_SportyBrains_

*This is my last post of the year. But it’s not about 2017, or 2018, or resolutions. I’m sure many of you are disappointed. Ok not really. So, I once read a comment on an Instagram post of yet another running pic that read: “ your legs are #goals” and promptly rolled my eyes a little. Really??  That comment makes basically no sense and is not good on the body image end of things either. Perhaps I’m just becoming a crusty old curmudgeon, but doesn’t it seem that the concept of goals (no hashtag) has become thrown around so much it lacks it’s original meaning? While goals, especially for athletes and businesspeople, remain necessary steering mechanisms for intentional progress, I have a pet peeve of that word being thrown around too much. And by how goal-setting can get misused. Or our focus gets misguided too heavily on a certain goal or we minimize them to clichés/loose terminology for just something you wish you had-we kind of have opposite extremes here it seems.   ...

...insert your name above....  Today we’re talking about lies, awful lies-but not the ones you usually think of: like when your mile PR is juuuust a few seconds over what you tell people or maybe that time when you were seventeen and you were staying at your "friend’s house" for the night (for the record, I have not committed either of these!). This post is about the lies that we tell ourselves. Yep. I do it, and probably most of the planet does so too to a degree. What’s crazy is how slick our negative belief systems can get at telling us things that are untrue. Absurd things. And like to the point where we don’t even question what’s going on anymore-it’s like “oh, okay Adrienne, whatever you say!”  That’s when stuff gets weird. And can work against us, but trust me-it doesn’t have to be this way. What this post really is about is about the jacked-up things that negative self-talk does to us often-like daily. These lovely thoughts are also referred to as Automatic N...

“Don’t look back, you’re not going that way.” -unknown Raise your hand if you ever find yourself doing this! Not quite sure what I’m talking about (or you're in denial, which is okay)- then read on. And you can put your hands down now... So there’s this awful thing we sometimes do to ourselves... some of us have this tendency to take our past achievements (Yay!) and use them to psychologically beat us down instead of build us up (Noooo!). When you read this for the first time, this idea likely makes little sense (or it's my writing style, but not much we can do there...)-or maybe it does if you’re all wise and stuff. If you're like me, we often find ourselves always going back to some arbitrary standard we set for ourselves this one day or moment in our lives and held onto it as to determine our worth and confidence forever and ever.  I'm writing to those achievement-oriented individuals out there; myself included of course. Maybe this blog should be re-named...

Let the audience be forewarned that a somewhat rambling and incoherent post may lie ahead. But if you don't care about that-read on. Because I think this topic is so relevant for so many; I know it is for me. We're going to talk about beliefs and letting go of those ideas that just serve no purpose in our lives. So life is all messy and stuff sometimes. The older I get the more I understand this is a prerequisite for truly living. You can't grow if you don't ever go through things-big things, small things, whatever. Sorry to disappoint any of you, by the way. This blog is not really about playing it safe. So when we go through things-anything like a personal or professional failure, a failing grade, or a sub-par race (or for me literally years of that mess) it can stay with you-we hold on to these experiences, often unconsciously for a long friggin' time. These beliefs can change how we perceive ourselves and they're sneaky little suckers. Not that we mean f...