Does Your Story Get in the Way of your Health and Wellness Success?

In order to begin to answer that question for yourself, you need to know what the heck “Your Story” means.

‘Your Story’ is an accumulation of your experiences, thoughts and beliefs from when you were born until now. 

Your past experiences that can shape who you are as a person and influence your path forward. Sometimes in a way you don’t want to go.

Take this story, for example, which uses a made-up person to illustrate the point.

For years Sarah hasn’t slept well. She’s gone to the doctor, the nutritionist; tried Chinese medicine, acupuncture, breathing exercises. Heck, she even joined a support group for people who can’t sleep.

When she meets up with friends or family, it’s always one of the first things she talks about. Her coworkers know about her sleeping problem and often give her book ideas or advice.

But for some reason, whatever she tries won’t help her problem long-term.

Something might start working, but for some reason, she stops whatever that is and starts searching for something else.

In this circumstance, her own story is stopping her. Subconsciously she’s not even sure she wants to start sleeping normally.

Based on her long past experience with having this health challenge, people pay attention to her more, are more forgiving at work, allows her to interact more with people at the group and through practitioners.

So if the problem went away….What would she talk about to her friends, family, coworkers?

How would people/work treat her differently?

Would she still be allowed to be a part of the group that she likes so much?

What would she do with her time that she uses searching for an answer?

Her past experiences of how her life is and how people treat her have defined her as a person.

What would happen if all of that went away?

Life would be different and that’s what can hold you back.

FEAR of how things can change can scare you just enough to coast along with a health challenge.

The problem is you can never move forward until you become AWARE of what’s happening and decide to get better no matter how life may change.

At some point, we’ve all wanted to work on something in our lives, lose weight, have more energy, less stress, constipation, diabetes, fibromyalgia etc.

Think of something you worked on and ask yourself if you achieved what you wanted?

Or did it just become part of your story?

Look at your thoughts around why you might not have succeeded.

Do you relate to Sarah in the insomnia story?

Sometimes awareness alone can give you that “Wow, I didn’t even realize I was doing that!” moment and help you move forward.

Other times it takes a bit more introspection, mindset work and possibly a therapist to help clear the fear of change.

The goal is to become aware of your stories, actions, beliefs and thoughts. Once you do, you have the ability to change them and move forward with your Health and Wellness Success.