Beyond
Walking

By Ronda Gates, MS

Ronda Gates, MS, is a pharmacy grad who traded her white coat for a pair of athletic shoes and never looked back. Her health promotion business, LIFESTYLES, provides motivational speaking, program development, and fitness assessment services to support people making a lifestyle change. She has developed health promotion programs for many organizations nationwide.
Visit www.rondagates.com for a complimentary subscription to Ronda’s weekly email newsletter.

An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

— Henry David
Thoreau

Starting Over

Once again a new year beckons with opportunities for change. Most folks are poised to make life altering resolutions — “From now on, I will no longer (fill in the blank).” Sadly, with one or two slip-ups, we describe ourselves as failures and tend to drop the whole effort in favor of the predictable patterns of the past.

After much contemplation I resolved several years ago not to make any New Year’s resolutions. Instead, I vowed to daily re-awaken the athlete within me by exploring ways to be more resilient. My success has been based on the principle that no matter what comes my way, I know I have resources to pick myself up and begin again. Here are seven tips for getting better at getting up.

1. Set yourself up to succeed. Regardless of your goal it should describe accomplishments, not activities. Remember the SMART acronym that’s been mentioned often in Walk About. S = specific, addressing the five Ws...who, what, when, where and why; M = measurable, including the numeric or descriptive measures that define success; A = action oriented, an achievable plan within the framework of your daily life; R = relevant, ensuring the goal is instrumental to the course of action that makes a better you; T = timely, consider your ability to meet a goal in the constraints of your daily life. Set a target date for completion with milestones along the way that allow you to measure your success.

2. Plan for failure. As ridiculous as that might sound, whether you are starting a different fitness regimen, diet strategy, or new job, it’s critical to be aware that the risk is high for screwing up early in the process. Having set a goal, consider where you might experience a setback and create a strategy for avoiding the detour. What will you do when things go wrong? Who can you call for support? Where can you get expert advice you can count on? Write this information down, keep it in a place where you can see it, and commit to ask for help.

3. Discover what lifts you up. Become your own personal investigator. What simple things can you do to replenish flagging energy quickly? Will reading a book, writing in a journal, or taking a class renew you? Do you thrive on exercise, traveling, keeping busy? Does it help to connect with a friend? Does listening to music move you to that centering spiritual place? When times are tough or stumbling blocks get in your way, use that bag of tricks that return you to your personal comfort zone.

4. Imagine a better future for yourself. Martin Seligman, author of Learned Optimism, found that people become pessimistic in part because they believe bad things are permanent. When we focus on a future in which things are better, current setbacks are nothing more than a temporary bump in the road to better living.

5. Change yourself. The inevitable detours of life are often out of your control, but the one thing that is always in control is you. If you don’t like your job, get the new skills to support moving on. If you are always angry with your kids, get parenting advice from a professional you trust. Remember that the only person you can change is you. Transforming yourself can transform your world.

6. Change your environment. Take stock of the people, objects, and places where you spend your time. Are they associated with your past or where you want to be in the future?

7. Wake up your spirit to start your day. I begin every day with a reading from one of the many motivational journals that fill my bookshelves. Ken Blanchard, author of The One Minute Manager gets up at 5 am to play with his dog for 15 minutes. My friend Susan starts her day with a rousing rendition of a Sousa march. If you awaken your spirit you’ll have a much better perspective for what does and what doesn’t matter.

Why, you ask, didn’t I mention the importance of daily exercise? Because it’s a given. If you want to feel good about yourself, never neglect to exercise unless you are ill. Exercise produces brain endorphins — nature’s natural feel good drug.

Lastly remember: It takes many lapses to make a relapse and many relapses to make a collapse. To avoid a collapse, use any lapse to, in the words of Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields, “pick yourself up, take a deep breath, dust yourself off, and start all over again.”