Personal growth can be hard stuff at times. You have to be brave enough to look in the mirror and really embrace what you are trying to do. Sometimes it is not easy looking at the parts of yourself that you want to change … or that have been made apparent that you need to change. Funny how that happens.

There is a universal truth though, that when that happens, either it is made apparent to you or you decide to work on “something”, help is always right there in front of you. Call it God. The magic of the secret. Synchronicity. The Universe having your back … your materials for personal growth are always there in front of you for your use when the lesson comes.

Doing the work, sometimes can feel dark and quiet. Very tough. You can think about it like the metamorphosis that a caterpillar goes through, to emerge as a butterfly. It can be hard work, but again, you always have the help needed. And with faith you know it is worth because on the other side is better, higher quality of life, high vibration. The ability to fly. However you want to think about it. Read more here.

There is a “place” in this person growth though, that is very uncomfortable and can be hard to deal with. That moment when the cocoon is opening, the new butterfly is emerging … and the new butterfly DOES NOT know that it is a butterfly. The last it knew … it was a caterpillar. So the wings thing is new. The size and shape is new. Everything is new. The ability to fly is so new and different.

Emerging a butterfly from a caterpillar can be uncomfortable, overwhelming and scary.

It is wonderful if you have an emotional and/or spiritual practice that helps you to stay grounded during this process. Staying grounded meaning … knowing how to connect and hopefully stay align with who you are deep down. In your soul. That part never changes. God created you as such, not everything about you needs to change. Just some of the surface things. So staying connected to what you BELIEVE in is critical. Staying inline with that “main line”. Thats important in this “phrase” as it can be so uncomfortable, being that new version of yourself. It can be super easy to go back to old ways that you are trying to shed, as it’s comfortable. I mean heck, here you are with wings and …. you have no idea what those things are. You don’t know how to use them. You are going to have to go on faith that the transformation that you went through will give you want you need to keep moving forward. Thats the scary faith part. Uncomfortable part. Because you feel like there is so much risk. The ground looks so far down … and you have never flown before.

Acknowledging that this “phase” can be difficult is a level of awareness that you can fine tune and help you to “master” the ability to GO THROUGH personal growth. It is a “skill” to travel through personal growth. Hopefully with less road rash than necessary. It’s a double whammy. Learning to do personal growth. AND learning and changing for the particular lessons at hand.

Have faith. Meditate. Be Brave. Keeping moving forward.

Grace and Grit

Life happens …. blah blah blah. To cut to the chase … run the race so you can do the VERY BEST THAT YOU CAN. Hahaha. The Army had it right.

BE ALL THAT YOU CAN BE!!

FINISH LINES NOT FINISH TIMES

1. Attitude is everything. Try really hard to not down on the race, yourself or what not. Just leave it at home. It is what it is. No amount of judgement or criticism is going to help. The only thing that will help is to keep a positive attitude. DO THE BEST THAT YOU CAN.

I had a 50K after my 2nd Ironman that I really didn’t want to do. I did but didn’t. It was mostly due to some personal things going on, but I really didn’t train at all between the Ironman and the 50K. I got the silly idea to take a picture during each loop of this 50K. Which turned out to be on a 0.8 mile loop. How funny is that. Well … even with the Kansas winds, I took my pictures at each loop. Had fun. PR’ed each distance and got a sub 6 50K. Keep your mind right, thats a big part of doing your best.

3. Say your mantra, over and over. What this means is, use that phrase that always gets you through. Over and over. Don’t stop. This will help you stay in the game and do #1 well. I am a fan of “I am stronger” as a mantra. I have used that for 2 Ironman. It’s a lovely practice. A form of meditation and can really enrich your life. I strengthened this mantra by repeating it for the entire marathon at Ironman Texas in ‘18. It was a full moon. So beautiful. So when everyone was walking, I was making up time by running and following my plan. Repeating my mantra until I finished up!

4. Do not let your mind win, put your foot down and do your best. It sounds easy. It’s not. It’s probably one of the things we as a society do not so well across the board. We whine. We make excuses. We tell ourselves …. this is really hard, I’m justified in walking or whatever. When if you dug down a bit deeper you would find more.

5. Don’t be afraid to cut things short, walk a bit or whatever. So with all of these things being said, do give yourself GRACE to rest and go easier if you need to. If you are not prepared, and need to adjust your expectations, then do it. Do the best that you can for that day, that moment, what life has handed you to manage. Sometimes doing your best means walking and winging to yourself instead of being hard on yourself and forcing yourself to perform past what you are prepared for.

BALANCE GRACE AND GRIT

For all the lotion addicts out there (myself included), this hand oil is amazing! I already have all my work peeps using it, as well as a lot of my family. This lotion is from Sundari Ayurvedic Skincare, it is very light, non greasy and it works really well! It’s made from natural plant oils, absorbs quickly and comes in a rollerball so it’s super portable and easy to use! And it doesn’t contain any harmful chemicals, no alcohol. And no animal testing, what more could you ask for?! The link is below, and I’ve also seen this at Costco. They have lots of other amazing stuff on their website as well, I’m a huge fan of their face cleansers too!

Happy shopping!

https://www.sundari.com/products/product.asp?idprod=86&skin=0&idcategoria=15h

One of the ways to EXECUTE a race ON POINT is to keep as many things as possible from going sideways or learn how to deal with it quick and effectively.

TRUTH: SOMETHING ALWAYS GOES SIDEWAYS!!!

We have expectations. We set goals. We work hard. Most of us are perfectionist (or close to it) and have a vision of what success looks like. We can have a hard to realizing that the journey IS more important and the image of success can change in a heart beat. Or a race season. So when things start to go sideways we start to fret about “success”.
Mental grit: when things go sideways, keep your mind on point, do what you have practiced and ADJUST FIRE.

In this way you can minimize and quiet the negative thoughts and judgments that work to just bring us down and steal our energy.

1. Keep in mind that you are out there to learn and grow. Not to be perfect. TO HAVE FUN. Get that Best Race Picture. EVAH!!! That swim went a little sideways … get your mind right and get out of that water and say “HECK YES” to the camera.

2. Practice practice practice. Yes this is suppose to be fun, but fun on race day is about practice and fine tuning things an practice days. Find the balance. Practice your nutrition, practice doing things different. Practice drinking cola once in an while.

3. Keep things SIMPLE. Easy to repeat. Easy to execute. Is having real food on the bike might sound good, is it easy to do each and every training ride? Easy to do at a race? If so, GREAT! Just ask the question. You don’t have to have all the fancy gadgets to do well. Being consistent and doing your BEST each training day and race is the way to excel.

4. Ask questions and give feedback to your coach or training partners. Ask about the goals and purposes of workouts. Listen to their struggles and their successes. Learn from others. As long as it is inline with how you live, train and race. Make small changes to what you are doing to help fine tune. Then practice more.

5. Work to be prepared. Keep extra food on ya. Clothes. Tri “stuff” in the truck. Extra “most important” things on your bike. Like base salts. Extra in your bike bag for when you dumb yours down your shirt or wherever that bump made it go. 🙂 Identify the most important things and have extra or DO NOT FORGET them. 🙂

Meet Ganesh. My buddie that I’ve had for many years. I bought him for my birthday during my beginning years of yoga teacher training. It was a big turning point in my soul healing. Ganesh, for those that know yoga, means remover of obstacles. 🙂 I got a lot of them so I thought at the time that I could use all the help that I could find. Plus the blue eyes I fell in love with. And his soft looking face.

He’s gone with m to all trips, races and what not. Been with me through a ton of good things and ugly things. I’ve almost melted down when I’ve realized I’ve left him somewhere. I’ve done a lot of extra driving to make sure he is by my side.

Why … because he is an anchor for some qualities in life that I am working to cultivate. To have stronger in my life. And I believe in magic, miracles and pixie dust. Ganesh holds that idea for me when life gets tough.

Binkie. Security blanket. Totem. Prayer beads. Pet rock.

Overeating, sexting, drinking, mind numbing amounts of netflix.

Over exercising. Working too much. Yelling and blowing up.

It’s totally ok for babies and young people to have stuff animals, security blankets and the like. As adults/parents we know that one things the little people need to learn is how to soothe themselves, deal with emotions and learn how to be ok. Even when life is more fun.

We give the new babies a binkie. Some of us are partly given them binkies as a replacement for nurturing and being a parent. Tho a baby using a binkie to learn to self sooth is ok. When done mindfully. It’s a good point to drive home that it’s not unfrequent for parents to substitute parenting and nurturing for binkies, bouncing chairs and what not.

Our habit of inappropriately dealing with life starts very early.

We then give our children all these kinds of toys. Stuff animals and what not to … help them. Let’s just say that parent x is doing everything just fine and the special stuff animal that they purchase for their kid is just a lovely add to their life. It’s ok and needed for the child to bond with this stuff animal. To them it. Take care of it and what not. There are many life lessons that are learned, practiced. And it’ socially acceptable.

At what age does it become unacceptable to not have binkies and security blankets.

We give up the magic of stuff animals for tough love, logic and “growing up”. We learn to be more hard and shut off, then remain soft and talk to stuff animals that aren’t actually alive.

They are now selling weighted blankets.

Perhaps we are doing ourselves wrong with expecting to be able to deal with life without providing ourselves “comfort”. I mean, we do provide ourselves with “comfort” but it’s usually in the form of the lists above. Things that aren’t inline with super healthy.

Perhaps we need to get back to soothing ourselves in a soft way. Don’t be worried about what other people think. Have stuffed animals that we take everywhere with us. Stuffed animals that we keep in our meditation spaces or our quiet and private areas.

Eating protein helps with losing fat, for a few reasons.

1. When you eat more protein, you tend to feel fuller longer.

Protein stimulates the release of satiety (stop-eating) hormones in the gut. So when you eat protein, you naturally tend to eat less, without feeling hungry.

(You can test this theory if you want. Go and try to eat an entire plain skinless chicken, or a few pounds of lean fish.)

2. Protein makes your body work to digest it.

Not all nutrients take the same energy to digest. Fat and carbohydrates are pretty easy for your body to digest and absorb, but protein takes more energy to digest and absorb.

If you eat 100 calories of protein, you’ll only use about 70 calories of it. (This thermic, or heat-producing, effect of protein is why you sometimes get the “meat sweats” after a big protein-heavy meal.)

3. Protein also helps you hang on to lean mass while you’re losing fat.

When you’re in a significant energy deficit (i.e. eating less than you burn), your body tries to throw out everything — fat, muscle, bone, hormones, etc. — all the stuff you need. It doesn’t tend to throw out just fat and keep muscle… unless you eat lots of protein.

Let’s take a deeper look: Protein, lean mass, and energy restriction

A recent study at McMaster University in Canada explored what would happen if people who were on a very low-calorie diet (about 40 percent less than normal energy needs), ate a lot of protein, and worked out hard.

For 4 weeks, a group of young men in their 20s were basically starved, but on a high-protein diet — about 2.4 g/kg.

So, for instance, a 200 lb (91 kg), relatively active young man whose energy needs would normally be 3000 calories per day might get:

• 1800 calories per day (40 percent less than normal)
• 218 grams of protein per day (2.4 x 91 kg)

This means that out of those 1800 calories per day, about 48 percent of them were from protein.

The men trained hard — lifting weights and doing high-intensity intervals 6 days a week.

After 4 weeks, on average:

• The men gained about 1.2 kg (2.6 lb) of lean body mass (LBM).
• They lost about 4.8 kg (10.5 lb) of fat.

The fact that they lost fat isn’t surprising, though that amount of fat loss in 4 weeks is pretty impressive.

What is surprising is that they gained LBM.

There was a control group, who ate more of a normal-protein, low-energy diet — about 1.2 grams of protein per kg (so, for our 200 lb / 91 kg man, that would be around 109 grams per day). This group, on average:

• Gained 0.1 kg (0.2 lb) of LBM
• Lost 3.5 kg (7.7 lb) of fat

This study was only 4 weeks long, and on a specific population group under close supervision, but it’s a cool experiment that suggests protein might be able to do some nifty things even under difficult and demanding conditions.

It’s particularly useful because it’s a randomized controlled trial. In other words, it’s not a food questionnaire where you try to remember what you ate last year — it’s a direct comparison of two similar groups whose food parameters are being closely monitored.

We don’t recommend a highly restrictive, high-protein diet combined with a Spartan-style workout plan as a long-term strategy, but if you want to try something crazy for 4 weeks, see if you can replicate these results!