Regress to Progress: Having the Courage to Meet Yourself Where You Are

Bottom Line:

• Developing awareness in whatever matters to you is essential for lasting, positive change.
• Reality is rarely what we expect. Our first encounter with it often brings pain because we aren't where we thought we were.
• When reality hits, stay calm and have self-compassion. Meet yourself where you actually are, even if that means stepping back from where you thought you should be.
• Regression gets a bad rap, but it's often the only path to real progress. Sometimes you have to go backward to move forward.
• I've learned to drop my ego and work with myself more compassionately. This approach—developing awareness and meeting myself where I actually am—has led to meaningful gains over the past few years.

Reality can be a tough pill to swallow. We all want to be further along or "better" in life in some way than we really are. I know part of me really wants to be healthier and stronger than I am. And if I'm being honest, I wouldn't mind having a higher IQ, being a better writer, and having better looks.

The funny thing about wanting to be anywhere other than where we are is that if we aren't aware of how deeply we internalize these wants, we start living an illusion. We treat ourselves like we actually are further along than we are. This leads to all kinds of problems.

Here's an example from my own life that I think is extremely common (perhaps in young men especially): the way I lifted weights for decades. I started lifting in high school. My dad was great about showing me good form, and I remain grateful for the knowledge he passed along and the way he got me interested in strength training. The problem was that I was a skinny kid with structural imbalances from tennis and multiple abdominal surgeries, so I was always compensating in sneaky ways to lift what I felt I should lift. I never took time to assess my joint range of motion or thoroughly evaluate my movement mechanics and how they impacted my exercise performance. I also had key areas of weakness—core strength and respiratory mechanics—which only led to more compensation.

By my early thirties, I had an extremely stiff low back, limited shoulder and hip range of motion, and numerous imbalances...but I did have decent-looking arms and could bench a decent amount. What a silly illusion I was programmed to maintain!

COVID hit, and my wife and I started doing at-home yoga on the Peloton app. I started to feel my body. I started to breathe differently. I began reading books about body and respiratory mechanics and taking online courses on conditioning and physical practices that benefit folks long-term. While it was tough to fully accept my actual level of strength, seeing through the illusion and meeting myself where I actually was began to allow me to feel better and do things I'd never been able to do. My body felt good, and while I'd always loved using my body, my engagement with fitness became really fun—more like an enjoyable practice than something to check off or judge myself on. Just a couple years down the road, even though I had to regress for a bit, I'm now stronger than before but also feel good, move much better, and have a more thorough understanding of my body.

I've experienced this process in all kinds of ways. With all the surveillance tests I have to go through due to my medical history, frequently the results aren't what I want and don't feel like they line up with where I think I am. But they are what they are, and they give me important insight. Taking a VO2 max test a couple years back and seeing that I wasn't as in shape as I was hoping...that sucked. The list goes on regarding all the ways I've built awareness, had my naive little bubble popped, and gone on to feel frustrated with myself or life in general.

Up until I had kids, that was the end of the cycle. I'd retreat back to my world of illusion, building up more walls of emotional and psychological gunk—increased reactivity, cognitive dissonance, a bigger ego to mask underlying insecurity, and whatever other compensatory processes would jump in to save me from the pain of facing reality. I didn't have the maturity to stay calm or be kind to myself.

But my kids matter to me more than my ego. They've given me the courage to face reality, over and over again. And because of them, I won't back down. So compared to others, am I that strong or that healthy? It doesn't matter. It really doesn't. Can you believe that? You can use benchmarks and guidelines to help yourself, but how you compare to others means nothing to your reality—yet engaging with that reality means everything.

So for once, stop running away. Stop being a jerk to yourself. Embrace the words of one of our wisest cartoon characters as I do, and let Popeye the Sailor Man unlock your potential: "I am what I am and that's all that I am." Only from there can the journey start.

Maybe "regress to progress" doesn't fully capture what I'm trying to get at. But what I'm really trying to do is challenge us all about what we do when reality smacks us in the face. Do we hide from it in one way or another, or do we meet it with courage? Once you meet it with courage, that's it—the next step becomes clear.

In our culture where it's so easy to weigh ourselves down with ridiculous expectations and speak to ourselves with tremendous unkindness, what I've found is that finally operating in reality usually means having some self-compassion and slowing down. It means embracing a kind-hearted process of meeting ourselves where we are—something I can't find a better word for than regression. Regression to who we are and where we are. This is how we either find or hop back on our open, endless path.

Thank you for reading!