Define Your Strength

What does it mean to define your strength? What does healthy, happy and confident mean to you? There are so many answers to this question and truthfully, you’d be hard pressed to find one that is, at it’s core, inherently wrong. And while no answer is certainly more right than the next, one thing is for certain: you are in charge of defining your strength. You are in charge of what comes next.

Strength (noun).

The quality or state of being physically strong.

The capacity to withstand great force or pressure.

It’s 5 a.m. on a Monday morning. Your alarm goes off. You wiggle out from under the covers, throw your hair in a messy bun and blindly press the Save Me button on your coffee maker.

You are not a morning person (no Buzzfeed Quiz ever puts you up, catching all the worms with the early birds).

Yet every Monday you get up to get to your favorite Spin/HIIT/Boot Camp class/personal training session before a full day at work. You’re even thinking about hiring a personal trainer.

Why?

What it Means to Define Your Strength

Ask 10 different people what strength means and you’ll get 10 (at least slightly), different answers.

It’s the ability to lift endlessly heavier weight. Maybe that’s another 10 pounds, maybe that’s another 100.

It’s the resiliency to bounce back from a tough break up. From a significant other, a spouse, a best friend, a career…

It’s the inner force that brings you back from devastating injury or illness.

The definitions vary but a few threads run connect each of them:

• strength is positive
• it’s about moving forward, or up, or on-wards
• and it comes from YOU

What strong means to you does not come from social media, or a magazine, or gym culture.

When you close your eyes and picture your strongest, healthiest self…who is she?

Your answer starts to give shape to what your definition of strong is.

Maybe you picture a woman who…

• can run a marathon
• can beat anyone in a push up contest
• has the ability to say “no”, or “yes”, whenever she needs to
• holds her head high in the face of hardship
• gives others strength without losing sight of her own
• feels in control in her choices

Why It’s Important to Define Your Own Strength

There will always be an excuse to put it off until tomorrow. There will always be a counter-force that stands in the way of you and your goals. Work. Chores. Sapped energy. The weekend. The holidays. Your love of Italian food that is built into your genes.

Those kinds of excuses have a way of losing their power when faced with a deeply routed sense of strength and meaningful goals.

Wanting to love your body…or feel in control…or live without guilt — those are life changing goals that are about strength and positivity.

Those are the goals and meaningful whys that keep you going even when motivation and will power wane.

Where Strength Comes From

It took losing my strength and my health for me to confront the idea that I had no idea how I actually defined my strength.

For a long time I’d defined strength by the text book definition: how much could I lift, how many miles could I run, how many push ups could I do. That meant something to me when my life revolved around sports and teammates and friends.

When I left for college, I lost all of that. I didn’t feel strong, I felt out of control. I didn’t know who I was and I hated feeling so lost. By sophomore year I was struggling with an eating disorder and searching for who I was supposed to be.

It took losing a lot for me to recognize how important my own strength, in so many ways, was important.

Define your strength from the place inside of you that mainstream media, guilt and insecurities can’t touch.