I’ve written only a handful of posts in December, so here is a smorgasbord of random thoughts for you on this Christmas Eve morning.

1. Doing lunges at a rest stop is weird, but not impossible

The trip from Maine to Pennsylvania begins with busy highways, three lanes of traffic, and the claustrophobic feel of the busy New England life. Gradually, as Massachusetts and Connecticut give way to New York, the exits get further apart, the highways merge to two lanes, and eventually, we’re making the final two hour drive on Interstate 80 to get to State College.

A Bonnie Raitt squat is a bodyweight squat. The rest of these exercises can be found on my YouTube Channel.

And I’m going batshit crazy because I’ve been in the car for too long. Sheila does all of the driving since she gets car sick, so I vacillate between singing Barry Manilow songs and trying not to puke in stop and go traffic.

It’s delightful.

By the time we hit a rest stop, we park far away and I lunge to the bathroom, jog back and forth a few times, and do wide stance t-spine mobilizations in front of vending machines. 

Strangers make a wide arc to go around me. “I don’t know what you’ve got,” they’re thinking. “But I hope I don’t catch it.” 

2. I travel with my grid stick

My friend John always told me to travel with a mag flashlight, as it could be used to break a window should my car get submerged, or take out a stranger at the knees, but in a pinch, a good whack with my grid stick would at least stun someone.

Both of us like to be prepared, ok?

But that’s not why I travel with it. I use my grid stick to get the blood flowing when we get to the hotel or our final destination. I can use it in the car, and it feels good to aggressively work on some of those knots when I just. can’t. Listen. To. NPR. For. one. More . minute. 

3. Something is better than nothing

Yesterday I popped into the gym with my little brother for a quick workout. I was tired, hadn’t slept well in two days, and the last thing I wanted to do was train. But we both went anyway, and I got in a solid 45 minutes of work. I only did six exercises after a brief warm up, but it got my blood flowing and improved my mood. Sometimes I struggle to train if I’m not following a specific program, so it’s good for me to remember that doing something is better than nothing.

It was also great to see my brother isn’t doing any of the program I wrote for him, so it was a good reminder that I’m not necessarily a “coach” but just someone who makes suggestions to family members when they ask and then they largely ignore them.

Cheers :-)

4. Training during the holidays helps to promote kindness

You know that I believe in kindness as a core value for everyone. Well, we’re all less likely to get in screaming matches over politics or the last piece of monkey bread Christmas morning if we’ve done a little workout to get those endorphins flowing. Or to work out aggression. Either or.

And when I say workout, I mean you can go outside and take a walk.

5. You don’t need a gym to train

Sure I practice deadlifting my dog into the car, up the stairs, and onto the couch, but even if you didn’t have to lift your 55 pound hound, you can still get a good bodyweight circuit in. Follow the circuit on the picture to get your heart rate up, your endorphins going, and make people at rest stops stare at you sideways.  

Cheers. 

Wishing you the happiest of holiday seasons.

My first college advisor died after my freshman year.

My second advisor left the school.

By my senior year, I assumed the English department was drawing straws to see who got stuck with me next, given that I was prone to weekly existential crises about what to do with my life. Eventually I fell to former department chair Dr. Kelly, a kindly fellow who used long guttural “uhhhhhhs” to fill the silence while he searched for his next thought.

In my final meeting with him before graduating, he looked across his desk at me, touching his fingertips lightly together and his kind eyes smiled through his wire rim glasses.

“You Kim…uh……are a true….uh…..work in progress….”

I don’t know if I laughed awkwardly aloud, or just avoided eye contact as was often my style back then, but I thought the comment was spot on. If he’d said something like “you’re going to set the world on fire” or pretty much anything else, I would have shrugged it off as the kind of thing you say to any graduating college senior.

But in this case, I appreciated him complimenting me for who I really was. Someone who was working hard to understand herself, someone who was exploring her faith, trying to be a better writer, and mostly trying to find her place in this world.

I've thought of his comment a lot recently, in conversations with clients.

We are all works in progress, aren’t we?

But I think we often lose sight of our progress because we are so focused on the arrival. That because we did not “arrive” at our destination or our goal, we’ve come up short, didn’t work hard enough, or failed ourselves. I didn't enjoy my graduation from college for more than a hot minute before I was consumed with what came next.

Ok, ok. I basically had a panic attack the day after graduation…

At Spurling, we recently hosted an eight-week drop two jeans sizes challenge. Most clients have seen results - some more dramatic than others. But nothing was quite so shocking as sitting down with someone who lost 20 pounds and almost 7% body fat while gaining 5 pounds of muscle and hearing the disappointment in her voice.

But look at how far you’ve come, I said, imploring her to see what I was seeing.

You have made lifestyle changes, not been on some crazy diet that you can’t sustain. You will continue to see positive change.

She nodded, but quite frankly there were no words I was going to say that would have made a difference. Because it is so hard to suddenly un-do in 10 minutes what society has spent 50 years creating.

The constant perception that we're not good enough as we are. That we won't be good enough until....

I’m not going to just suddenly convince her in a 20 minute conversation to focus on how far she’s come. I can talk until my lips turn rubber and she’s not going to believe me. My words alone can’t suddenly change the belief.

My question as a coach - no - as a human being - is what's it going to take? What's it going to take to help each and every client understand that she is good enough as she is? Clients, students, partners, parents, friends - we need to change our language and our belief system to both/and.

You can be working towards progress AND celebrate your achievements.

As with kindness, as with civility, as with compassion, I can only think that it's going to take what it takes - a minute by minute, day by day effort from each and every one of us to help each other not only realize that we are all works in progress, but to love ourselves for the journey we're on, not the destination for which we search.

Be kind.

This thing happened…when I published an article…

I often listen to books when I'm making the hour drive to the gym, and recently, I heard this quote:

"Who you are is defined by what you are willing to struggle for." **

I re-wound (I still listen to books on "tape" in my mind) and listened to the quote again. Well, I thought, laughing to myself, then one thing is absolutely clear to me. 

I am a writer. 

As much as I enjoy writing, I struggle with it. But putting my words down on metaphorical paper is important to me for a litany of reasons - it was how I found my voice over the years, and how I still find my voice. It’s how I coach and teach. It’s hopefully how I entertain sometimes. I’ve taken classes upon classes to try to perfect the craft, but the process is still a struggle, especially as I push myself to take more risks.

In 2017, I pitched an article to the website Girls Gone Strong, determined to try and publish outside of my little blog, and my pitch was accepted.

Then, I let the project slide through my hands. Even though I was pitching an article on a subject I know well, I kept writing and re-writing and bumping up against self-doubt. And I let the article fall through.

Hence the reason that I can somehow get a blog post out of writing a blog post (or article more correctly).

Until August of this year, when a good friend of mine who also contributes to the site brought it back up to me. And after a few months of struggle and lots of encouragement, the article was published last week. 

I get plenty of encouraging feedback about my writing - and chances are if you're reading this, it's because you have at some point enjoyed some of what I write. Thank you for that. 

And as much as I enjoyed the feeling of finishing the article and finally seeing a writing project through to completion, I think I enjoy the challenge just as much as the finish line. Not always…I mean I get crazy frustrated sometimes.

But for the most part, I’m willing to struggle for my writing. Because it’s important. Because it’s the one thing that has always called to me. Sometimes I feel tortured by it. But I’m also weirdly gratified by it.

We know that happiness doesn’t come after success. We aren’t suddenly happy if we hit our goal weight or land our dream job with our dream salary. If we are, the happiness is short lived. I enjoyed seeing my article published for a short period of time before I took a deep breath and thought well, what’s next?

It’s not that we shouldn’t savor the moments of success. We need to take a sacred pause and acknowledge our achievements. But if we can’t find some satisfaction in the struggle, well, maybe we need to pick something else for which we want to struggle.

This same author also talked about trading problems - I traded the problem of working 70 hours a week at a job I didn’t love for the problem of driving an hour each way to work - but also having more time to sit down and write.

So right now, I am very grateful for this particular struggle.

** The book is the Art of Not Giving a **** by Mark Manson