Gut-Busting Bikini Battle
Wearing a bathing suit in public: It sends a chill down my back. In fact, I gravitate to big-city get-aways so I don’t even have to take my bathing suit out of its drawer. But yesterday, I did it. I put on my big girl pants (or in this case, a bikini), marched into the pool area at Soho House (because big cities have bodies of water, too...), and decided I’d have a wonderful day at the pool if it killed me.
I’m honestly not sure this could have happened had I not attended the Motivate Summit here in Chicago a few months ago. Let me explain.
During a breakout session, a group of fitness pros was talking about how we coach our clients to re-write the script that runs in a loop in their heads. Scripts like, “I look fat” or “I wish I looked like that” or “What will so-and-so think if I do such-and-such?” Coach Stevo, CEO of Habitry who puts on the Motivate Summit, mentioned that his fiancé had a great trick when it came to crappy self-talk like this. She will let herself think the negative thought (instead of just trying to repress it) and then will immediately follow it up by asking, “But what if I didn’t care?”
What if I didn’t care?
Those five words put together into a question: Those could be some of the most powerful in your life. They’ve begun to sink in with me and it’s been a serious game-changer.
“I will feel so gross in my bathing suit and people will totally judge me,” was the script looping around in my head as I weighed the pros and cons about going poolside.
“But what if I didn’t care?” I rebutted. Really, though. I made myself answer that question. If I didn’t care, here’s what might happen:
I might actually get TO the pool area.
I might even get INTO the pool and cool off between replying to emails and reading.
I might get into the pool, cool off, and realize that it’s really, really FUN.
I might pay much less attention to other people who I thought might initially judge me. And then I might realize that if they DO judge me, it has more to do with them than me.
I might then wonder, hey, what kinds of bodies of water have I been staying away from all of this time??
What if I didn’t care? Simply put, if I didn’t care, I might be able to live a little more whole-heartedly (hat tip to Brene Brown). And, wow. That's pretty freeing.
So: What if, next time you caught yourself saying something not-nice to yourself, you asked the question, "But what if I didn't care?"...
