the discomfort, I didn’t see how I was going to last 30 minutes on this machine. Like our beloved prophetess Whitney said, I didn’t know my own strength but the only way to uncover said strength is by going through the discomfort and coming out on the other side – although sore and hurt but not broken. It is only in the doing that we can get better and grow.

In so many aspects of my life, I’ve hesitated to pursue and procrastinated on accomplishing goals I thought were too hard. I mean it’s human nature to choose the environment that feels good and to choose the setting on the machine that doesn’t make every muscle burn but what good would result in that? The goal isn’t to be successful at first try but instead to push yourself a little further beyond your zone of comfort each and every day.

As I encourage myself to embrace feeling uncomfortable, I hope you see the value in doing the same. We don’t want to look back at 2020 and see that the only things that grew were our fears. Let’s kick the idea of perfection to the curb and focus on making progress instead.

Outfit details:

FASHION NOVA jeans – here (love the fit!)
ZARA T-shirt (old) – try this
ZARA Blazer – similar here
STEVE MADDEN snake print pumps – here
KATE SPADE cross body bag – similar here