To growth mindsets and the strength and courage to try new things.

I am not a natural athlete, growing up I barely survived gym class in high school. I distinctly remember watching the classroom monitor mark a tic mark every time I stopped to walk during the mile run – it goes without saying that I accumulated a lot of tic marks. For whatever reason, athleticism was not something that came naturally to me. I never played group sports, I didn’t run for fun, and at the age of 17 I had resigned myself to the fact that physical activity was not for me. At the time, I didn’t have the language to describe my mindset, but now I know that I had a very fixed mindset about myself as it related to my athletic abilities or in this case, lack thereof.

I graduated high school in 2004. While it wasn’t THAT long ago in some ways it feels like a million years ago. There were no social media influencers or positive psychology thought leaders sharing from their soap boxes the importance of having a growth mindset. And if there was anyone having conversations about the ability for us to change and evolve as people, their message had not yet reached my corner of Eastern North Carolina.

It wasn’t until I entered my early 20s and found myself around a new friend group in a new city that I began to consider the possibility of giving athletics a try. I started slow, initially joining a gym. Now, I didn’t join a gym with grand plans of reinventing myself as an athlete. I joined the gym to use their cardio equipment, spending 30 minutes at a time on the elliptical machine watching HGTV. Eventually, I began to look up from the little screen on my elliptical machine and started to take notice of the other things happening at the gym. It was hard for me to understand, but some people at this gym seemed to truly be enjoying themselves. People were running on treadmills, signing up for spin classes, and toting yoga mats into the gym to take vinyasa flow classes.

I was intrigued by these people who seemed to be deriving a certain level of joy from their time spent in the gym. However, I couldn’t relate. These gym goers who seemed to be having a genuinely good time were just as perplexing to me as the kids I went to high school with who participated in group sports and were successful in gym class. I just didn’t understand what motivated them and I certainly couldn’t relate to their willingness to make themselves uncomfortable on purpose.