Resolution 7: Be Happy
My book is based on the premise that people can achieve happiness and their fitness goals by applying an approach of awareness, acceptance, and adaptation to their life. This is the breakdown:
Awareness: Another way of referring to awareness is “collecting the truth of a moment.” When you practice remaining aware before making a decision, a judgment, or movement, you are committing to a higher state of living; you are committing to seeing the real perfections and imperfections of the world and yourself, and making a fair judgment based on this. It’s important to examine how your belief system, insecurities, fears, emotions, feelings of helplessness, and decision-making process affects your behavior before adapting new strategies. Otherwise, these unconscious parts of you can obstruct or undermine your ability to reach your best self.
Acceptance: Moving forward or redefining yourself really can’t occur unless you can learn to accept yourself or the way a situation is at a given moment. When you’re unhappy with yourself, recognize that feeling. Perhaps you can dispel this irrational thought with the evidence around you and move on, or maybe there is some truth in your thought (i.e. you really do need to lose weight). You might as well accept it—if you can’t change it right away—and then start thinking about adaptive strategies. Beating yourself up about it will only send you down a self-destructive path. Put yourself in the right mindframe and try to remove some of the emotion from this. Learn to accept imperfections and move on. Trust your instincts, your gut, and your good perspective. Don’t be afraid to start over or put in the work.
Adaptation: Adapting is choosing the best strategy to enhance a moment based on you and your resources at a given point. In the big picture of redefining you, you will need to change your problem solving approach, accumulate wisdom through error, create new habits, define your purpose, learn self-policing strategies, define your boundaries, create positive life goals to steer your behaviors, and create conversations with others as you adapt your life with the intent of happiness and achieving your best physical, mental, and emotional self.