Learning real self-motivation and undoing years of negative reinforcement

The first part of this past week was a little bit stressful for me, for reasons which are stupid.  Mondays are usually our total rest day because our schedule is especially tight.  Sundays, on the other hand, are usually a day when we have all the time in the world to workout.  But last weekend we had that dinner at a friend's on Saturday night which kept us out until 1am, meaning very, very little sleep.  We normally would have napped a few hours on Sunday and still hit the gym.  But last Sunday after work I had a meeting just a few hours later.  That left no time for a nap, so we filled the time with our Valentine's dinner (sushi and sashimi).  By the time I was home from my meeting we both knew we were too tired to lift weights (dangerous!) and would sleep straight through 'til morning if we tried to nap.  So we skipped the gym.   We did go to the gym and do cardio Monday night so we wouldn't end up having two rest days in a row, but Sunday would have been cardio AND weights, so I felt like I'd slacked off on top of eating too much over the weekend. 

Yes, I know that missing one workout doesn't undo all my progress or anything, and when a body needs rest you have to give it rest.  Shit happens.  But this is what happens when I have a great plan to follow and hit a bump along the way.  I get twisted over the fact that I've deviated or fallen behind or wasted time on something else, and I get hung up on trying to catch up by working twice as hard for however long it takes to make up for what I didn't do.  When that doesn't work (and it really never does) I get overwhelmed by how far behind I've gotten (because as I try to catch up by tacking extra onto my to-do list I inevitably make the tasks so hard to complete that I can't keep up) and eventually I just throw in the towel.

So lesson one I have to teach myself is that a missed workout is simply a missed workout.  I just have to keep going and forget about it.  It's not like my other strength workouts this week suffered for the one I missed.  I don't freak out like this over my dietary changes.  If I have a day when I go over my calorie limit by a little bit it's not a big deal.  I don't eat less the next day to make up for it.  I don't obsess about catching up.  Part of it is that with my "diet," I've been at it long enough to know that one day here and there doesn't really effect my weight loss progress.  I don't have that same reassurance from personal experience that missing a workout here and there won't mean I'm that much less ready for the marathon.  I know it shouldn't, but I haven't been through it enough to know that it won't. 

But, it's like every other mental/emotional issue I've worked through over the past few years.  Now that I see that the problem exists I recognize that it's a pattern in my life.  And knowing that it's a pattern means that I can figure out where it comes from and be that much closer to stopping it.

Looking back, I guess I was never taught to truly self-motivate. Yes, I achieved a lot as a kid, and if I knew I was expected to accomplish something by a certain date I would get it done without a parent hanging over my shoulder. But I didn't ever have to set my own agenda or motivate myself to do something without parents or teachers getting involved to support me. I picked projects and involvements that others would take an active role in encouraging.  Even then I would purposely procrastinate or do things differently than certain adults thought I should, just to have a little bit of control over the situation, I think.  But in the end I did what they wanted me to without a lot of prodding.

But things don't work the same in the adult world as they did when I was a kid, and I realize now that all these years I've been seeking the kind of praise and recognition I always used to get from my achievements.  As an adult, though, I've been focusing on goals and tasks that people DIDN'T think I should or could do, and therefore aren't going to actively try and help you along or throw you a party for succeeding. And when you get down to brass tacks, I didn't get the praise and recognition I did as a kid for being talented or smart or capable, I got it for following directions and fulfilling the expectations of others. It's not that I did great things, it was that I did the right things.

Training for this marathon is not something I have a ton of active support for. That is to say that I have a lot of people wishing me luck or telling me they think I can do it, but nobody actively helping oversee or assisting my training. My sister will be doing many of my long walks with me, but she's not keeping after me to make sure I do all my other workouts. It's my own job to police myself, but to be honest I am far too good at letting myself off the hook at times, after which I compensate by freaking out on myself about how I messed up. I learned how to go easy on myself in college, when I realized that nobody would rain fire and brimstone on my head if I wasn't perfect. And I learned the art of the freakout from my mother, who will unleash a storm of nagging when she doesn't think I'm conducting my life properly. I've gone to great lengths to avoid her nagging by gradually excluding her from more and more of my personal life, but I guess I've learned to nag myself in her absence.

What I haven't learned to do in her absence is the part after the nagging: the commandeering. She steps in without asking and does what she thinks I should be doing, should have already done, or should have done differently. I've basically been conditioned to quit if I hit a snag. I've come to subconsciously believe that I can only persist in my undertakings up to the point where I "mess up" -- after that point I'm apparently not capable of finishing since somebody always steps in to save me whether I need it or not.

Nobody can save me with this, though. If I fall behind with training nobody can step in and finish it for me. And that's good, because I'm sick of being made to feel incapable.  I'm sick of having my pursuits taken out of my hands and finished by someone else. But it's also a little intimidating because, as much as I've always hated it, my safety net is gone. Having someone take over and finish what I start hasn't been good for my psyche but it has protected me from real failure and disappointment. I don't have evidence to suggest that without my mom's well-meaning interference I would have been able to reach the end goals alone. But it allowed me to take some pretty big risks, knowing I had that safety net. And it allowed me to be able to claim that I could have succeeded if only given the chance.

So here I am, trying to prove to myself that I can function without a safety net and without the need for external supervision, and it takes all of one week for crazy insecurities to come bubbling to the surface. I know I just have to ignore the bubbling while I keep putting one foot in front of the other.