“Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength.”

~ Arnold Schwarzenegger

Do the thing you don’t want to do. If it’ll bring you good things in the end, tired isn’t always a worthy excuse. Push past fatigue and do it anyway. In the video below, I’m talking about exercise, but it’s true of anything you know you need to do, but don’t want to. Your struggles develop your strengths. Do the thing.

Watch the video below, or read the transcript that follows, and then push past fatigue and move your way into more energy and better productivity.

Hey, Michelle Cederberg here coming to you once again in the middle of a run that I did not want to do. I tried to talk myself out of it many times from the moment I woke up today. How often do you get to the end of a busy week or even a busy day and say to yourself, “I really need to get some movement” but what you’d really rather to do is put your feet up on the sofa. And so begins that endless tug of war between what you know you should do and what you’d rather do. Sometimes the sofa wins, and I want to tell you why we need to listen to our body and what it is telling us it needs (usually movement), even though we feel like we don’t want to.

I’ve been on the road an awful lot. If you follow me, you’ve seen that I’ve been traveling almost every week since the beginning of September – actually, the middle of August – at national board meetings for my Professional Speakers Association, for a mastermind event that I was in, and of course for all the speaking events that I’ve been doing across this great country in the last eight weeks. I got home last night after four days on the road, having done a bit of movement during the week, but nowhere near the levels that my mind and body crave.

And then today, I was in a professional development meeting for my Professional Speakers Association all day long, from 8:30 until 2:30. I drove home with the intent to put my running shoes on and head out the door. And then I sat down at the kitchen table and started  that tug of war. “Well, maybe I could skip it. Maybe I could go tomorrow. Maybe I can do a little less. Maybe I can skip it… Maybe I can skip it… Maybe I can skip it.” And then I said to my husband, “I’m going to go right now before I can talk myself out of it any further.” And here’s why I needed to do that. I could’ve given myself a big old break and said, “Michelle, you’ve been working real hard. You could take a day off and that’s okay.”

I’m going to tell you why it’s not okay. I have been working hard. I absolutely have. And you in your work day no doubt work hard as well, but it’s usually with cognitive tasks and emotional energy drains that cause a great deal of fatigue and give us this false sense of “God, I’m too tired to exercise”. When we feel that fatigue that’s coming from cognitive and mental strain, the exact thing that we need to do is movement. I did a video about that a while back, check it out, around the channels in which we work…cognitive, physical and emotional.

I’ve spent a lot of time this last week in the cognitive realm and in the emotional realm with not enough movement to make it matter. So, I got my running shoes on and I headed out the door. And man, am I glad that I did. It started off slow, but it’s exactly what my mind and my body needed and it turns out I wasn’t as physically tired as I thought I was. I was mentally, cognitively drained and I needed exactly what I’m getting right now. Fresh air, movement, a little bit of sunshine and enjoying the fall colors. So, think about the ways that you talk yourself out of movement and listen to your body. Somewhere deep down beneath that fatigue it’s craving movement. So, I will challenge you; the next time you are talking yourself out of getting some movement, listen to your body, put on the running shoes, go for a walk, go for a bike ride, go for a run.

If you need it to be short and slow, that is okay. But just do that thing that you’re trying to talk yourself out of. Your mind and body will absolutely thank you. This physical machinery that we live in is amazingly intuitive if we listen to it. And when you give it things that it needs to stay healthy and strong, it will give you in return more self-esteem, more self confidence, more cognitive abilities for the work that you need to do, and you will be firing on all cylinders. It’s how we work. It’s how your body works, and I think that we need to spend more time listening to the amazing physical machinery that can help us have a competitive edge in everything we do.

Until next time, I’m Michelle Cederberg reminding you that we get one chance to do this crazy, wonderful life. I say Dare to Live it Big and dare to do it with a little bit more movement even when you’re trying to talk yourself out of it. Don’t do that. All right, I’m off. I’m going to finish the rest of this run and take in these wonderful views. Happy day to you. Talk to you again soon.

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Michelle Cederberg, CSP, MKin, BA Psyc
CEP, CPCC, ORSC

Empowering today’s dreamers, leaders and go-getters to create the life and career they want.

www.michellecederberg.com
403-850-5589

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