Now I’m not one who loves exercise. In fact, I hate it. I do it because I have to. Every time, I come up with excuses not to have to do it. It’s not something that motivates me to work at it because it’s hard. There are so many mental and physical hurdles I have to overcome. There’s sweat. There’s pain. There’s failure. There’s all those images of my childhood where in school, I came last in every sport.

There’s also that routine of having to change what you’re wearing, looking at the classes on offer for the day and making a selection of the one that is shortest and less arduous. There’s weird equipment that would not look out of place in a medieval torture chamber.

Most horrifying of all, cheery trainers in trendy gym clothes who look at your treadmill dashboard and point out “You’re not working hard there, Helen. Why not increase the speed and the incline there?”

No, let’s not! Don’t touch my treadmill, you evil man! (Images of the Inquisition in my head)…

Seriously, I have no idea why people love to going to the gym or even running marathons — to me, these activities simply don’t make sense.

It’s easier to do nothing and catch up on the latest episodes of my favourite TV show instead.

So, so many excuses…

This year, I had a good long hard look at myself — in particularly, my mindset which needed a complete overhaul.

Why was it easier for me to share my personal learning experiences openly and in public without fear, while the idea of doing the same for my fitness journey held complete dread?

What was stopping me from pushing myself to do something that would aid my health and wellbeing?

Why was I comfortable with the status quo and make excuses not to change my current routine?

After all, I knew deep down that having a regular health and fitness routine would help me. However I could see that my own actions — or inaction — was sabotaging my health.

That’s when I started to realise that my fitness routine is exactly like some people’s fear to sharing their own personal or self-directed learning experiences.

It’s easier to continue what you’ve always been doing because:

• Learning new things mean that we need to change our comfortable and compliant behaviours and mindset
• Opening our learning journey to public would make us accountable for our own actions — we have to make a commitment to ourselves and in front of others
• Sharing what we are learning to others may mean that if we fail, we lose face or reputation and if we succeed, it comes across as if we’re self-promoting
• Self-directing our learning means that it will take time away from the things we prefer to be doing at work and at home
• We believe learning is expensive — after all, it’s easier if someone else tells us when to slot it into our work day and figure out a way on how to do our other work or, if they pay us to attend a course or conference
• We don’t see any real value in it because we’ve gotten to where we are today with what we know so why the need to change anyway?

If we swap the word “learning” with “fitness”, we have a collection of EXACTLY the same fears that some people have with self-directing their learning to help them support their professional and personal goals.

I am now beginning to understand the fear and dread with some people who may not think personal and continual learning is of any value to them.

While exercise and physical activity improves your health and body as well as reduce your risk of disease, learning does the same thing for your mind. By opening and sharing our learning to the world, it makes us accountable. We have to commit. 

Accountability is the mental hurdle we have to overcome. Not the learning nor the exercise itself.

Look at where you’re making excuses for not taking a more proactive approach to your personal learning routine and ask yourself, how are these excuses serving you for the better?

As always, I’m interested in your thoughts.

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