When I was growing up, my mother always told people, “Jenny would never do anything she’s not any good at. No way!”
I’d get irritated with her, tell her she was wrong, and scoff. As I got older and got involved in high school sports, my grandpa told me, “Jenny, I think you’d make a great little golfer.”
“I’m not any good at it, Grandpa,” I’d tell him. In my mind, I was thinking, ‘Who wants to play a sport they suck at playing? Not me.’
Fast forward to now, age 30, and as I look to stepping out of my comfort zone, I have to be honest with myself. I have to tell myself that if I want to truly get uncomfortable, I’m going to have to do things I’ve never done, and most likely, they’re going to be things I’m not any good at doing.
Three weeks ago, I decided to embark on a duplicate journey of one I took just over a year ago, and I started a second 60-day journey with Shaun T. and Insanity. I was feeling up to the challenge and ready for something hard because I knew that when I had done it before, I had felt the best I’d ever felt. The first day, I pressed Play and made it through the workout. I was fired up, screaming at the TV because I remembered (and briefly enjoyed) the pain my body had been craving and missing. A few days later, I was still excited to be on the journey, and set out to do Pure Cardio. For those of you who know Pure Cardio, it’s 42 straight minutes of crazy-ass cardio. As in, no breaks. When I was graduating from the program last summer, it was a piece of cake to make it through this workout without stopping to recover.
This time, it was a struggle. I found myself cursing out loud and slamming my fist into the carpet when I’d have to drop my knees. Or when I’d be doubled over, high-school-basketball-practice style, from lack of air to my lungs. It was painful, but not just in a physical way. It was brutally challenging, and I wasn’t any good at the challenge.
So I thought about giving up. And I thought about blogging about it… Something cliche about how you should love yourself and not get frustrated, and just press on.
But instead, I figured there was a lesson to be learned that I wasn’t seeing. I started to reflect on multiple moments in my past when my loved ones would say those completely untrue things, like, “Oh yeah right. Jenny won’t do that. She’s not any good at it.”
But wait, maybe those things had truth.
Crap.
So I kept pressing Play. I continued my journey, and I let myself get frustrated. I pounded my palms into the back of the sofa in our basement near my workout space. I flailed myself against the wall, arms overhead and eyes squeezed shut, praying for the workout to be over. But I kept showing up, more than anything to learn the lesson in all of this.
And then, as fate would have it, as I was walking my dog this week listening to a podcast by someone who studies champion athletes, the actual, literal lesson spilled itself out of the author’s mouth and into my brain. He said:
“A workout should be something that makes you upset. It should be challenging. It should make you have to overcome something. Interestingly enough, athletics is merely an exaggeration of reality. We should always be overcoming.”
Huh.
Funny how when you open up to the universe, the universe teaches.
The lesson here is not about working out. If that’s as shallow as you see it, try again. I believe the lesson is in the allowance for each of us to be upset with ourselves. Upset with our lack of progress, upset with our clumsiness, upset with the fact that we simply aren’t good at something. We should be upset. Often, I find myself upset that I’m even upset, if that makes sense.
When you set out to step outside your comfort zone, are you doing so with the precaution to yourself that you’ll only be OK with being uncomfortable? Because I have an entirely new challenge for you: Step outside your comfort zone being totally OK with getting upset. With having your cage rattled. With having to slap your sweaty hands against a wall. With having to tell your Mom she was right, after all these years.
It’s in the frustration that we see ourselves, and see the lesson that is before us.
It will be painful. It will be completely introspective. But in the end, we have overcome.