Success, Motivation, Action, Nutrition, Spending

This post is just kind of a random rant. Welcome to a tour of my brain for the evening. This whole thing probably falls into the “too much information” (TMI) category. But, meh, overshare is just generally part of what I do.

I just got home from the grocery store, and my shopping bag has quite a few things that I never have in my fridge. These things include

-grapes
-strawberries
-cheese
-blueberries
-pineapple
-blackberries
-raspberries
-hummus
-celery
-whole wheat crackers

All the fruit is made up of those pre-cut plastic buckets of fruit. Why? Because I’m lazy, and that’s the only way I’ll end up eating it.

So, why on earth was this the summation of my shopping trip?

It has a lot to do with the reason I’ve made more progress in the past 12 days towards my Bronze test judge appointment in figure skating than I’ve made in the past 9 months.

First, a few of my all time favorite quotes:

“Successful people do the things that unsuccessful people are unwilling to do.” -John Maxwell.

You don’t need someone else’s permission to become successful. – Dan Kennedy

The path to success is to take massive, determined action. – Anthony Robbins

“The key to success is discipline. What is discipline? Discipline is self-control.” Gunnery Sgt Phil Yoho, USMC, my NROTC officer instructor

People that meet me generally think I’m one of those super-motivated people that takes massive action, and that’s the reason I’ve done so many things in life and had so many opportunities. People that REALLY know me, however, know that simply isn’t reality. By my very nature, I am a lazy, unmotivated, slacker. I am capable of taking massive action, and have a long track record of doing so, but I do it in crazy spurts of productivity that generate necessary results, and these spurts of activity are spurred only when the pain caused by inactivity exceeds some threshold. It’s like rolling a boulder uphill – it’s not gonna happen unless there is sufficient reason to do so. Otherwise, why bother?

There is really only one glaring exception to this generality about myself: I’ll go out of my way simply to find out where a road or trail goes, or to see what’s around or over something. I’m the one that pushes the button to see what happens, and opens the box just to see what’s inside. I’m the cat that curiosity killed.

OK, so what the heck does this have to do with figure skating, or grocery shopping?

I tend to define myself as a person by external things, and am therefore motivated primarily by external stimuli. When I was in the Navy, the military was a massive part of my identity as a human being. It was the thing from which I drew my desire to succeed, and sometimes, my motivation to even live. Once the Navy was no longer a part of my life, it left a gaping black hole that I tried various ways to fill, and they mostly failed.

Roll around to the end of 2007. With my marriage two years gone, my religious faith buried, and my business in shambles, I was having a massive identity crisis, which required massive action. That’s how I ended up with a massive career change and a drastic change in hobbies.

Entering the tax field was one of the best thing I’ve ever done in my life. I truly love what I do, and nearly two years later I have even more passion for what I’m doing than I did when I started. With the new job also came the motivation to start over financially in it’s entirety, thus the Chapter 7 bankruptcy. After filing bankruptcy, my income also started to increase a little, and for the first time in two years I had some actual disposable income. Oh, and a rink on the way to work.

I’d been a figure skating fan my entire life. One day on a whim I stopped in and asked about learning to skate. I went straight to private lessons on public sessions, and was very fortunate to find a coach that I clicked with.

Fast forward, and while I occasionally speed skate, whack a puck around the ice, curl, and shoot, figure skating has become the thing I attach my identity to, along with work.

I’m in a phase of massive action at work, for one very simple reason: I reached the point where I breached the breaking point, and the pain of working long hours and building the systems I’m building will result in a great enough reward at the end to make it worth the sacrifice now. These systems will enable me to increase my income while working remotely, which will satisfy my curiosity to travel the world AND enable me to spend more time doing stuff related to figure skating. Tada – external motivation!

Back to working on my trial judging. Why am I suddenly motivated to advance towards that goal rapidly? Again, simple. Since figure skating is now deeply attached to my self-esteem and sense of self-worth (no matter how bad of a thing that attachment is), my failure to keep satisfactory pace with my goals for my own skating skills has led me to compensate for that failure by shifting my focus back to judging.

It’s probably overcompensation, to be honest. I’ve trialed three test sessions in two weeks, will take my Bronze written exam in a few weeks, and have also started working on test requirements for my Silver appointment, and have registered for the Silver level school at Nationals in January. I have also set things up to start working on my accountant appointment and System Specialist appointment. Yep, that’s officially overcompensation.

And why? Because I’m not picking things up on the ice at the pace I want. And why is that??? This finally answers the grocery question (btw, the cheese cubes, grapes, and strawberries that just became dinner during the course of typing everything above was actually very delicious! and filling! and, OMG! healthy!).

When our rink was shut down in September for maintenance, we all had to skate elsewhere. After a lesson at APEX one morning, my coach and I were talking in the parking lot about food. It’s been obvious for a while that my weight has become a limiting factor in the advancement of my skating skills. I can’t jump any higher, it makes balancing difficult, it kills my flexibility, tires me out faster carrying the extra baggage, etc., etc., etc.

So we were talking about food. One of the biggest things out of that conversation was that I should buy pre-cut, packaged veggies and fruits, that way they’re convenient and I’ll actually eat them. And I will do so, since when I’m sitting in front of a computer, which I do 12+ hours per day, I tend to graze on whatever’s at arms length. That tends to be a lot of chips, soda, cookies, donuts, pastries, chocolate (one of our employee’s moms owns a local chocolate business….that’s dangerous), and things that are microwaveable for lunch and dinner — meals in a bag or a box, which are never healthy. OR…lunch becomes a run to a nearby drive through.

I was hoping that some of the good dietary changes I was forced into at Burning Man would stick with me. I even did that 30 day Mountain House meal challenge, which worked great, for a while.

Throughout all of this, though, I have simply lacked the motivation to make a lasting change.

So why am I now staring a 3 pounds of fruit sitting on my desk?

I want to succeed ON the ice, not just in the judge’s box. I know for a fact that I will consider myself a failure if I don’t achieve certain things, such as eventually getting up to at least my Novice moves, Adult Silver freestyle, pre-silver compulsory dances, and Novice free dance.

I’ll never forget something that Madison said to me one day after practice in the locker room. I was fairly pissed off at myself for having a bad practice session, and she asked what was wrong. My reply was, “I suck!” She looked at me with a strange look and said, “Umm, you just started.” I had been skating for just over a year at that point, but in the grand scheme of things, she was still right – a year is just beginning still. It gave me pause, calmed me down, and is just one of those things I remember sometimes and that I’ll never forget. Kids can be amazingly insightful at times.

Sitting at a 4+ hour test session this morning, after a practice session myself, was motivating as both a skater and as a judge. Talking with Leslie, another trial judge, was part of it, because she’s 45, has a bum knee, and an artificial hip, and she’s got her Senior moves, pre-Gold dances, and at least her Adult Silver freestyle done.

So there it is. Now I have all this fruit to eat. Fun times.

I wanted to write about my battle with overspending on food, too, and lifestyle choices, but writing this kind of drained me mentally. Needless to say, the insane amounts of money I spend every month eating out or on crap at the corner 7-11 are intimately tied to my poor diet, and it is literally my single biggest monthly expense, exceeding my truck payment, my rent, and even my figure skating bill (we’re talking a four figure dollar amount on really, really bad months).

I fix one problem, and I help solve at least three others: overspending, jumps/edges/balance, and self-esteem. Not to mention adding a few years to my life, and making those years more productive.