Reboot Part 2

Fast forward a few years and another kid and late one Sunday night I was taking a shower before bed.  The sermon that night had been about gifts and using our talents and how they help us live out our purpose.  It had struck a chord with me. I am not trying to insinuate that raising my children isn’t a noble and admirable purpose.   But is that ALL I should be doing? I didn’t really feel like I was maxing out my potential.  I felt much more like I was surviving, not thriving.  And just barely at that.  While I was in the shower that night I was praying asking God to show me how he wanted to use me, show me what I could and should be doing, and give me purpose.  I stumbled over to my bed and jotted a list in my phone of things that I was either passionate about or that I considered to be my talents and I laid them there at his feet.  For several months I began praying about these items. I would think of small things here and there that would encompass some of the items on my list but never saw any real avenue to grow them.  And as time went by again slowly that hope that things were on the horizon faded in my memory and again I seemed to move on.  

The week between Christmas and New Year’s this year I started having a stirring in my heart again. But this time there was a lot of “Oh no, not this again.” I felt very uncomfortable in my own skin. Quite literally the person looking back at me in the mirror was not who I felt like in my heart and yet she had totally taken over me.  I was sick and unhealthy.  I was ashamed. I was broken.  I was trying as hard as I could to live a life worthy of being a mom to Grace, Sophie, Charlotte and Jack but I felt nothing like a role model, not like a mom to be looked up to and admired. Much like Michael Phelps I felt worthless and needed a purpose. I decided then and there, once and for all, I was changing! I put my stake in the ground and I yelled “No more!”  For all the times in my life that I have wanted to make changes and didn’t stick with them, this time felt drastically different and I’m not sure why.  I feel strongly that my stubborn nature is finally working with me. I will never go back to living the way I was, it was not truly living.  

It’s hard to fully describe how I’ve changed in the last 7 months.  I have lost 35lbs and gained a ton of energy, vitality and most importantly that thing I have craved for years, purpose.  I began tracking my food and working out, I enlisted friends to work out with me and I joined online accountability groups to encourage me in my struggle to change quite literally from the inside out.  My friend Sara who has also been my coach for the last 6 months and I planned a camping trip for our two families in June and I knew it was my chance to ask her some questions that had begun burning in my heart, what is this coaching thing all about?  As our kids and husbands went to bed that first night we sat up until 2 am talking about coaching and the ups and downs and she answered question after question for me as we sat staring at the sky and beautiful embers in the fire slowly went dim and we finally realized how late it was and went off to bed.  I did not sleep well initially; I was wrestling with the idea.  One of the main reasons I didn’t know if I wanted to try this was I hadn’t actually even tried any of Beachbody’s products myself yet.  I had been in a 7 week weight loss plateau.  I was still tracking all my food.  I was still working out 6x/week and everything just stopped.  Something needed to change.

A few weeks later I called Sara, “we leave for the Bahamas in 21 days…..I want to do the 21 day fix!” (Nothing like waiting till the last second! Typical me!) so she loaned me supplies to last me until my order arrived.  She set me up to go to a “what is coaching” sneak peek online the next night.  I began to have more and more answers to my questions and thought maybe this would be fun for me, a little extra income.  So I told her why not sign me up for the discount and I’ll see what I think.  Paul Harvey fans, stay tuned for the rest of the story ….