Improvement Begins with I

By , SparkPeople Blogger
Improvement……we all want it but how do we get there?  When I first started on SparkPeople over two years ago I was seeking a lot of personal improvement.  The word itself tells us where to start – with “I”.  Then if we add a few more letters to the word we get I’m..PROVing..what I MEaNT.  To me that word speaks the truth that we need to start with ourselves and then prove what we’ve decided to do, day in and day out to get the results that we want to attain.

Quite frequently where we lose our way, or lose our hope is on the days where we don’t quite live up to our expectations.  We deviate from our plan and then convince ourselves that we failed.  Then what happens? 

I follow a blogger named Mastin Kipp, and he writes for The Daily Love.  I liked what he wrote recently about handling failure when he said, “It allows us to see that there really is no such thing as failure – that all you are doing is producing a result. And what you do with that result will greatly determine that outcome, far greater than any other force.”

One of the best things I think I have learned through this process of losing weight and keeping it off is that any one day is a brush stroke on the larger painting of my life.  It does not make the whole picture.  I have plenty of opportunity to correct the ultimate outcome of the masterpiece.  I am not doomed to repeat the same brush stroke over and over.  Many of the world’s greatest artists painted over something they didn’t like to get the masterpiece we enjoy today.

I started with a plan three years ago, and I’ve modified it many times as I’ve learned through the process.  If you think I made it through that time proving what I meant without error, then you need to think again.  There were plenty of cookies, hot out of the oven brownies, frozen margaritas, queso…well you get the picture.  If I would have deemed any one of those an ultimate failure and not gotten past it, well I wouldn’t be writing this blog on maintaining a large weight loss would I?

How do you handle it when you deviate from your plan?  Do you see it as something you can get past, or does it stop you in your tracks?  Do you think about giving up because of the “failure” or do you realize it’s a “result” that isn’t a destination? How can you learn to move past it and make progress in your journey?