Yes.  The device went dead.  Here’s the million dollar question:  What does it take to get it back?  Here is a list of things you can do to get your mojo back in no particular order:

Start all over again. I know what you’re thinking: “What is wrong with you, you pelican!  You know I’ve tried that at least 50 times and it hasn’t worked…clown.  Last time I’m reading your blog for any advice.  Sheesh.”  Thank you, I’ll take the beating.  Now shush and listen.  Starting all over again is not going back to what you know and resurrecting it, it’s about starting with something completely new.

• Do not try to eat 5 small meals with the same old chicken and broccoli.  That ain’t gonna cut it.  In fact, I would say start with 3 meals: breakfast, lunch and dinner and then have a snack here and there.
• Give up the thought of trying to eat like you did when you were on point.  Accept anything healthy.  Don’t worry if it is a carb, fruit, protein, Styrofoam—whatever.  Just eat.  If it’s unprocessed, it’s yours.
• Do NOT pick up a fad way of eating:  raw, vegan, paleo or etc. unless that’s what you truly believe in.  This needs to be mindless and easy with absolutely zero pressure.
• Do NOT put a weight loss goal on it or any other type of goal.  JUST HANG OUT FOR A WHILE.

Make 2/3 of your workouts be outside and bodyweight driven. There is something about being a kid again that gets us energized.  I’d ask you to skip to work if I thought you’d do it.  Get up, get out and have fun.

• Do NOT set up a workout to be a body part split unless lifting isn’t your issue.
• Do NOT get 2 feet near an elliptical.  In fact, burn the ones in your gym during prime time.  Although, DO get the people off of the machines first.  They didn’t do anything to you, you know.
• Don’t tell me that it’s winter and it’s cold and blah, blah, blah.  Get up, get out and have fun.
• Do NOT ride the bandwagon of the latest fitness craze.  That only perpetuates the burnout.  But DO do something completely different than what you were doing before that involves all of your bodyweight and agility:  snowshoeing, biking, skiing, hiking, trail running, CATZ and whatever else you can think of that is not lifting or stationary cardio.
• Make general goals like I need to move 4 times this week.  Avoid things like, “I need to lift 3 days and do HIIT 3X’s a week” for now.  They emotionally bog you down and immediately set you up for failure.

Go beneath the water line. You must want this for more than aesthetic reasons and realize that “proving” yourself hardcore is no longer the draw it used to be for your subconscious.  Go down into the deep recesses of your heart and soul and find out why you do this.  Make peace with your thighs.  Love your back fat.  Enjoy your cellulite.  I don’t care how you do it, but move beyond the mirror and start digging in that well spring known as your heart.  Discover other reasons as to why you exercise and eat right.  Now is the time to:

• Journal
• Meditate
• Discover
• Analyze

Now is NEVER the time to:

• Criticize
• Dump on yourself
• Bitch and moan
• Whine

You know this emotional exercise is for you if your immediate thought was, “I don’t have time for this.  I need to lose X amount of pounds.  This stuff is stupid and it’s for those who are too weak to get it done.”  Ding ding ding ding ding!!!!

Change your environment. If you are beaten down right now and trying to get your mojo back but everything that surrounds you binds you to your past, it’s time to move on.  Stop the magazine subscription, block some folks out of your feed on facebook, change gyms if you must and find new friends if need be but do something now.  Don’t let it drag you down even further before you finally cut the umbilical cord.  You are not leaving forever—just until you get healthy.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• What bothers you about it?
• Did you ever do the same thing as what bothers you about it?  If so, why/how?
• How does it make you feel?  Why?  If it’s a super strong reaction, note that.
• Where is that coming from?
• What can you do about it?
• Does this feeling crop up every time you start a new program?

These are just a small sample of questions to ask yourself once you de-clutter your mind.  I have a million more but I’ll start you off here.  Last but not least…

Know your fuel source. Find the accelerant.  Remove all the charred material.  Build it again but this time make it fire proof.  Woop woop!

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 What's Your Fuel Source [15:18m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I want you to envision us just sitting and chatting.  Excuse my afro; it’s a bit unruly today.  And I am still in my night clothes, I hope that’s not awkward for you.  But as we sit and talk, I want you to imagine that this conversation is taking place over several weeks, not in one sitting.  And I want you to imagine that you have told me a lot about you before this conversation is taking place.  The things that make you happy…things from your childhood…all good stuff that you remember shaping you into the woman you are today.  And then I want you to think about the some of the most prominent memories of your childhood that stick out to you instantaneously.  You don’t have to dig.  They’re just sitting there like a book on a table.  And most likely they are not positive.  Now, you’re ready to read.

Like a moth to a flame burned by the fire…

The other day I used the example of laundry as being the thing we were “all about” at the time and I used that on purpose because I wanted to make the point that it doesn’t matter what it is that we’re focusing on, it matters that we’re focused.   This is because if it wasn’t your dream that you took you down, then the fuel source that was giving it life finally burned out.  This flame could have been burning like a raging inferno since you were a kid or it could have had a fresh dose of kerosene poured on it later in life.  Regardless of when it started, it was there or you wouldn’t have been driven.  Denying you have a fuel source is futile, you have one—get over it.  The fact that you lost your mojo says that something went out.  Whether it was a tiny candle or a flame thrower is debatable, but the flame is out.  Gone.  Finito.  Zed.  Zilch.

I refer to us a lot as Type A, driven women.  I want to point out here that they are two separate things.  There are many Type A people out there who are not driven and there are many driven people who are not necessarily Type A, although, the latter is less common.  But being type A is not about a flame.  That’s personality.  Being driven, though, is about a flame and that’s what I want us to focus on.  There is something that is making you like a dog with a bone about whatever it is you want to do and if it burned out, it was not healthy.  Those that can burn for years on end without taking themselves or someone else down with them, either have a healthy fuel source or a lot of fuel to burn.  But how many of us are watching what’s going on in the world today and realizing that very few of us have a healthy fuel source?   We read of tragedy after tragedy of celebrities and every day folk self destructing because they burned themselves out.  Very few of us are pulling from a place of security when we set out to do whatever it is we want to do.

I have millions of conversations with women every week.  Seriously.  Millions.  Ok, maybe more like thousands, but that’s as low as I’m going.   I am a consummate introvert—which is hard to believe—but I am not in the least bit shy.  If you give me access to you, I will absolutely ‘go there’ and help you to find the identity of your mojo whether I am working with you or not.  Why do I tell you this?  Because what I am about to explain to you did not come from a book.  I didn’t read a good book on psychology and then come bring it to the blog.  I know what I know because I’ve been up in enough women’s butts for the past 8 years that I can now write about it.  And I only became interested in it and then convinced of it because of my own personal flame (which was a 5 alarm fire that needed 3 city fire departments to put it out—oy!) that blew out and it took all that I had to do to get it back.

There are two ways that we lose our mojo:  we kill the dream (that was yesterday) or we never really had it in the first place and we somehow discovered that in our quest for validation.  I am sure you are thinking, “You made me read all this so far to tell me that?”  Yes.  Sorry it’s not complicated.  It’s very simple.  Your drive has been fueled by something other than ‘your great discipline’.  How do I know that?  You can’t get it back.  When it comes down to it, you no longer believe in any of the reasons you had before to continue doing what you were doing.  Now, you may consciously believe, but deep down inside your inner self took a vacation to your goals.  This is why you can start a plan 35 different ways but finish it the same way:  as a fail.  You cannot muster up enough of anything to get your heart to match what your mind wants and it’s frustrating.   Self sabotage, extreme measures, rigidity, throwing in the towel, depression, jumping from plan to plan, starting a new plan every other week, vegan today—atkins tomorrow and endless excuses are symptoms of this phenomenon.   If you have ever heard yourself say, “It’s because of… that’s why I can’t… If I could just… then…”  Um…no.  You need a new mojo.  You can just [fill in the blank] all you want.  It still isn’t going to get you back to where you want to go.

Sit on this.  Think about it.  I have more…really.  And trust me when I say this, it is always something.  It’s never just because you suck or you just can’t get your act together.  And you do not need therapy.  You just need to know what it is.  Cool?  More tomorrow…woop woop!!

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My husband and I make 24 years this coming Saturday.  We have been married for almost 16 years, but we’ve been together for 24 years this Saturday.   Just to add a little to the story, we were married twice: first, by the justice of the peace in his aunt’s backyard June 23^rd, 1996 and then in a formal ceremony by our pastor at the time on March 9^th, 1997.  [Don’t ask, I’ll explain in another post at another time. Ha!]   Our second wedding was like a hometown reunion.  If you lived in our city, you were at the wedding.  It was ridiculous.  Right when the reception was in full motion and people were having a great time, the music stopped, the lights came on and everyone’s face said the same thing, “What the…??”  It was over.  Don’t know how we did it, but we totally messed up on the time of the DJ vs. the hall that we rented.  It was terrible.  We were all left wanting more.  And so it goes when you’re goal doesn’t fulfill the want you have in your gut.

There were only a handful of people here and it was awesome.  Cried through the whole thing, got the dress off the rack and delivered my Sunday newspapers that morning with him.  Those were the days.lol

There are three ways we are let down by a goal:  it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t “do it” or it isn’t what we thought it would be for us.  Out of the three, one is defeating, one is dangerous and one is depressing but all of them cause us to be aimlessly lost if not addressed properly.

When we commit to a goal, we do so not just with our minds, but we do so also with our hearts.  When I say that I am sure some of you think about integrity or finishing what we start because we believe in it and yadda, yadda, yadda.  Umm, no.  I mean the minute we commit to a goal we begin to dream about the outcome and our dreams come from the heart.  Not all of us dream in grandiose fashion so please don’t think that the dream has to be this out of control scenario of you winning American Idol or something.  The dream could be as simple as you thinking that the experience is going to be fun, or rewarding or there will be some sort of redeeming quality to it when it is all said and done.  Therefore, when the goal does not come to pass, the dream dies right there on the spot and it takes a piece of your heart with you.  This is defeating.  Or, if the dream does come to pass but it was not enough to fill that want in your heart, you want more and more and more.  This is dangerous.  Finally, if the dream does come to pass but it was not even close to what you thought it was going to be like and you leave there thinking, “What was that?” or “Why did I even want to do that?” then that is depressing.

I think the music cut out 10 min after this.  It was bad.lol  And if you hear that noise, it’s my hair piece whinnying.  I think the horse it came from wants it back. hahahaha!

How we handle each scenario depends on how deep that goal is buried in your heart and what’s the fuel source behind it.  If it is buried deep within, then it’s going to throw you off tremendously.  Getting back on track could take weeks, even months.  If it is not buried deep but the fuel source is a flame thrower (we’ll talk about this tomorrow), it will have the same effect:  devastating.  You may be asking yourself right now, “Did I have a dream?”  And you may be thinking, “I don’t remember dreaming about the outcome at all.  Not my thing.”  This line of thinking would be valid if you’re not an active day dreamer, but this does not mean that you didn’t have a dream.  Instead of trying to remember the dream, ask yourself the following questions and journal your answers:

BEFORE

• Did you have a sort of giddiness about the event that seemed almost childlike?  You may have been super motivated and organized to the nth degree.
• Did you talk about it all the time and couldn’t wait to put time to it?  Going to the gym was easy and cooking was a breeze?
• Did you tell people you were doing it for a cause?  Things like:  to prove I could do it or to “go to the next level”.
• Did you journal it or share it with others daily whether on a blog or a social network of some kind?
• Did you feel pressure to complete it?

AFTER

• Did you have a sense of emptiness after the event even if you won it or did your best ever?
• Did you even get to do the event?  If not, how did you feel?
• Did it not turn out how you wanted it to, if not, why?
• Do you feel shame, embarrassment, anger, resentment or bitterness towards the event in any capacity?

Let me tell you how this goes.  The first time you ever ask yourself these questions, you will stay strictly surface.  They will be one word answers and you most likely won’t see the need.  Or you can answer them and see the issue and because of that, now have the solution.  If either one of these things happen, get up, walk away from the table for a while and go do something mindless like watch reality TV or something.  Whatever you do, keep the mind free from real thought.  Do not be surprised if the answers start going deeper as time goes by.  When they do start coming, answer them to your best, most honest ability.  It may take you a few permutations but you will eventually get to the core.  We will put this together as to what this means soon enough.

If you do not remember a specific event that happened or you’re not exactly sure why you lost your mojo and it’s not here, hang on.  Tomorrow I talk to you about fuel sources and you’re really going to hate me then.  But I love you. J See you tomorrow.   Woop woop!!

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Emotion is a force that drives harder than a stampede of buffalo and is as secure as a tall glass of water sitting on the edge of a table…

I have wanted to do this series since the beginning of last year and have danced around the topic in a few posts since then but have never really “gone there” because this is so close to me.  Whenever I’m this close to a topic, it never really comes out the way I want because I struggle with getting the point out and making sense at the same time.  It’s like I have a conversation in my head and you’re supposed hop in at any time and figure that out. Ha!  Good luck with that.  With this series, though, I know what the hard part is going to be so why not tell you what that is beforehand so you may be prepared in case I begin to become confusing or go over your head in some way?  If you are going to successfully navigate through this series, there are 3 things you will need to recognize as you follow along all week:

There is an internal GPS device that drives us goal oriented folk, whether we acknowledge it or not.  Some of us are super aware of it and it almost seems obvious and silly to mention, sort of like, “Duh. I’m goal oriented.”  However, some of us never realize how much it is driving us until it suddenly stops working one day and then we’re left thinking, “What the heck was that?”  Everything about us operates around that GPS device.  How we treat others, how we treat ourselves, how we handle our jobs/career and even how we handle our relationships is all preprogrammed into that device that is hidden away in us somewhere way out of our view.

To be fair, the less psycho, goal oriented folk have it, too.  It’s not like they are doomed to a life of aimlessness because they are not taskmasters like us.  It’s more like they have compasses, though, or paper charts and trip-tiks than they have GPS devices.  Ours seem to be much more precise, much more focused which cause us to move with a force and speed in life that is undeniable.  This doesn’t mean that we are super successful or anything because that is not a prerequisite.  It means that if we’re hanging laundry somewhere, we’re hanging laundry somewhere.  It will be done efficiently, with fervor, purpose and zeal.  We may measure out the space or research the best place to hang our laundry.  We may hang more laundry at one time than the average woman would ever hang.  Or we work on several techniques to hang the laundry, visiting other laundromats to make sure we were doing a good job.    Then we move on to hanging laundry while folding at the same time, too.  Then we master folding.  Then we master hanging and folding in several different formats making sure that we stay current in both the hanging world and the folding world.  THEN we want people to know that we are the masters of the hanging world, the folding world *and* the hanging and folding world together.   Most importantly, we want to be recognized for it.  Make no mistake about that.  It’s not enough to do this or learn about it; someone somewhere needs to recognize it.

I use laundry as an example on purpose because the mode in which you burned yourself out has nothing to do with the fact that you burned yourself out.  You may be tempted to blow off this whole series as not pertaining to you if I used an athlete as an example and you don’t feel athletic at all.  Or if I used dieting as an example, you may think that that wasn’t what kept you from running that race so this is about someone other than you because you are the athlete.  I want to make sure I emphasize that it doesn’t matter what you were driven about or whether or not you accomplished your goal, what matters is that your drive is gone.  The GPS signal went dead and now you have no idea where you are going because you have no compass of your own, no paper map to fall back on and no drive to make it happen.

Recognition #1: It’s not about {XYZ}, it’s about my GPS device.  And the question is, “Why did it burn out?”

Once we have lost our way, the chaos and mayhem that follows can be overwhelming:  up and down eating, in and out of the gym, no type of normalcy in our eating or exercising, endless guilt, confusion, questioning our worth, countless attempts to get going again only to have them end in failure.  Each time we try to go back to where we left off but fail to make it happen, we sink deeper into a pit that may show up as anger, depression, resentment or passivity.  It’s either we’re mad at the world, beaten down by the world, sticking our middle finger up at the world or we walk away from the world.  No matter what, we cannot get back who we once were no matter how hard we try.

Recognition #2: No matter what I do, the woman who once was, is now gone and I have to own that.  However, that’s not a bad thing.

It is at this point that all of our stories begin to go in different directions.  Whether we choose to be introspective or stay more on the surface and become more task driven, the journey we take is ours and ours alone.  For me, I went so deep inside that I almost got stuck in my colon for a minute there and wasn’t sure I could get out again.  It has been awesome and hard all at the same time and I want the same thing for you.  But there is work to be done and it is more than just picking another event.  There is a bit of soul searching to do and some realizations that need to be made about ourselves if we are ever to get that drive back again to the degree that was there before AND in a healthier way.  Not everything I say is going to ring true for you, but some aspect of it will.  Take what is yours, leave all else on the screen.

Recognition #3: Ok, I get it.  This series is not “my answer” but the beginning to “my process”.  Getting my drive back is directly related to the amount of digging I am willing to do.

As always, ladies, I cannot wait to hear from you.  Email me, comment below or send a carrier pigeon to my house.  Who cares.  But let me know what you’re thinking…  Cool?  Woop woop!

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The hardest thing about exercise is to start doing it. Once you are doing exercise regularly, the hardest thing is to stop it.

Erin Gray

Oh my goodness, is this not the truth!

Have you ever had a day long conversation with yourself as to why, when or how you are going to make it to the gym that day only to wear yourself out emotionally before you get there just talking about it so you don’t go? 

Have you ever determined that today was the day you were going to get back on the wagon and get it done and you pack a great lunch and put it in your gym bag to bring to work—and then leave it at the door?  Or better yet, your alarm didn’t go off.  Or you woke up sick.  Or you got called in early for work….

What is that about?  Is there some kind of Universal Sick Joke out there that just plagues us women with this stuff?  Guys do not go through this!  You know it and I know it.  Somehow they are impervious to wavering.  It’s either they are doing it or they are ok that they are not.  We, on the other hand, will begin a torturous rant in our head that starts out low and gets louder throughout the day like that bad music in Damien: The Omen that ends in a crescendo at night with us declaring war on the gym the next day.

When I am not “on”, my husband can wake up, work out in the cold basement, get the kids ready for school, make their lunches, change the oil in the car, re-finish the driveway and set up the Mid East for world peace talks and I haven’t even decided what gym pants I’m wearing that day—AND THEY’RE ALL BLACK!   What is that about?  What hit me over the head and took my mojo away?

And it happens fast doesn’t it?  One day we are on fire.  We are working out every day, packing our food, getting it together, losing inches, losing weight, losing time…just downright losing!  And then…it happens…who knows what it is—it’s as mysterious as ‘other natural flavors’, but it happens.  WHAMMO!  We can’t get out of bed, we can’t get a rhythm, we hate our food, we feel fat (we still weigh the same, though, go figure!)…what the????

OH THE JOYS AND PERILS OF BEING A WOMAN!!

How do we get back on track?  Become a psycho!

Oh we’ve all done it.  We may not admit it, but we have done it.  We’ve pulled out the big guns and we’ve made a pact with the evil exercise and diet spirits.  It goes a bit like this:

Conversation with yourself….

“What worked before?  Sigh.  What’s killing me now is I cannot focus.  How can I focus…?  No choice.  If I just eat chicken, sweet potato and green beans only for 7 to 10 days that’ll get me back on track! 

I gotta get to the gym.  Ugghhh!  I hate my workout right now. (Mind you it is brand new but this is what us women are plagued with).  I need something new and hard to give me a kick in the arse!  That’s it!  I will do a simulated Iron Man race everyday on the treadmill/bike/wave machine at the gym and then try advanced kettle bell training for martial artists to see if I can hang!  And then if I can make it through that, I’ll be good next week!”

I know I am not the only one.  In fact, not only am I not the only one, some of you are reading this thinking, “Hell, I would have taken it one step further and bought myself a gym bag, a matching outfit and a new lunch container just to seal the deal!”  Although, that does sound good!

So we put our psychosis into action, now what happens?

We become gym rats. 

Now 2 weeks later we have a 5 o’clock shadow, mussied hair and keen resolve that borders on scary.  Now we’re lecturing everybody!  Yes, looking down our nose at others wondering why they couldn’t seem to make the same illegal pact we did with the evil diet and exercise spirits and sell their soul to the green bean!  Are you too good for the green bean??  Woman, focus!  Hop on board with us and just get it over with…you know you want to do it! 

But now you have a new problem.  You are addicted…and you know—and I know—that if you stop, you’re done for.  So you keep going like a hamster in a wheel until someone says something to you that just clicks and gets you back to reality.  Sometimes it’s as simple as, “What the heck is the matter with you, you clown!  Get off the treadmill, it’s been 2 hours!”  Or, a loved one like a husband who taunts you with your weaknesses, “Oh we’re back on this now again.  How long is this going to last?”  That gets your head together because you can’t let him know he’s right and you’ve entered the ‘psycho zone’ so you begin to plan a sensible dismount to this insanity.  And you begin to get perspective.  And honestly, you’ve gotten over the hump so you are back to normal again of just working out and enjoying it.  You’ve also started seeing other veggies besides the green bean.  Good thing, too, you were feeling stifled by the relationship.

You can now enter normal civilization again having survived one of nature’s greatest mysteries:  the exercise slump.  Not sure what it is but there is no vaccination for it (thank goodness or NY would make it mandatory in gyms) and you have no idea when it’s going to strike.  Just know, we’ve all been there.

“Good humor is a tonic for mind and body. It is the best antidote for anxiety and depression. It is a business asset. It attracts and keeps friends. It lightens human burdens. It is the direct route to serenity and contentment.”

Grenville Kleiser

Enjoy your day and I hope I didn’t ruin it for anyone who brought chicken, sweet potato and green beans today!:o)