Hey Team!
One of the things I love about Yoga With Adriene is how often she returns to the idea of ‘Find What Feels Good’ when it comes to a yoga practice.*
I think it is a great guideline for many practices but particularly for movement practices because so many fitness instructors and influences are all about what looks good or about burning calories or about crushing one thing or another.
I feel decidedly meh about all of those things but I feel GREAT about leaning into ways to feel good about the practices I am bringing into my life.
And I am hoping that as you work towards expanding your life in whichever ways you choose, your feelings will be a key factor in your decision-making process.
It is worth figuring out how to make your practices feel good to you.
In fact, “How do I want to feel?” can be one of the most important starting points in any project** because it gives you some criteria for choosing activities, timelines, conspirators, and actions.
Once you know how you want to feel, you can identify what actions to take, how and when to take them, and who to take them with.
And considering how you want to feel gives you a bit of extra motivation, an extra sense of why you are choosing to do what you are doing.
When it comes to fitness and wellness, your feelings aren’t just about feeling good, bad, excited, or whatever, they can also get specific to the practices you are considering.
You can ask yourself “How do I want my legs to feel?” or “What does strong feel like?” or “How does ‘feeling energetic’ show up in my body?” And then you can decide how to work towards those feelings/how to track them/how to motivate yourself in the search for them.
And, of course, my ADHD brain won’t let me get away without considering this possible hitch:
Sometimes, the thing that will feel good in the long term doesn’t feel good now.
For example, the feeling of having strong abs will be great in many ways but doing plank right now may not feel good at all.
In fact, the effort required may feel downright discouraging.
And I am not going to suggest that you put a lot of energy into convincing yourself that something you don’t enjoy feels good (but if that works for you, have at it!)
Instead, I am going to suggest that you find something that feels good about it – maybe you can focus on how good it feels to check that exercise off of your list, or how good it feels to see the number on your timer creep up, or, even, how good it feels to stop!
And you might spend a bit of time digging deep into your imagination to generate a sense of how it will feel to have strong abs, the things that will be easier for you to do, the way your body will respond to future challenges as a result. Perhaps knowing you are giving a gift to your future self will help your sacrifice feel good in the moment.
I have a lot more to say this topic but I don’t have a lot of time to say today so I am going to pause the discussion here and get to the gold star portion of our post:
Here are your three small gold stars for your efforts today. You can award them to yourself for three separate things or you can pile them all in for one thing.
I know you are working on things, whether you are at the thinking stage, the planning stage or the action stage.
And I know your capacity will vary from day to day.
Please celebrate whatever the you of today is able to do, no matter how small, because your effort counts and your work matters.
Be kind to yourself out there!
Go Team Us!
*In fact, Find What Feels Good is the name of her app.
**In many other contexts – relationships, presentations, web design, displays, “How do I want them to feel?” can also be an important question but it is less relevant for your fitness and wellness, of course!
