Access or Ability?

When we’re attempting change, seeking improvement and wanting to be better, there’s a tendency to review everything in the here and now. We’re all guilty of it — “I’m just not good enough,” in the context of that moment. And you may be right. The reality is that many of us fall short of our lofty expectations, and creating the space to deal with that high expectation and the perceived loss is a valuable skill.

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Do you lack the ability — or just access to it?

One of the questions I often pose in this conversation is: do you think you don’t have the ability, or is it more a question of access to that ability at this point?

Now, I’m not talking about me at my height becoming an NBA player. I’m talking about real changes you want to make in your own life to improve its quality. Most of these conversations centre themselves around body image and the eating experience, so let’s use that as an example.

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Meet Alana

Alana is a young medical professional — competent and capable in her work, which is very important in her life. The sort of person you want in your team of health professionals: she cares, she’s confident and capable, and she has a great sense of humour.

Alana recently finished up a maternity leave cover position in a department she loved, and had to go back to an old role she wasn’t a massive fan of. As timing would have it, her relationship — probably on the rocks for many years now — also came to an end. Given the context and the background, you can see this had been a period of change forced upon her. Feeling pretty low and isolated, food became a comfort.

With a relatively warped sense of reality, Alana’s eating habits led her to thoughts like “how much weight have I put on,” “how unattractive I’ve become,” “how far have I regressed.” The “I’m not good enough to get through this” story had grown horns. In all that emotion, we rarely get any logical air — no real perspective.

The reality? The weight change, if any, was the same as her regular menstrual cycle fluctuations. Clothes may have felt a bit tighter, but Alana was still rocking the designer labels she wore before. The spring in her step and that sense of humour had quietened, though — she didn’t feel like herself.

Sometimes this stuff happens, and it can feel like it happens all at once. The story we tell ourselves is one of half-truths and Chinese whispers. The story of her career regressing and her relationship ending had suddenly combined into a negative self-evaluation that didn’t seem to end without the intervention of Cold Rock via Uber Eats. But then the guilt of the act… oh, the guilt.

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The cycle: feel, eat, guilt, evaluate, repeat

These are conclusions we draw without realising it — assumptions we’ve made and evaluations we’ve rubber-stamped. The reality is that at this particular point of Alana’s life, in the environment she was in, she couldn’t access the abilities that had enabled her success in the past.

That sense of humour that gave her the bandwidth to deal with the heavy stuff; the compassion for others she showed in her professional work — she couldn’t extend any of it to herself. It was all getting lost in this cycle of feel, eat, guilt, evaluate, repeat.

To her credit, Alana has always been willing to do the work. As a coach, it’s our job to align the next step with that person’s current capacity — whether that’s taking your fitness to the next level or reprioritising your health amongst the chaos. Our job is defining and creating the space for the next step, and supporting you as you take it.

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Alana’s next step

Instead of comparing Instagram stories and worrying about the future, we shifted her gaze. Her next step looked like this:

• Prioritise some decent rest
• Change nothing about your eating habits for the next seven days
• Complete a food and thought diary alongside that eating

We then reviewed the thoughts that went alongside the eating experience and — importantly — started to provide her access to her abilities beyond the emotion.

Perhaps the question to answer at the end of this one is: are your current habits a reflection of your ability? And if not — how can we access that ability to change those habits?

Yours in Health,
Sean Cornish

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