Well, I haven’t managed a personal blog since
Dec 2013, so I think it is about time I pulled myself together and got on with
it. I finished last year with a run through of the lifestyle changes I had
managed, and the ones I wanted to put in place, and now it’s 3 months later. People
always say that time moves faster as you get older, and it is perfectly true!
But three months is a good period of time to implement change, and then to
re-assess.
So, one of my ideas was to work on my fitness levels.
Thanks to an ex-client of mine, Jo Wells of Simply Yoga (http://simply-yoga.moonfruit.com/),
I have been going weekly to an excellent class that Jo leads. She’s a great
teacher, and makes yoga accessible for all sorts of ages and body types. So I do my class with her every week, and I
even manage to spend 20 minutes or so a couple of times a week practising my
moves. Already I have become a bit more flexible, a bit less stiff, and my back
has given me no trouble at all, even after a day spent digging in the garden.
I’m so relieved as I was beginning to feel that I was a right old crock! I am
finding that, for me, 20 mins doing yoga first thing in the morning is time
well spent.
I’m also managing to fit in the odd 20 minute
walk, where I really try to walk fast and get a bit breathless. I know I am not
exercising enough yet, but at least I’m trying. It’s a minimum of 90 minutes
and a maximum of 160 minutes a week, which doesn’t look much when I write it down!
But the main thing for me is that it is achievable. I don’t spend much money, I
don’t have to wear special clothes - just something stretchy for yoga, and I
have a ton of stretchy clothes! – and the main thing is that none of my
exercise takes up much time. I’m still repeating my mantra about making a
healthy lifestyle easy to achieve and slowly I am managing it.
How about you? Are any of you managing small
changes that are easy to achieve and make a big difference? I think we should
start a ‘Don’t change your life, just tinker with it a bit’ movement! There is
plenty of very good advice out there in magazines and newspapers, or even on
the internet, but most of it is aspirational, and rarely achievable. And if you
try and fail, you end up feeling worse that when you started. So it seems to me
to be much better to achieve one little change, rather than fail to manage a
huge change. It’s important to give yourself time as well, don’t rush it –
after all, you have a whole lifetime ahead of you, so just take a small step at
a time.
The thing is that when you make a small change
for the better, it’s incredibly empowering. It gives you back a feeling of
being in charge of your life, of being able to do what you want to do. That’s
scary too, because not being in charge of your life – a sensation a lot of us
have – means that you don’t have a sense of responsibility about what happens
to you. Someone, or something, seems to be driving your life – your job, your
children, your partner, your direct debits. Changing something, achieving
something for yourself, means that you begin to take that responsibility back,
you begin to be consciously in charge of what happens to you. It’s like you
begin to live your life, not the other way round. Whilst I agree that that might
feel scary, at least you are back at the centre of your own life, back in the
driving seat, mistress or master of your own destiny. Surely a little bit of
fear shouldn’t be allowed to get in the way of that?
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