Internet Flattery / Plagiarism And When To Get Back Up

I found some odd comments on my blog today, and lo and behold I went to the site and my posts are reposted over at another site called “p90x workout us dot com” I was pretty pissed off actually since there is not a single reference to myself or my site. I suppose I should be flattered that someone wants to steal my posting but then again, I know it’s not that personally flattering, just trying to hawk beachbody products. I suppose  I could tell BB about them but really, what am I going to gain from it?

I was thinking this past weekend about getting up when you get knocked down. There are a lot of motivational messages out there about getting up one more time and just rising more than you fall and so on and I wondered if people actually know what it’s like to get knocked down by life. I have a feeling that someone who chooses to sit on the couch and eat fast food when they should be at the gym would count that as getting knocked down. The person who fails to stick to their diet and has fried chicken and cornbread instead would count that poor judgement as life knocking them down. Even better, the person who quits their workout regime after a week because it’s “too hard” would tell people when they start again (probably only to fail again) that they got knocked down and got back up.

Let’s be real.

There is a big difference between quitting and being forced to stop. A huge difference between giving in to the voice in your head that follows you around and tells you that you are not good enough and facing a life altering event that forces you to reevaluate who you are as a person. Tearing a tendon and getting a blister are not the same thing. Losing your job and not being able to afford a gym membership is not the same as not being able to find your running shoes and that cute lulu lemon top. I guess it comes down to this societal effect of thinking that we are all magnificent warriors, living on the edge, waging war on the demons of disease and apathy but we are not. Most of what you read as motivation doesn’t apply to you. Most people who think life is hard for them are delusional. Most people need to wake up and realize that they are not the hero of their life. It’s not a movie with a happy ending, you are not some silver screen character whose life is defined by cliches and snappy one liners.

Not yet.

The problem is that people don’t know what they are capable of and they are terrified to find out. For the vast majority of us (and I include myself) we cower behind excuses at some level in order to escape the potential for pain. We may wear shirts that say “no pain no gain” or have desktop wallpaper telling us that the opinions of others aren’t important but in reality we all have a threshold we just don’t want to cross.

It’s not that I have a problem with motivation. Motivation is great, temporarily. Unfortunately it won’t get you where you want to go in the long run. It’s an external force, you are running off the energy of others. The only way to set your own fire alight is to internalize your fight. Sit down and understand why you want what you are seeing, what it is that those cheap and cheesy posters are saying to you on an emotional level. For the most part, pictures of abs and muscles may get you to the gym one or two days a week, it may help you to say no to cheesecake once in a while but it won’t change who you are. The reason you are where you are now is because that is who you are, not what you read or hear. You may not like it, but that’s your problem. The only way to change your future is to change what you believe to be true about yourself.

If you are reading this you likely are in the same mindset as a lot of us, you want to be healthy. Maybe you have made a decision to change some things in your life to make some changes in your life. Sounds trite, and it is. But it’s a grain of truth. We have to change in order to leave where we are. We try to effect change with outside influences such as reading fitness blogs or buying fitness magazines but those things never get inside us. The greatest agent for change is inside our heads and in order to get our minds to help us and not fight us we need to get on the same page.

Think differently.

You are who you are as a result of your thoughts and THEN your actions, not the other way around. Changing who you are starts with changing how you think. Motivated and successful people don’t just do things differently, they think about things differently. You don’t need to know exactly what it is, but you need to know that it’s not what you are doing. Far too often we use exercise as punishment and food as reward. How about you think of it the other way around? Think of your body as an engine and food as fuel, then find the best quality fuel you can. You wouldn’t pour orange juice in your car gas tank would you? Think of exercise as a chance to prove your ability, not 40 minutes of lost couch time. Think of your smoking abs not as a goal but as a by product of your healthy choices. Go into your brain and flick some switches and see what happens.