🔄 Are you stuck?

My calves were aching when I went out for my morning run. My legs felt heavy, and I forced myself to put one foot in front of the other.

“I’m just warming up,” I told myself. “After 15 minutes, I’ll be fine.”

My mind went back to my early days as a runner, I’d started running with my new boyfriend (next month we’ll be celebrating 11 years together). I wanted to be more active and he liked running, so I figured I might as well join him.

I hated running. Even more, I hated those first few minutes of a run, where my calves were on fire and I just wanted to give up the whole time. If it hadn’t been for my boyfriend egging me on, I would have given up.

Later, I realized I hated running because I was a slow runner, and going at a pace that was normal for most people left me winded and gave me stitches. My boyfriend was willing to run at my pace, and slowly, I started liking running. Eventually I became a runner, and when I started again after a 3-year hiatus, I was all in.

I’m still the slowest runner in the world (it feels like that). Elderly people pass me sometimes. Last week, a woman walking with a broken arm in a sling passed me. But I love my run and I push through those twinges and aches that aren’t actual injuries.

I tell myself a different story now

I used to hate running. Now I love it.

The only difference between then and now (aside from the fact that I weigh 40 lbs more now) is the stories I tell myself. I’m actually in a physically worse position than I was back then, not only because of the extra weight but because I’ve been through a gamut of foot issues, from achilles tendonitis, to plantar fasciitis, to metatarsalgia.

The story I tell myself is what keeps me running. That story is that I’m a runner, that running keeps me from getting diabetes (my father and all his brothers were diagnosed with type 2 diabetes when they reached my age), I get to spend an hour in the early morning fresh air, and it’s a great way to get my steps in quickly. Oh, and I also tell myself that my calves will stop aching once I warm up.

Now, I understand that not everyone wants to be a runner. I’m not going to change the stories I tell myself about mountain climbing or skydiving, or even going on a rollercoaster because I feel no need or urge to do those things. But I had to change my thinking to do this thing I knew I wanted to do.

What stories do you tell yourself that keep you stuck?

Are they stories like these?

🚫 If I stand up for myself, things will only get worse
🚫 I need my ex to treat me fairly.
🚫 I’ll never get out from under my ex’s control.
🚫 My ex is ruining our children.
🚫 Judges are all pro-mom/pro-dad and they won’t help me.
🚫 I hate having to give up the family home.
🚫 Documenting my ex’s abuse is too overwhelming.
🚫 I’ll lose my kids because my ex manipulates them into hating me.

Some of these stories may be true, or you may believe very strongly that they’re true.

That doesn’t matter.

The real question is, is the story you tell yourself serving you? Or is it keeping you in a cage and stopping you from living the happy, fulfilled life you deserve?

So, how can you create a better story?

Believe it or not, there is a tool for this.

It’s a model created by a coach called Brooke Castillo. The basic premise of this model is that your thoughts produce your feelings, your feelings generate your actions, and your actions cause your results.

Let’s look at my running:

➡️ My circumstance: I’m a slow runner and my calves ache.
➡️ My thought: “I can’t run”.
➡️ My feelings: Disheartened
➡️ My actions: I don’t go running
➡️ My results: My blood pressure and fasting blood sugar go up.

The circumstance is a fact of life. I can’t do anything to change the fact that I’m a slow runner. It’s also neutral. It isn’t what’s causing the problem here. It’s my thoughts about it that produce the end results.

So, now I'm redoing this model. This time, instead of starting with the circumstance, I start with the result I want and work backwards from there.

I want my blood pressure and blood sugar to go down. The action here is to go running. Other actions can also do this, like weight training and a healthier diet, and I’ve started working on my blocks with those, too, but we’ll stay with just this action for now.

When I ask myself what feeling would prompt me to take this action, I come up with determination. And the thought I created to generate that feeling: “I can be a runner too, just at my own pace!”

So, there we go – same circumstance, different thoughts, and I get a different result. When my foot problems hit, I used this model to find the help and tools I needed (man, those Asics Kayanos are expensive but SO worth it) so I could keep running.

Imagine what this could do for you….

Want to know how I can help you?

Resources

You can read more about Brooke Castillo’s model here and it also comes with a PDF guide. I use this model in my coaching as well, so feel free to contact me for a session if you need help with this.

The Ramit Sethi quote is taken from this episode of his podcast, where he interviews couples and gets to the root of their financial issues. You can find it here on Youtube and here on Spotify.

I’ve seen some powerful results recently with the people I help once they shift their thinking.

They’ve gone from being terrified into passivity by the threats and emotional abuse coming from their exes to laughing at their ex’s messages and it’s like they’re different people.

This can be you as well.