What if all this personal growth is bullsh*t?

Sometimes the whole health & wellness, personal development, find your bliss, empowerment rigamarole seems endless, doesn’t it?

Just like we can’t walk 20 feet without being told by magazines, commercials and the culture at large that our bodies aren’t good enough and need changing, our “betterifying” gets the same scrutiny.

There are countless articles, websites, programs, including my own, that seek to help you shift and grow, to show you the way to become your most present, most vibrant, most happy, most powerful self.

Just writing that last sentence exhausted me. That’s a hell of a lot to live up to.

When I first started coaching 12 years ago, I was all about helping people change from who they were to who they wanted to be, with a particular focus on changing their bodies.

We talked about what to eat and avoid for the body they’d long dreamed of and though my clients began to take better care of themselves, there was something missing. Yes they were technically “healthier”, but there was something pulsing under the surface, something pulling at the fabric of their new health that didn’t sit well with them ...or me.

In those early years I too was drinking the Kool-Aid that we all needed to change. That accepting ourselves in our current state was somehow giving up.

As I saw it at the time, we each had a responsibility to change the unsightly bits of ourselves to make life “better”.

The fear that pulled at the fabric of my clients’ positive results was the same that kept me grasping for new ways to control and change myself.

What I now know is that we had each invested so fully in our change that our fear of either losing the change or not changing enough prevented us for accepting ourselves as we were, at whatever stage we found ourselves.

There’s no new goal, intention, eating or movement change that can root itself in your life if you first cannot ACCEPT and be loyal to yourself, as you are, right now.

This is now where I start with my clients because it’s the only place to start. Nothing can grow in toxic soil of not-good-enoughs and always-needing-to-be-betters.

Though growth is imperative to create an authentic, connected life, it can become devastating when where you are is never where you’re supposed to be.

That said, while acceptance is a simply concept, it’s far from easy.

Today, start with a single step. What’s one thing you can embrace about yourself today?

Tomorrow let yourself find another piece of you to hold just as it is.

All of my love and here’s to accepting what IS so you may plant the seed of what’s next to come.

XO,

Jamie