Find Life Purpose in Your Effort

While working with a client about six months ago I was asked whether I believed that people were just being lazy when it came to starting or maintaining a fitness regimen. At the time I answered “yes.” However after several months in deep concentration and many questions asked, I have come to the conclusion that people are not just being lazy, and that there is more to it than this.

For the months ahead I hope to engage each of you with these blogs by being informative and stimulating and I hope they will be what you need to energize you to start or maintain your effort. Consider this for living fit: Create your life work around your purpose for living. If you are fortunate enough to enjoy what you are doing (work) and get paid for it, you are one in a million. However, if you are fortunate enough to have you work define your purpose for living you are truly blessed. If your work is your purpose for living, it may be said that you have passion, that your work is “meaningful.” If it is, what does this mean to you? Well it may contribute to your self-esteem, a sense that you can be fulfilled through a mastering of yourself and even to the sense that you are valued by the society you live in.

If you go back to the question that my client asked me many months ago, let’s look into why I now do not think it is an issue of laziness that people do not start or maintain a fitness routine. Let’s make a comparison between what you may do when you are given directions for a project at work. Remember your work contributes to your self-esteem, a sense of mastery and value by others. Have you ever told your boss that you will try to start or sustain your effort at work? The answer is a flat “no.” You will never try to work, but you will try to start or sustain your effort to follow a fitness routine. Well I think it is more than just being lazy. I think it can be traced to how we are socialized, what we learn is value. For the most part our cultural makeup can determine how we function daily. For example, we will sacrifice ourselves at the expense of doing good work even if it means that we must go without sleep, spend long hours completing a project or choose career over family. Whatever it takes, we will make sure that work gets done. So what is the answer? Take time to be aware of yourself, the thing you have defined as important in your life. Is it your health? Can you stand to feel better of think clearer in your work? If you can make an effort to start and maintain a fitness routine, your self-esteem will be enhanced, you will develop a sense of mastery of yourself and your environment, and you will increase your value. The underlying theme of this blog—to create your life work around your purpose for living—understands the relationship between your effort to start and maintain a fitness routine and your work and its effects on your self-esteem. Just that is well-summarized by Elliot Jacques: “…working for a living is one of the basic activities in a person’s life. By forcing them to come to grips with their environment, with their livelihood at stake, it confronts them with the actuality of their personal capacity—to exercise judgment, to achieve concrete and specific results. It gives them a continuous account of their correspondence between outside reality and the inner perception of that reality, as well as an account of the accuracy of their appraisal of themselves…” In short, a person’s work does not satisfy their material needs alone. In a very deep sense, it gives them a measure of their sanity, until next time, Take Care of You.

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