Yourself before your Health:

    Everyone one of us has struggled with some aspect of our health in our lives, be it our weight or our appearance. I know that I have tried many things since I gained those extra pounds to get rid of them with varying degrees of success, but the common theme is that the weight came back in short order. Most people can relate to this having spent time on diets and with weight loss pills and the like, finding that the achievements they do get to never stick around. This is a good metaphor for many of those other physical health aspects of ourselves that we try to change over the years from our appearance to our cholesterol and blood pressure. By concentrating on the immediate problem, we gain successes that doesn’t stick around. The reason for this is that we are constantly treating the symptom rather than the problem.

    We have already seen how our world is shaped by the lens that we look at it through, that our perception of our reality creates our reality. This problem is no different, yet we never analyze the lens that we look at ourselves with. The reality of it is that, for the vast majority of us, we have a negative outlook on ourselves and our worth, even to ourselves. We don’t believe that we deserve even what we have, much less those dreams on the horizon. This outlook of negativity is a perception filter that we have in place when we look in the mirror or into ourselves and it is one that we rarely analyze and adjust to better suite our lives and the lives that we want to live.  Simply put, our perception of ourselves is creating the reality of ourselves.

    So the task in front of us one that we have done time and again at this point as we look to achieve our dreams. We have to analyze the perception filter that we are looking at ourselves with and work to change that filter so that we can see ourselves as wonderful and deserving people. We need to change that core belief in our own worth before any exterior work will stick. It is time that we worked on ourselves from the inside out rather than the outside in, though most never even move in when they work on the outside.

    The process is going to be a tough one, even worse than changing one of the filters we look at the world with. We have to take that same attention to analyze the filter that we look at ourselves and we have to realize that it is a flawed and detrimental to our dreams and goals as our old external filters were. We have to change it so that we can see ourselves as deserving and healthy people so that when we change the exterior to match, those changes will stick rather than be sabotaged by the flawed self filter we have in place. For me, I use self-talk scripts. These are short things that I can say at certain points in the day to reaffirm the beliefs that I want to hold. They can feel very silly when you start them, but repetition makes them a reality in our lives and will work to change the filter we have in place. There are other methods out there from meditation to self help books and classes.

    It is time to find that a method to work on our emotional health and inner self so that when we make those great external changes, we have the framework to support those changes as well.