I could start bleating on about how gym-goers couldn’t be more THRILLED when a new person joins their club in order to put your mind at ease. I could also share a bunch of anecdotes about how I also started out in a baggy greying tshirt (surrounded by tight arses in even tighter tees), to make you feel like you’re not alone in your trepidation. Or about my paranoia regarding my stinky pits and beetroot coloured face, so hot at times I swear you could have used it as a heat source to fry an egg.
However, I’d rather cut through to the meaty marrow of the matter. There is only one reason the thought of the gym makes you cower behind the sofa and it’s this:
You don’t realise you have the power to decide how you’re going to respond to you own feelings.
*pause for dramatic effect*
You don’t need me to tell you that if you go to the gym (and by gym, I of course means exercise in general. I realise not all exercise begins and ends in a gym), you are going to look and feel better, become calmer, more productive, be less prone to anxiety and depression and general malaise, and develop a sunny outlook on life, the likes of which you might never have experienced. You’re whole vibe (if you’ll forgive me for using that word) will rise.
In other words, by refusing exercise you’re leaving money on the table. Which means that your decision to believe the feelings that are telling you you don’t enjoy the gym is fucking up your life. Well, at least preventing it from being as cool as it could be.
Tough love over, now onto the good stuff.
You DO have the power to decide how you’re going to respond to your own feelings. So, if the feelings are unhelpful and smack of “I can’t face the gym”, you can decide NOT to listen to them and therefore find yourself NOT retreating to the sofa. Instead you are welcome to ignore them, push on through the discomfort (which again, is only thought), and go to the gym, in your baggy greying tshirt, anyway.
You don’t need to CHANGE your thinking (or subsequent feelings) about the gym manually, with weird mantras and tricks to get your subconscious in line, you just need to realise your feelings about the gym are nothing more solid or real than thought, and most importantly, realise that as thought, you have the power to decide what you’re going to do with them.
Are you going to respond to those feelings by believing them and dodging anything that even looks like a raised heartbeat, are you going to decide to give them the middle finger and go after the much higher vibe / better feeling life that you derserve?
You are the decision-maker in your life. You are the one who chooses what feelings to listen to and what feelings to give the middle finger to. So, if a particular strain of thinking / feeling is fucking you up? Give it the heave-ho.
See you soon in a hiit class, bitch – I’m the one sweating like a pig, in a crappy tshirt with a face the colour of beetroot.
Stay salty, bitches XX