Success: It's a Personal Thing (Audio)

ITP #13: What is the measure of your success? Are you goal oriented? Or are you more about learning along the way? This week, Inside the Pomegranate takes a look at success, failure, determination and perseverance.
Links: www.pudgypomegranate.blogspot.com
Produced by Suzie Shatarevyan for epostle.net
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Success: It's a Personal Thing

If you follow my other blog, the Journey of the Pudgy Pomegranate, you may have read my post last week about success.  Today I wanted to kind of continue on that subject. Success.  I've been thinking about it a lot because two weeks ago my wWeightWatchers leader asked me to speak about it to those that attend my Wednesday meeting because we're beginning a new set of discussions on it.   So each leader was supposed to ask two members to speak, and my leader asked me.  I questioned this.  Surely she had me confused with someone else because I have not been successful at all.  Seriously.  I've been attending meetings since February, and have only lost 15 pounds, so why me?   I have been plateauing for 4 months...maybe even 5 now!  Sandy assured me that she hadn't made a mistake.  She told me that I was successful because I keep trying.  I keep coming back.   Great.  So she handed me a sheet with 4 questions on it and asked me to present the answers at the next Wednesday's meeting.  Well that was the week before the Avon Walk.

So I thought about it.   I mean I did the Avon Walk.  I set out to walk 39.3 miles in 2 days and I did it.  So that was a success.  I thought about the fact that I was walking with my brother, and my sister-in-law by my side...and my daughter, sister and my husband were working on crew.  My younger brother was texting me while I was walking for updates.  And I thought about how blessed I am to have a close relationship with my family.  Was that a success?  For me, yes, although I think success usually is goal related, and has a positive outcome or objective met, right?  I thought of my past history with breast and colon cancer.  My objective was to fight it...and I did.  I was walking and I am healthy. So I am successful when it comes to that.  So all was good.  I mean, I just thought about it.  A lot. What is success?  What makes us successful?  Do you always have to reach your objective to be a success? This type of thing. 

So last Wednesday, I went to my WW meeting with my questions in hand.  But at weigh in, after walking over 40 miles that weekend, I got to my weigh in to find my weight up 1.8 pounds.  Really???  I mean after walking over 40 miles this past weekend.  After all the training.  And then to add salt to the wound, my friend who started the same week as I did back in February, hit her 40 pounds lost...and I just felt so low and defeated.  All this negative speak was going on in my head.  How come I can't have that success? Seriously. There was no way I was feeling successful.  And the thing is, that I work so hard at it. Tracking my intake, drinking my water, staying active, eating healthy when my highly successful friend doesn't do any activity and manages to consistently have the scale heading lower and lower every week.   So I'm sitting there all disappointed, and trying to hold it together and be happy for my friend.  But inside, i'm just feeling really sad.  

And then our leader gets up and introduces the next topic and invites me to come up and speak.  So I start off telling everyone a little bit about how I felt prior to joining.  This part was fine.  I told them I used to weigh much more that I do now...but I had also weighed less than I do now as well.  And the whole thing about the empty nest when Ani got married, emotional eating and how I needed to get things back into balance and control so I re-joined.   Okay this was all fine.  

But the next question was, "What helped you believe that you could succeed?"  That was a tough one because really, the way things were going, I don't really know if I can succeed.  I mean, I'm doing all that's humanly possible.  So I explained that believing in success is one thing.  And believing in fighting for what you want is another.  I told them about how I was a survivor...and how I had just walked this amazing 39.3 mile walk.  And then....I went there...to the dark place.  I told them that despite all my efforts the scale was not moving. I told them about the plateau.  I told the how frustrated I was...and then, I got all choked up.  Tears were coming out.  I felt totally stupid.  My nose was running.  I told them how it was so difficult to sit here week after week and listen to their successes.  By this time, I can't make eye contact.  I'm standing up there, looking at my little paper and reading from it.  I told them that I had no idea why Sandy had chosen me to speak about success.  That I wasn't a success.  Blah blah blah.  I mean, it was difficult.  At this point, I look up at the people in my meeting, and guess what they did?  Half of them were standing up....to support me.  One lady yelled out..."You are a success! What about the 60 pounds that you're successfully keeping off? What about fighting cancer?" I was genuinely touched by their support.  Sandy went and brought me a tissue and threw an arm over my shoulder.

It's true, yes.  But those aren't the successes that I was focusing on at the moment.  Flash forward to this afternoon, because I kept thinking about it.  We were at dinner at my daughter and son-in-law's home, and I asked them what they felt was the meaning of success.  Ned (my husband)'s answer was "You set a goal. You achieve it.  That's success. Plain and simple." Boo.  I didn't like that one.   

My son-in-law had a different take on success.  He said, "There are two types of success. You set a goal and have the outcome according to how you planned it.  That's one type of success.  Or you set a goal, have a plan, work on achieving the plan but you may not be able to meet the objective HOWEVER, if you've learned something along the way, then you're successful."  I liked that one better.

And Ani's response, "You have a goal and a plan.  You work toward the goal.  You're a success if you continue to grow and keep trying.  Goals change.  You have to learn and keep going.  Once you stop learning, you stop growing.  Once you stop growing, you stop caring."  How true is that?  Right?

So I came home and looked up meanings of success: Dictionary.com stated success as "The achievement of something desired, planned or attempted."  Another site said, "The accomplishment of one's goals.  The attainment of wealth, position, honors or the like."  

The thing is that our successes are individualized and personal.  I may achieve exactly the same thing as someone else yet not feel as successful as the other.  Or vice versa.  It made me remember high school geometry (worst subject EVER!!!) I'd feel successful if I could just pass the test.  Yet, if my friend didn't get an A on her test, she felt like a failure. 

So going back to my meeting, I added, there are other successes.  Like perseverence, and trying. And I guess for me,  that's what I will need to measure my successes by.   I'm like the Little Engine That Could.  I keep saying, "I think I can, I think I can."  It's not easy.  I have a lot of stresses in my life.  Dealing with cancer, follow ups and check ups, family, taking care of my mom, running a homeless outreach, trying to build my own business, holding down a full time job. There are things that I can control, and things that I have no control over.  I can do my best to stay on plan (which I do).  I can track my intake (which I do).  I can do everything I'm supposed to, and one of the most important things that we all have to do is to be honest with ourselves and take responsibility for our actions (which I do pretty well  most of the time).  So if we're doing all these things and the outcome is still not as planned, then what?

Well, I think we have to not necessarily change the goal as much as we need to re-assess. What have I learned along the way on this journey?  Discipline.  Control.  Perseverence. Patience.  And then were there positive outcomes other than the scale that I achieved? Well, yeah.  Being healthy, maintaining weight loss, getting a grip on emotional eating.  So I guess it's about seeing the glass as half full rather than half empty.

Finally, I noted a couple quotes on success that I wanted to share with you all:

Winston Churchill said, "Success is not final; failure is not fatal.  It's the courage to continue that counts."

How about this one:  Strive not to be a success but rather to be of value."  Albert Einstein

And here's a great one:  "Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome."  Booker T. Washington.

I am on this journey.  The goal is to be healthy.  I know what I need to do.  All I can do is do the best that I can do.  Honestly.  If I am doing my best, taking responsibility for my actions, and learning along the way,  then I can call that a success.  My  body has its own personal agenda.  As much as I wish I could measure my success by the scale, my success has to have a different measure.  It has to be measured in knowing that I am eating right, that I am well for now, that I am being honest, accountable and doing the best that I can on the road to being healthy.

And finally one last thought from Dale Carnegie:  Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.

How do you measured success?  I'd love to hear from you.  Leave your comments here! And have a fantastic and successful week!  Let's all try to focus on our successes, however they may be measured.  

Recommiting (Audio)

ITP Episode #5: On this week's episode, we take a look at goals. Are you too hard on yourself? Are you a perfectionist? Anush takes a look at commitments....and then discusses re-commitment to our wellness goals with a kinder, gentler outlook. It's all here, Inside the Pomegranate!
Links: Pomegranate & Eye handmade jewelry by Anush
Avon Walk Team In Her Shoes Page
Produced by Suzie Shatarevyan for epostle.net
Look for Inside the Pomegranate on BluBrry
Subscribe to Inside the Pomegranate by Email
Get Inside the Pomegranate on iTunes

Play Now: 

Recommiting

Hi there!  Happy Monday.,I just got back from a team training walk.  Today we set out to walk 10 miles again, but according to our GPS tracking, our round trip ended up being 9.3 miles.  Still, it was a great walk, and I got a chance to visit with two more team members today.  We walked from the Santa Monica pier, all the way to Marina Del Rey and back.  And saw some beautiful scenery, some local people and their usual Venice Beach craziness, and some incredible flowers.  If you're on Facebook, you may want to "like" our page called "Team In Her Shoes".  I posted photos from this mornings walk.

This week I wanted to talk a little bit about commitment....and recommitment.  I think it's good to kind of take a break right now, being that we're half way through the year already, and take a look at where we're going....and if we're still on track.  So here we go with this week's pomegranate seed.

I don't watch a whole lot of TV.  There's always so much to do and so much going on.  Now that we've caught up on all the past episodes of Breaking Bad on Netflix, my time in front of the TV is not spent watching but usually either writing, blogging, paying bills, posting recipes or making jewelry at my work bench, which is in the family room.  My mom has been staying with us, and having me in the same room at least allows us to spend time together.

This past week, mom was channel surfing and turned on a show called Extreme Weight Loss.  This episode chronicled the weight loss of an Iranian guy that weighed over 450 pounds.  At first we thought he was Armenian, so naturally we kept watching but I was interested in this show because of this guy's genuine commitment to his self improvement.  His story was that he wanted to get healthy.  And then one of the things he wanted to do was to propose to his girlfriend, but in Persian culture, as in Armenian, he would have to ask the girl's parents for her hand in marriage. And for that he wanted to put his best self forward.  So he worked hard at it.  Diet, exercise...and in three month's time he lost 137 pounds!  So the months went on, he lost another 67 pounds and he was looking pretty good!  The show kind of chronicles a year in 3 month periods.  So during that second three months,  hes lost a significant amount of weight..is feeling good about himself, so he goes to meet with the girlfriend's parents (which they didn't show), and the parents said no.  Our guy is a DJ and a sound engineer, and I guess his girlfriend's parents told him they loved him, but wanted a doctor or lawyer for their daughter.  The guy was devastated.  And I guess shortly after this meeting he and his girlfriend broke up.

I'm actually getting at something here, so bear with me. So what ends up happening, is that in his depression, the guy falls back on his old habits.  His trainer lives in a different state and on a weekly basis, the guy weighs in on video showing his weight in to his trainer who documents his progress.  it's all great from the outside, except that it's a lie.  We find out instead of reporting his weight to the trainer, our guy is  manipulating the video and lieing to his trainer - panning the video of  him stepping on the scale and then only showing the weight on the display.  So this continues for a while, and then the time comes for the 9 month weigh in. The trainer comes back into town and notices his client is very down. He  asks what's wrong. And the guy explains...he broke up with the girlfriend, he turned back to old habits...and....he's been lying to him about the weigh ins.  He had put on over 45 pounds. If you could see the disappointment in the trainer's face...,and even worse, the disappointment in the guy's for what he had done.  The trainer felt completely betrayed at being lied to, and then here's the part that really hit home with me:  The trainer expressed his disappointment, but brought up the absurdity of the lie.  Why would he do that?  What would cause this guy to feel that he had to "be perfect"?  Why couldn't he just be open at the beginning of his downfall and ask for help before the bad behavior escalated?  Betraying one's self is the worst ever.  The goals he had set forth to achieve were not put there by the trainer, but by himself.  So why then did he feel this need to lie?  Does this hit home with any of you?  Because it did for me. Not that I lie about things...no. But this need to have to do everything right.  All you do is set yourself up for failure, because the reality is that not one of us is perfect.

 For the guy, it was probably the first time in a long time that he had been in the limelight.  He was his trainer's best client.  He must have felt that need to not want to disappoint him after getting all the positive reinforcement not only from him, but from his family and friends who saw his transformation.  Who would want to end that run on Cloud 9, right?

But the truth of the matter is that at some point, we've got to take resposibility for ourselves, TO ourselves. We have to honor our commitments to ourselves just as much as we honor commitments made to others.  We are the ones that choose our goals.  The discipline that is learned is difficult. The road is not easy.  But ultimately, if we're to succeed, we can't do it for anyone else...to please anyone else.

And it's hard to keep that commitment going.  In the beginning, we're excited about change.  So we kind of impress ourselves, in a sense, about the newness of our commitment.  But as the weeks, months, years go by, it's hard to keep things fresh.  And I'm not talking only about weight.  Think about new year's resolutions.  Did you have a resolution that you made this year?  Have you kept it?  This applies to everything from drug or alcohol addictions, to just making some basic changes to get out and exercise more.  Or to spend one on one time with family.   Or with God.  Whatever your goal is, it takes persistence and focus.

What undermines us...okay, what undermines me is that need for perfection.  The all or nothing thinking.  We start off totally commited to the change.  And then we slip up --  of course, right?   And the once we've blown it, even a little bit, do we immediately start over?  Or do we wait for a special day or after a certain event passes in order to start over.

How about this scenario: You start a diet first thing Monday morning.  You do great on Monday and Tuesday.  Wednesday, someone brings bakery madness to your office.  You have just a half.....but then you start feeling bad that you blew it.  and you think...hmmmm...it was so good.  I'll just have the other half...and then start tomorrow.  But tomorrow is Thursday.  And that's so close to the weekend.  And you know you're going to a party on Saturday.  So you may as well, start over on Monday.  You go to the party and it's like girls gone wild...you're "stocking up" because you know come Monday you start your diet.  Right??? C'mon!  I know I'm not the only one out here that's done this.  Wouldn't we have been better of if we just understood that life is all about the journey.  There are hills, road blocks, smooth roads...and it's up to us to figure out how to navigate and then still get to our destination feeling good about ourselves.

Okay....so this is the deal.  RECOMMIT.  And do it now.  Not one of us is perfect.  So let's not be so hard on ourselves.  It IS about the journey and not the destination.   I mean, seriously, God forgives us, right? So why is it so hard to forgive ourselves? The commitment to make change is never easy.  And don't compare yourself to others.  This is a real difficult one for me.   If you follow my other blog, the Journey of the Pudgy Pomegranate, you know that I have a friend of mine that is dieting with me.  I sabotage myself by comparing my success (or lack of) with hers.  And the funny thing is that I'm not competitive in anything else.  So we go to our weekly weigh ins and inevitably, I get discouraged by my tiny loss compared to her significant one.  But how can we compare? Aren't we created uniquely by God?  So why then should I compare my dead slow metabolic rate with someone else? I'm going to try really hard to "Commit' to stop that.

Finally, the most important thing -- and the reason for all of this desire for self improvement int he first place is the idea taking care of what God has given us. We are all given this beautiful gift of life.  A few years ago, I had to take a stress test and got to see my heart beating on the screen.  It was an epiphany.  There is was.  My heart that has been beating since the first day I was born...and had gone through so much with me.  I remember being in tears watching how amazing it was...and thinking about how I had abused it.  Think about it. Our bodies are miraculous.  And it's up to us to appreciate them...and take care of what God has give us so that our bodies can serve God.  Right?  So if you've made your commitments in the past but they've fallen by the wayside, it's not too late.  Recommit.  In your heart, we all KNOW what we need to do.  We don't need anything special. We just need to do what is right for us....and then roll with the punches.  I haven't given up.  Have you?  I hope not.   I've recommitted and I will recommit over and over again.  It's a journey - a good one!--and the destination is a healthy, happy life.

On a different note:  I know Father Vazken has shared with you all about my jewelry business, and I never seem to mention it, so I'll take this time right now to give a shameless plug.  I make handmade silver, copper and bronze pomegranate necklaces out of metal clay.  I got into playing with metals several year's ago, and have been having a lot of fun with it. First it was just silver....but after buying a kiln that opened up the door to work in copper and bronze as well.  I also make eye bead jewelry.  Yes, yes...the eye beads!  Do I believe in them?  Nope.  But I do love the way they look.  And Ive designed my own beads which I have made for my company.  The name is Pomegranate & Eye (because I make pomegranates and eyes, right?).  And you can find me on Etsy at www.pomegranateandeye.etsy.com.  So I hope you'll go check out the online store.  And I'm also on Fcebook as well as Pomegranate and Eye as well as just myself. : )