It’s been 2 years since I hit the gym for the first time. I am away from home, and an Indian. So I have to move back and forth between two festivals which we all know. and then this pandemic. So my gym story has kind of its own on-and-off time. But I am not gonna tell you all the gym stuff, I just realize some fears before the gym, I stopped going to the gym so many times and started to. So I got this feeling so many times that I cannot ignore it for now. So I wanna talk about a mentality of fear that keeps us from doing anything, and that keeps us from living into now.
The fear of something is bigger than the actual thing. So in this case it’s the fear of going to the gym. So two years ago, me and my friend I both decided that we will hit the gym. We took approx a month to decide, we always find a reason not to do it. Sometimes we convince ourselves that it’s the office timing, sometimes it is not the month’s start. We always convinced ourselves and didn’t actually start.
Then even after a month we still wanted to go, so in the evening we went to talk and started the next day in the morning. The first day was mixed, not so hard, but it began to become hard, on the next day and harder on the next day. It kept getting harder. And after two weeks, one day when we woke up in the morning we decided to skip. And the next day and then the next day, so we actually skip a week. And then we somehow ended up not going. That was it, I know we seem a little lazy, but yeah right after two weeks we did give up
After that, we again become normal and just office people. And now let me tell you a reason why we started actually. We have two different seniors of the same age, and both have so different personalities. One of them looks younger than the other one. So we were inspired by the younger one. We all do this, and we get inspired, not by the hard work that person is putting in, but by the outcome that he is getting. That’s the problem, we get inspired but not motivated. We always need to learn that in order to achieve something big we need hard work and strategy. This is a process, and we are not in love with the process but with the outcome. And that’s the reason we give up easily.
One week later, we met our senior and told him that we have left the gym, he was a little conscious about us giving up on something. He is someone who always inspires me to go for it. So in his own way, he did it again. So our senior asked us to go to the gym, and click a photo working out, if we won’t he will take the gym monthly fee from our salary. Now this changed something. Although in our mind we knew that he was joking, it was also there that what if was not. Now the fear turned, and we decided the next morning to give it one another shot. And this time we did it until Diwali. And then we have to go back home and we left the gym again. It lasted two months.
So in this case fear actually helped us get back. So we can always use fear the other way around, and do what we actually want. For instance, instead of telling yourself that it will be hard today because of leg day, tell yourself that you will gain fat and look bad if you won’t go. Or worst, you will lose your girlfriend, you will always be a loser if you won’t go. Sometimes this works, Don’t do it too much or you will lose confidence :p
So the next time we wanted to start the gym again, it took a month again, because of the excuses again, So, in this case, I learned that when we fear something we always try to find some reason not to do it. We convince ourselves that we will do it when this happens, and we keep pushing that day forward. And that doesn’t make your fear decrease, it will increase it more. This fear is so small also that we probably won’t even realize that we are in fear and making such decisions that are destroying our time.
So I came to realize that, if somehow you want to do something in your life, just ignore any kind of excuse that is coming in the way and jump right into it. It’s like, Sometimes you have to run before you walk.- Iron Man. Or find any quote that motivates you. This one is for me 😛
Now even if I have stopped gym for so long I can start anytime. And even if I have no time to go to the gym I always find time to do exercise. So I think if we really want to do it, we will find some way to do it anyhow. I guess we all have to face fears in order to overcome them.
Thanks for reading.