ReFitYOU

Fortune Cookie Wisdom – Integrity and Consistency

I got a fortune cookie at dinner the other night

Fortune Cookie Wisdom

“With integrity and consistency – your credits are piling up”

It was hard not to crack up upon reading that. I happen to be on a “first date” at the time and so there was the obligatory “… in bed” game that had to go on.  So not a sexy fortune. Once that subsided, I realized that this goofy little slip of paper just nailed the crux of my life struggles for the past few months (and OK, if I was honest with myself, the last few years).  Integrity and consistency have been a huge struggle for me in many areas, and it’s through running that I’m finding ways to reintegrate that into my life.

Integrity for me is doing what I say I’m going to do when I say I’m going to do it. Simple right? And without integrity, you can’t have any sort of consistency and without consistency, you can’t achieve any health or fitness goals. Thinking bigger, you can’t really achieve any goals without consistency which is developed through integrity.

I got to a place in my life where you really couldn’t count on my word. Yeah, I’d say, “sure I’ll do it” and what ever ‘it’ was never got done. Worst of all, I couldn’t count on myself. Every Monday morning it was the good ole “Oh I’ll start my diet today” or some other promise I knew I’d never keep.

But that began to change when I declared to a room full of people that I would train and run a 10K race. YIKES. You gotta put in the training hours to succeed in a goal like that. So I stared small and celebrated my wee tiny successes and I re-taught myself how to have integrity and how to be consistent.

Now the funny thing is, that training is bleeding into other areas of my life. I am now the person who if I say I’m doing X, X gets done. OK, fine, X sometimes does not get done how or when I originally planned, but it gets done nonetheless. Running isn’t only changing my body, but its changing my life.