Magic Change Goggles: It's not Them, it's YOU!

HOW do *You* 🤔 look back at the past, be in the now, and plan for the future?

Sooooo.... We often hear people say things like: "Looking at the past is depression", "Live in the NOW!", "Too much focus on the future is anxiety" - and we can fall into the trap of not only not looking at our past, present, and purpose with purpose - but not looking at all. TOTALLY OVERWHELMING, right?

Or... we look for, what I call, "Magic Change Goggles" we can beg, borrow, steal, or buy... to make our lives appear better, even when we're still feeling crappy behind the reflective lenses.

(That don't really do much more than make us "look" like we have our ish together - or, at the very least, make us feel like we're repping an 80's song).

Way back in 2008, at the age of 35, I hit a wall and made a promise to change EVERYTHING in my life that I was unhappy with - my weight, my relationships, my job, my nutrition, my health, my spirituality, my finances... you name it, I felt trapped in a life without satisfaction and grace. That was when I started to reach for just about EVERY pair of those (sometimes really expensive) "Magic Change Goggles" I could get my mitts on. I tried pills, programs, people, equipment, priests, mommy groups, MLMs, gym memberships, praying, starving, binging, purging, crying, therapists... and even though some of them "stuck", THEY weren't the answer. I was.

You see, not everything was broken like I thought it was. In fact, I had a lot of things that were going just fine for me in the moment, and that I needed to just give more time to allow to take seed and grow. I'd done something we like to call in the mental health biz, "catastrophizing", in which I attached everything that was happening in my life to each other, made it all "bad", and blamed it all on myself or others. Meanwhile, the "good" things in my life were all separate and random, never attributed to anything I had done directly, and transient (see the pattern?).

I also dismissed each bit of magical "help" I grabbed on to like a sinking woman in the middle of the ocean as broken if it didn't make me FEEL better, quickly. In fact, I ended up grabbing on to so many things at once that I could have drowned in the mess. It wasn't until I stopped blaming and shaming, and started naming and /doing/ that I started to see how it wasn't faulty glasses... it was how I was using them.

Honestly, I was trying to make the glasses show me progress like some horrible adaptation of Snow White's Magic Mirror has a baby with VR, when really, I just needed them to help me focus on myself.

Besides, would you really let something that looks like this tell you what you should think about yourself?

10 years later, I am pretty proud of what I have achieved: I changed my relationship with food, I learned not only how to exercise in a way that I love - but learned to teach others how to do the same, I mended fences with the relationships that are healthy and set boundaries with those that were not, we moved back to the Southwest, I founded and am growing my own business, I fostered new and old communities of professional and social friends who are amazing, we got together as a family about our financial health, and I reconnected with my spiritual self through all of it. I also intimately know each and every moment of the blood, sweat, and tears that took me to today.

Am I where I want to be after 10 years of hard work? Absolutely not! In fact, I fail EVERY DAY. I make poor food choices sometimes, I don't exercise every day I schedule it, I say and do things that hurt the people I love at times, I have TONS of doubts about my business (heck - I am doubting whether or not I should write this, whether or not people will read it, and what I am doing with my life in general - right now). Yet, I show up, every day.

I have also learned a lot about who I am and how I think about myself. I view work and time differently than I did when I was younger. I appreciate the value of my hard work more, and understand it will usually take more time than I anticipate to get the results I want. My "Magic Change Goggles" don't change me from outside in, but they change how I look at the world from inside out.

So, don't be afraid to slap on those shades... but remember that they won't "fix" you - they can only help you see yourself - and the world - in a new way.

<3, Jonni Khat