What are you willing to do?

I, like many of us, continue to look for ways to improve my condition, my life, and my existence. It’s a journey that I welcome, but sometimes I hit a wall with my self-care making it more difficult for me to make meaningful strides.

When I get into these spaces, I like stop, take stock in what’s going on and discover what I could do

A few days ago while taking stock, I had a moment of clarity in which I heard two questions being asked; ‘what do you want to do’ and ‘what are you willing to do?'

Want vs. willing.

I firmly believe that we all deserve a high quality of life. It’s simply God’s design! However, it often escapes us. As women, “life issues” --jobs, family and other obligations-- typically derail our quality of life. We juggle all of this, but often not very well with respect to our needs. We want to change, but we know our life issues aren’t going anywhere. As a result, we feel stuck. When we feel mentally or emotionally, our health behaviors often lag behind, too.

What are we to do when we need to make a behavior change but life isn’t giving us a lot of room to do so?

This is where the want vs. willing concept comes in.

In many cases when we are looking down the barrel of a lifestyle behavior change, we visualize that change by asking the question ‘what do I want to do’? This is the easy part! When we ask and answer this question, we are immediately able to identify with our needed change and the highest vision we have for our life. We might say, ‘ I want to be 10 pounds lighter’, ‘ I want to sleep 8 hours each night’ or, ‘ I want to meditate/ pray for 15 minutes a day’. These are the easy callings of our vision to which we can quickly relate.

These wants are very important. They represent your vision! However, in my taking stock time this week, I was challenged to see that perhaps ‘what do I want to do’ is not the only question we have to ask.

We must also ask ‘what am I willing to do?’

What am I (me and you) willing to do to get from my current state to my desired state?

Now here comes the tough part. Willingness implies the need to specifically attend to areas or actions that are harder to manage, will require extra amounts of planning and energy, or are not common to our existence.

Often times, these are the actions that put us just outside of our comfort zone.

For example, one of my biggest “out of my comfort zone” actions is asking for help. Somewhere along the way, I began to believe that I could actually do everything all by myself. Nope, don’t need help from a single soul…..yep….I got it, no worries!

Well, let’s just say that God had a good laugh watching me work through that one! Even as I began drowning in the pressures of wifehood, motherhood and professional pursuits, I pushed through my life for the longest time without asking for help.

While the pressure mounted, I was fully aware that my life issues were not going to change. Therefore, if I had been willing to do this one thing for myself earlier in the game--- to make this one behavior change--- I could have saved myself a lot of worry, stress and strife.

Asking for help, was my ‘what are you willing to do’ action.

What’s your ‘what am I willing to do’ action? Maybe it’s going to bed an hour earlier, drinking water instead of sodas, or walking for 30 minutes around your neighborhood. Chances are you already know what could be done to create even the smallest space for change this week. Willingness creates that space. Be willing! In the absence of willingness, you could deprive yourself of the life you deserve.

I want to hear from you! Tell we what you are willing to do this week on the Dr. Kim Brodie Facebook page. Or, tag me in your your #drkimbestbehavior post on Instagram!

On the journey,

KB

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