To Fail Is To Evolve
What do you tell yourself about failure?
What guidelines and rules do you try to abide by that you deem yourself a loser at when you don’t “succeed”?
How many times along your weight loss journey have you considered yourself a failure?
We tend to write a story of failure when the facts of a current situation do not add up to what we thought they would be. When we compare where we thought we should be at a given moment to where we actually are. And while we COULD continue to call this failure – we could also begin to see these situations as opportunities to learn.
We could stop seeing “failure” as a bad thing.
We could instead allow ourselves the space to grow, learn, and evolve.
To evolve is defined as to develop gradually, especially from a simple to a more complex form.
The path to losing weight (and really any other path in life) is littered with opportunities to learn and evolve. But often we deem these same opportunities as failures. We keep striving for some point in life where we’ve got it all figured out and make no “mistakes”. Guess what? That’s not what we were created to do – we were created to develop from a simple form to a more complex one.
So imagine if you could start looking at life as one growth opportunity after another. Imagine if you opened yourself up to the possibility that this weight loss journey was MEANT for you to learn more about yourself and step further into the person God created you to be.
At my writing workshop – I had the opportunity to send in the chapters I had written for editing/review. When I got the chapters back with the review comments – I immediately wanted to start making changes and addressing the critiques that I had received. Luckily, our fearless leader – Angela Lauria – cautioned us from doing this. She suggested that we continue “writing forward” and not to allow ourselves to get sidetracked by going back and making revisions at this point. That we would be much better served to continue writing and go back to make changes once our first drafts were completed.
It really struck me how this parallels other areas of our lives, including weight loss. So often, we want to go back in time and recreate a certain time or event. Maybe a time in our lives where we were at our goal weight. Where we physically felt our best. Where food felt easy. Or maybe go back and change when we “fell off the wagon” – eating whatever whenever – gaining weight back.
And that’s not to say there aren’t lessons we learned in those situations to take with us and move forward with – much like my editing comments. But as we grow and evolve – we are no longer the person we were back then. That season of our lives is over with – it served its purpose – and now it’s time to move forward.
But our desire to hold onto something in the past, keeps us from being able to be fully present and grateful for who we are now. We “fail” to acknowledge that the very person we are today is necessary for that next level of growth.
One of the reasons that Angela suggested we keep writing forward was because our voice would continue to evolve as we wrote. And when we went back to make the overall edits – that new voice would be able to show through.
That’s my suggestion for you today – weave the lessons of your past experiences into the voice of who you are today. That perfect person who stands before you with new growth and experience. That person who is necessary to evolve into the next level of self.
God did not create you to be a static person, never changing, and never challenged. You are created new every day.
