There is one form of working out that I hate more than any other kind of exercise and that is working my abs. Lately, I decided that I really wanted to commit to doing ab exercises everyday for a while and see if there is any progress. Every minute of doing these ab exercises I feel like I am choosing to torture myself. Today while I was doing these exercises though I thought of something (besides the obvious pain) and that is the main reason I love exercise, in general, is because when you do exercise you can prove to yourself that you can do anything. When I’m there suffering and I am still able to somehow make it through that workout I feel so proud of myself by the end of it. When I am able to challenge myself to do something painful it reinforces that I can make myself do anything even if it is hard.

There’s something about pushing yourself to do something and you accomplishing it that helps inspire you to other things. For example, after I completed my ab workout today it made me feel like if I could push myself past that pain and accomplish that task then I could do the same in other areas of my life. It’s helping rewire the way my brain is programmed. Instead of thinking “I do not feel like doing that” or “I can’t do that.” I instead tell myself I did this hard thing and accomplished it so that tells me that I can also do this other thing in my life. Exercise is a great example of this because you are pushing yourself to do something. It doesn’t have to be as challenging for you but simply showing up and going to exercise is doing something that is hard. You could have went home, watched Netflix, and made ramen but you chose to exercise instead. You chose to make the hard decision instead of picking the easy way out.

If you are reading this and are struggling to feel like you are capable of anything I want to challenge you to focus on one thing you can do a day to challenge yourself whether it be small or big. It could be exercise or something completely different. The point of this is to prove to your brain that you are able to accomplish things. Even if you start small you can then look back and still feel this since of accomplishment for challenging yourself to do something. I can also almost guarantee that this will also snowball into other areas of your life as well, because if you are capable to push yourself to do that then you are also capable of pushing yourself to do something else that’s also challenging.