Chickening Out

"I won't make it. I have an ingrown toenail."
Trainers are just another form of teacher. We've heard them all. My dog ate it. I had a sniffle. I was kidnapped by aliens. I was kidnapped by sniffling aliens with hungry dogs and ingrown toenails.
My client who had suddenly contracted an ingrown toenail within the 3 hour span since I'd set up the appointment, was chickening out. I wasn't taking it personally. It happens all the time. I did it a hundred times myself, but the only time I remember was the time I almost chickened out and didn't, and it changed my whole entire life forever and ever.
I had been searching for an activity that would get me out more. I had (long, long story very short - see entry "Dancing Queen" from November 2009) settled on Latin dance. I had gone once. Hardly got asked to dance. Went again. Almost turned the car around and went home to a comfy piece of chocolate cake and six pack of beer at nearly every intersection. Decided to keep going instead. Met Arturo. Learned to dance and to love dancing. Got pretty good at it. Now, only a short time later, I have to be restrained from dancing by my friends and family because I have an important race the next day.
I've fallen in love on the dance floor. Several times. I've made literally dozens of friends and acquaintances. I've learned the art, or some might argue science, of Latin dance. I've branched out to Tango. Fox trot. Waltz. Two step.
The residual shyness, self esteem deficit, fear of intimacy, paranoia, all the things I got as a twofer with my lifelong weight battle, they're all gone. Replaced with the outgoing, friendly, smiling, genuine, authentic albeit slightly sanity challenged social butterfly you all know.
And I owe it all to the fact that one night, dressed in my favorite pink top and my very first ridiculously short skirt and my brand new strappy pink heels I told myself everyone would think I was weird for sitting alone by the dance floor, that I was a lousy dancer, that I would never make friends and influence people, that the women I had met last week hated me and the men I'd danced with thought I was a clod and anyway I'd done it once and once was enough to prove I could and...
And I told myself that as I drove into the sunset in my car and listed in the blink of an eye a thousand reasons why I Should Not Keep Going and Did Anyway.
So virtually every good and permanent change I've made to my life, my body and my mind I owe to one, single solitary fact: that despite all logic, in defiance of all my best attempts at reason, all my ingrown toenails, dogs and rogue aliens with dogs, I Did Not Chicken Out.
I kept driving.
I met someone who helped me.
I not only succeeded at what I'd set out to do, I kept going beyond anyone's expectations.

All because I Did Not Chicken Out. I repeat: I Did Not Chicken Out.

And now as I hung up the phone with what must be the umpteenth client to chicken out on what must be the umpteen-thousandth dance-date-5K-race-swim-meet-gung-ho-fitness-guru-event-X I wracked my brain to remember how that moment when I Didn't Chicken Out had been so remarkably different from the umpteen-thousand times I HAD chickened out. What had scared me off all the times I'd invented aliens or made excuses about sniffles or dogs or work or whatever that had not been present that last, decisive, non-chickening-out moment? The answer? Nothing. Nothing had scared me off. Nothing had crept around the corner preventing me from doing what was clearly in my own best interest. No monsters crawled out of the closet and there were no wild animals hiding behind fence posts. For lack of monsters and bears and aliens and in grown toe nails my brain had made some up.

They were called
Reasons.
Perfectly logical.
Totally understandable.
Completely sane.
Reasons.

Every time I got it into my head to do something beneficial to myself, I would come up with one very good reason why I should.
For instance:
Isolation is one of the main contributing factors to weight gain and regain and overall diet failure. Therefore I need to get out more. So I should learn to dance.
That was a very Good Reason.
But as the day of the actual event crept up, more Reasons kept invading in on me.
Reasons I shouldn't. Didn't need to. Could do something else instead. Something less difficult. Something less scary. Something that had a LOT less potential for disappointment.
And that was THE very heart of the matter. Everything I Did, as opposed to things I chickened out of, had the potential for disappointment. I would be all dressed up in my cutest laughably high heels and ridiculously short skirt and no one would dance with me. Or the other women might cluck their tongues and gossip about me, the new girl. Or I might never learn to be good at it. Or...
It, they, I (and "I" was the worst potentiality of all) might disappoint me.
Disappointment, the very whisp of the possibility of the potential of disappointment had scared me off a thousand times from a thousand things that could have been as beneficial, or maybe even a thousand times more beneficial, than Latin dancing.
So why had the great monster-bear-alien-dog-ingrown-toenail of impending disappointment not tackled me this time? Because this time, just a few days beforehand someone very clever had asked me this question:

Are you going to be disappointed?

To which I had answered, maybe.

And what will happen if you are?

To which I had answered, I don't know.

Are you going to die from the disappointment?

No.

Will you eventually get over the disappointment?

Probably. OK yes.

Right. Because in over thirty years you've never died of disappointment before. And many, many worse disappointments have occurred in your life up to now. How did you cope with them?

Answer: chocolate cake.

And did the chocolate cake make it go away?

No

Did it help?

No.

What did help?

Nothing. It went away on its own.

That's right. The feeling of disappointment had gone away all by itself. In a comparably short amount of time.

As compared to the grief I'd felt losing my beloved uncle Joe, disappointment had been a cake walk.
Compared to the loneliness I'd experienced when I'd first come back home after years of world travel and had no friends and barely knew my own family? A little of the D-meister had been like falling off a log.

Next to being abandoned by my boyfriend for an important soccer game on Valentine's day? Not being asked to dance was practically a pleasure.

Of all the awful, bad, distasteful lousy things that had happened to me, disappointment over not being good at dancing or not being asked to dance or... Whatever, was Nothing. It was not a monster. Or an alien. Or a bear. It was not even a potentially rabid field mouse.

It was nothing I couldn't handle.
There, that day as I drove into the sunset to Sacramento, that was the day I realized that

I Could Cope. Even If I Was Disappointed.
And I didn't need the help (or rather hindrance) of chocolate cake.

Since then I've seen them a thousand times: The Reasons.

They surface anytime the potential of disappointment comes up. They float over the phone lines from friends and clients and relatives who see

Potential Disappointment

As something so overwhelming that they are utterly debilitated by it.
And what do I do when The Reasons strike?
I think about that night of dancing.
How it led to a dozen friendships. Love.
Happiness.
A new and utterly satisfying career.
And yeah. A little disappointment.

Today I had my first ever race win. I got an interview on TV. I met some die hard runners who will be a whole new set of friends, and half a dozen potential clients.

Last night I almost decided not to run.

Because I really was tired.
I still had a sniffle from last week's flu.
I wasn't sure I was totally over those shin splints.
The course was too hilly.
I was in a ratty mood.
I had paperwork.

Reasons.

Actually, the possibility that, although I, the fitness guru, Should win the race, there was always the possibility I MIGHT not.

Impending disappointment.
Reasons.

Would I die of the disappointment? No.
What would happen if I wasn't disappointed?
The possibilities are endless.
Limitless.
Boundless.

Don't let the mere whisp of a potential for impending disappointment make your life one long chain of them.

The only time you can guarantee you'll be disappointed, is when you chicken out.

Win the race when you can. And be disappointed when you can't. It's OK. Really. You'll see.

Whole Health Renovation Specialist
209-740-7898

"Small steps can be agonizingly slow but how much better a small step in the right direction than a giant leap in the wrong one." -Me