Pushing Past Limits: Embracing Imperfection and Growth

Hello and welcome to another episode of Words With Myself.

Before we start the podcast, I just want to say thank you for putting up with my voice, because I have a sore throat and this is how it's coming out, so you'll just have to bear with me while I amble through the podcast like this. I'm just going to try and get it done anyway.

And that kind of takes us into the theme of the podcast, which is awareness of our patterns of behaviour and the decisions that we make.

It could be that I could decide to say well because my voice is like this I'm not going to make the podcast or I'll do it next week or make an excuse or an exception instead of doing that I'm going to show up anyway regardless of how I feel regardless of the condition I am I'm just going to show up and I think that is one of the most important things you can do because when you rely on how you feel to do something you end up being very conditional about whether

you're going to do it or not you wait for the perfect parameters which never really arrive. If you want to go to the gym and you're saying, well, I want to have loads of energy and good rest and the right food and all of this kind of stuff, that's only going to be a limited portion of your life that you're actually going to be able to spend doing the habit that you want to start. Whereas if you want to learn to be consistent, you have to learn to do things anyway, to push through, to persevere.

On the flip side of that, there is also the other case, where we are so used to persevering. We are so used to being strong and telling ourselves to get it done or not to prioritise how we feel, not to prioritise what we want to do, where we're not making excuses but we genuinely need rest or we genuinely need to look after our health.

This isn't one of those instances but there are a lot of those instances where I would push through anyway and I would do things to the detriment of my health because it was almost like this drive to overcome any form of obstacle or barrier.

When you are hyper-independent, when you have had to be your own source of strength and support and your own supply of comfort and care, you learn to become invulnerable and you try to maximize yourself to the best of your ability so that you are limiting your weaknesses so that even eating or sleeping becomes this sort of challenge where you are greater than the need for sleep you are greater than your need for food you can go without you can

overcome you can be stronger rise above your primal instincts and i know it might sound silly to some people but for a lot of people is our reality, in which we don't even want to feel like we can be vulnerable when it comes to any aspect. We want to feel like we can transcend all of our weaknesses and have no weaknesses and only have strengths. And to prove that to ourselves constantly, to do things to the detriment of ourselves or to harm ourselves or to put ourselves in harm's way,

just so we can say, well, look, I can take it. I'm strong enough. I can tolerate mass amounts of pain and that means that anything that you do to me, you can't hurt me more than I can hurt myself. And I can imagine how that can sound to somebody who hasn't had to be put in that position before, where they had strong support structures around them when they were younger. But for people that didn't, they had to be that for themselves.

They had to be that source of strength and it doesn't matter whether that is financial or physical or mental whatever it is whatever it was that you needed as a child but didn't receive you end up showing up for yourself in that way where you want to make sure that you can never be put in that position again or never let someone else put you in that position again for instance somebody who was physically abused and they were

a child so they weren't as strong as the person who was abusing them they might go to the gym and work out and become ultra strong because in their mind they are still that little boy or little girl who wants to overcome that feeling that anyone can do that to them again. They want to make sure that they are so strong that if they were in that situation again, that they could do something to protect themselves because they were at a time in their life where they couldn't.

Or if they didn't have any money, they might dedicate their life to the pursuit of financial success because they never want to be in the position again where they're watching their loved ones not be able to have the things that they want or not be able to feed their family or not be able to do the things that they want to do because they are limited financially.

What we lack as children typically ends up being our primary motivators as adults. If you think to yourself, what did I lack as a child? What was missing? What did I feel like I was really yearning for? Was it comfort or love or support or money or food or security? You will typically notice that what you strive to be in your life or what you are striving to obtain is the opposite of what you lacked. If it was love, you're aiming to give as much love as possible.

If it was security, you're aiming to have as much security as possible, as much stability, as much comfort.

And it can be quite hard to decipher just how much of an impact this has on you, because you might notice that the more you dig the more you pull at that thread the more you see that all of your decisions all of your thoughts are guided by these patterns these learned behaviors these things that happen to you and how it felt how it made you feel you then took that information and you built up some form of defense mechanism or need or want through that.

Some experiences are so traumatic that we don't even see that even 5, 10, 15, 20, an entire lifetime of years later, they are still affecting every decision that you make. If you tend to be overly nice and overly understanding and you're always out for other people and never out for yourself, the chances are there was never someone who was out for you. So you aim to show up in the world as that person for every other person.

But that contaminates every decision that you make all of your decisions up until that point in your life where you realize this and you say okay i understand that this is just a pattern that's come from trauma or a traumatic experience and i'm going to aim to make better decisions more aligned with who i am today until you do that you will keep making these decisions through this lens you will keep seeing the world in the same way because you're not aware that what

is you is not really you it's just the patterns that you have been doing day after day after day for all of your life probably and that's why it's important to bring this awareness because until you're aware of the pattern and the cause of your decision making you can't change it you can't address it. You can't do anything about it. You have to have the awareness to go, I understand now. I understand why I'm making these decisions.

It could be things like, you know lots of things that you need to do, but you're not doing them. Why? Why is that? You know it's good for you. You know you should be doing it. Why are you not doing that for you? Because it conflicts with something else and something else that you're not seeing. You have a resistance for a reason. That resistance is not stupid. You're not lazy. You're not an idiot or ADHD or any of these things.

It's because this pattern was developed in such a traumatic way and has been refined over such a long period of time that it feels like it's become a part of you. And in some way it is. Your ego is purely made up of these patterns.

If you didn't have these patterns, then you would simply think every day was a fresh day and you wouldn't have any memory or you wouldn't learn anything but you think about all of these things that you've memorized over the years all of this information that you've stored everything that has led you to become the person that you are today as stored information well.

There are things that conflict and there is new information that has come into light but that doesn't necessarily mean that the patterns have changed or your behavior has changed because you can't just throw out a habit or a pattern that's been going on for the last 20 years just because a new bit of information come out even if you know that that information is the right thing to do but that's not how the brain works it forms these patterns if you imagine a mountain and it's

got covered in snow but skiers have gone down the slope from years and years and years and you can see all of the tracks in the mountain those are your patterns and new information is the light dusting of snow like it covers the top but you can still see those huge grooves from where people have gone on them from years and years and years that is those behavior models that you have learned and they are ingrained into the fiber of your being so you have to assess new information

and see where your actions conflict. Where you know what you should do, but you're not doing it. Or you know that something is wrong for you, but you do it anyway. Why are you doing these things? If you unpick this and you truly sit down and reflect on this, you will get the answers. Only you can possibly know where these patterns formed and why they formed. And once you've understood this, you can then look to implement new behaviours.

And form new patterns ones that align with who you are now and what you believe in and you can let go of the old patterns you can stop those forms of behavior that you do just because you've always done them just because you've always done something that doesn't make it right that just means that you have this pattern of behavior that needs to be changed and you can't just change a pattern it has to be a process you

have to understand why that pattern is there in the first place because it wasn't for no reason. These things didn't just come up out of nowhere. The chances are they were there to keep you safe, to keep you protected, to look after you, or to give you what you needed in a rudimentary way. And just because you've outgrown these, that doesn't mean that your body hasn't still learned that this is what keeps me safe.

Why am I going to go against these things that keep me safe? Why am I going to go against these things that have looked after me for all these years and you need to come up with a good reason for that because it's true they may have kept you safe but that doesn't mean that they are optimal or that they align with your beliefs now you wouldn't choose to behave that way if you hadn't have always done it that way but in order to get rid of that you have to let your body and

your brain and your mind and your soul know that it's safe to give it up that it's okay that you've moved on that you acknowledge the necessity of that pattern you acknowledge how it kept you safe and provided something to you you acknowledge it and love that part of you you accept it and honor it but also let go of it to say that it's no longer serving you that it's no longer necessary and it's not what you want anymore and that way you can truly move on thank you for listening.