For the last few months I have been taking Pilates one-on-one with Gini Murphy. She is an incredible trainer and coach who continually pushes me to do things I have said I could not do for close to 15 years. I used to work out a lot and then I got hit by a car while I was walking across a street. That sort of took away the momentum I had built up at the gym. I never really got back into working out because I always seemed to get sicker or more injured each time I would start up again. Then I went and played a round of golf and tore two discs in my lower back. I figured I was done with exercise.
In walks Gini. A former dancer, Master Pilates instructor and trainer and all around perceptive person. She took one look at me and the way I moved and said, let’s get started. Within 15 minutes the constant pain I had in my lower back was a faint memory of what it had been. Within an hour my mood had changed and I was standing taller. In a month, friends were asking me if I had lost weight or had makeup on because I looked younger and taller and thinner. My weight was the same but I was standing differently and I wasn’t in constant pain like I had been for years.
Why was this working for me when even walking hadn’t worked for 15 years? The difference was the questions. A few training sessions in, I walked in limping and in my old pain posture. I figured that was it. I couldn’t go any further. My Pilates time was over. I had almost cancelled my appointment but I knew I would be charged. I was also enjoying moving again and was praying Gini could fix me.
Gini and I talked about what was going on in my body and she had me walk for her and then move a bit. I told her my sad story about how this always happens to me when I start to get fit again and it just ends. You know what she did? Gini asked me a question. “Why do you think this is the same thing? Why can’t it be different?” WHAM, it was like she had hit me over the head with a 2×4. I was so stuck in the past that I didn’t realize that I was a different person than I was back then and that it did not have to be the same response.
In less than ten minutes of doing a few specialized Pilates moves Gini had me do, the pain was gone and we had moved forward. If I had not let go of my past responses, I would have stayed in pain and not seen that I could do it. She helped me realize that my body and my mind had been in a place of compensation for so long for those old injuries that when we began to unwind it and retrain the body to work the way it is meant to work it tried to stop me. Once we opened my mind to the possibility that something good was coming, my body was able to let go the old patterns and open up.
How many times do you stop moving forward because of an old pattern that you have? Do you even realize you are responding to past patterns? Next time you hit that wall, get shut down, or feel you cannot move forward, ask yourself a few questions, “Am I responding from my past self or my current self? How can I respond differently to what is happening right now? What do I need to know/do to make the outcome different than it usually is?”
This applies to your personal and your business life. Try it and tell me your story. Let me know how asking yourself these questions makes a difference for you, your life and your business.