Your FITNESS JOURNEY and the IKEA experience...
Years ago, I was introduced to the home furnishing store....IKEA. I must say, my first experience was nothing short of AMAZING. I think I stayed in there for about 3 hours. There was just so much good stuff in there and I was trying to see everything. The best way to describe it is imagine flipping through your favorite home decor magazine and actually being able to physically walk through the pages in REAL LIFE. The mock setups of lighting fixtures, furniture, and accessories made you beyond excited about decorating your own home. You could literally follow the blueprint of what they used for the look.....step by step and piece by piece. They even had an inventory tag on each of the items so that you could pick up each piece before checking out. How fantastic is that?!?! And the prices were AMAZING too. It made you want to buy two or three pieces (even if you only needed one), just because the price was so good!! I thought to myself...So you mean to tell me that all I need to do is jot down the inventory numbers, head over to the receiving area to pick up the items, and then I could have the same version of the mock setup? Well...NOT QUITE. There was a little more to the process than that....I later found out. The process "in a nutshell" was as follows....you received a huge box (sometimes a few boxes) and detailed assembly instructions on how to put it together. YIKES!!! Yep, once you found your item, you had to put it together. But the good thing about it was that you had a blueprint to follow to get you there. You just had to be willing to put in the work to get it done. That is very similar to how the whole FITNESS JOURNEY flows. Sometimes we may see a person's before and after picture and imagine the same thing for ourselves. We become inspired by the end results and think the same thing can unfold for each of us. Well it can, but you have to keep in mind that everyone's journey is different and so will be the results. You also have to be willing the follow a blueprint from beginning to end....leaving nothing out.
Which is why, when it comes to your fitness journey, it is good to be inspired by someone else's journey but not try to duplicate it. Leave that to the IKEA experience.
