Strangely enough, one of the factors making maintaining a healthy life balance more challenging is also one of our strengths: our adaptability.  We are quite good at adjusting to minor changes.  So good, in fact, we often don’t even notice that we are doing it, and the process flies below our awareness radar.  And therein lies the rub.  Life thrives within a complex, ever-changing Goldilocks zone in which things are neither too much, nor too little; too fast, nor too slow; too hot, nor too cold, but instead fall within that “just right” range nestled comfortably between the more extreme possibilities.  Our adaptability allows us to drift towards the extremes of the Goldilocks zone without noticing it — and that ultimately makes corrective actions more difficult.

A case in point: when it comes to our physical well-being, many of us in the Western World find ourselves a tad out-of-balance and would benefit by bringing more regular physical activity into our life.  In addition to its well-known physical benefits,  recent research is showing regular exercise to also be helpful for our emotional well-being: it’s proving to be an effective treatment for mild to moderate depression and anxiety.  In retrospect, such results are not too shocking.  We have good reason to believe that our mind is created, or at least shaped, by activity in our brain — a part of our body. If regular exercise promotes widespread healthy functioning of our body, and it does, it would be entirely consistent to find that it helps brain functioning as well, as part of the package.  And if our brain is functioning better, our emotions are likely to be in better balance.

Quick, Robin!  To the Bat-Gym!  Given the overwhelming benefits of regular exercise, you’re most likely eager to leap from your chair, don a cool spandex outfit, and start your new workout program.  Or maybe not.

There’s always a catch.  In this case, we might sum it all up as follows: I hate exercise.  It’s rather easy to understand why we might feel less than totally enthusiastic about exercising.  All too often exercise tends to be unpleasant, inconvenient, and out of sync with the rest of our life.  Most outrageously, exercise requires serious effort; it can be out-of-breath, red-in-the-face hard as it makes us hot, sweaty, achy, and exhausted.  It can literally be a pain in the gluteus maximus.  Perversely, the greater the potential benefits of exercise, the more unpleasant it tends to be — at least in the beginning.  And as if all that weren’t bad enough, many exercise activities are repetitive, boring, and generally not much fun.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t like hard and boring.  I prefer fun and easy.  Should I deliberately stress myself in the hope that my body will respond by gradually becoming stronger, fitter, more resilient, and attractive?  Well… maybe.  But that brings up another major mismatch with my preferences: I like instant results. Working day after day, seeing only minimal, if any, improvement is not an attractive prospect.  But that’s par for the course with exercise: getting significant results takes time and persistent effort.  And here’s a bonus wrinkle: the older you are — and arguably the more important it is for you to be exercising — the more time it takes to actually see results.  Oh, bother!  Who’s responsible for this mess?

I’m not done.  It would help if it were easy to fit exercise into our already overcrowded daily routine.  But it isn’t.  Let’s be honest about this. For many of us, regular exercise amounts to a life-style change only slightly less comprehensive than having a sex-change operation and moving to China.  Admittedly, one can sneak up on a more active life-style, starting out small.  But still, it eats up time, which we don’t have, and requires planning and attention.  Even a modest exercise program can easily consume six hours a week, and more is better.  Where’s that time and effort going to come from? And who is going to pay for all those spiffy outfits, equipment, and hours at the gym?

In short, exercise sucks.  And regular exercise sucks regularly.  It’s little wonder so few of us indulge.  But that does not change the stark reality: exercise may be the closest thing we know of to a magic elixir: it’s very likely to extend your life while making it noticeably more enjoyable while you’re at it.  Would you like to be more attractive?  Have more energy?  Would you like one more day to spend with your loved ones?  To see one more beautiful sunset?  Only you can decide if it’s worth the effort, but if you’re like me, and are convinced it is, then our challenge becomes one of tipping the scales, of creating circumstances that make regular exercising, on balance, simply too good to pass up.  Among other things, that translates into making it as convenient and enjoyable as possible.

Do you exercise regularly? If so, how do you motivate yourself, how do you make the experience more enjoyable, how do you make it more convenient? In other words, what works for you? We are all individuals, each with our own set of life circumstances.  That means strategies and tactics that work well for one of us may not work — at all — for another.  Nonetheless, the more ideas we can gather together, the more raw material we will have to experiment with as we each create our own unique life-style balance.  Oh, I know there are lots of lists on the net outlining how to motivate yourself to exercise.  And those are all great!  But I’m not looking for ideas that might sound good, or seem as if they should work.  I’m more interested in what we know does work, tried and true tactics that we know work for at least one of us… no matter how off the wall they might seem.  Below, I share a few tips I’ve already collected.  If you would like to comment, or add some tactics that work for you, please feel free to do so.  And remember, people are different. What works for one of us will not always work for others.  Each of us will need to experiment to find our own best balance.

Take-a-Tip, Leave-a-Tip

For me, listening to enjoyable, upbeat music seems to create extra energy for exercising and make it more pleasant.  I don’t know where that inspirational energy comes from, it seems to appear out of thin air.  I only know the effect is real.  Curiously, it is not always easy to predict which songs will work best, it takes a little experimenting.  I have also discovered that different songs tend to go better with different exercise activities. Thus, one set of songs goes best with walking, another with working on a treadmill or elliptical.

Some people like to jump into activities with both feet, others like to sneak up on them from behind.  I tend to be in the latter group.  Starting out gradually worked well for me.  I started walking and gradually added more strenuous activities.  You might prefer bike riding, swimming, or daily ping pong.  The important part is to get started.  What also helped me is that I liked to walk, so the activity was inherently enjoyable and did not require any initial special equipment  (read, “big financial investment”).  Later, after trying out several types of work-out machines, I settled on an elliptical and put in front of a TV with DVD player.  That made exercise about as enjoyable, easy, and convenient as it can get for me.  It also made it harder to come up with excuses for not exercising: so what if it’s raining or my hair’s a mess?

Once upon a time, there were five blind brothers living together in a peaceful little village. Surrounded by lush vegetation and bright tropical flowers, their village was nestled in a beautiful valley protected by majestic mountains. A babbling brook running through the valley provided cool, clear water for all. The rich soil made farming easy and productive. Days in the valley were warm and sunny; nights, just right for restful slumber. All in all, life was good.

Almost as if to compensate the brothers for their lack of vision, nature had granted them great intelligence. As respected wise men, they were asked to teach at the village school. The villagers, in return, provided the brothers with hearth and keep. Now, being very smart, the brothers knew a great deal about a great many things… a great many things that is, except elephants. Amazingly, they knew almost nothing about elephants. They had heard of them, of course, but they had never actually encountered one, and the fates had seemingly conspired to keep them from learning about them in other ways. But that was about to change.

On a particularly fine day, while taking their usual afternoon walk about the village, the five brothers stumbled upon a friendly elephant the villagers had left in their path. As luck would have it, each brother encountered a different part of the elephant. The first, found the elephant’s trunk. “Finally!” he exclaimed, “Now, I understand elephants. They are just like big snakes.” The second wise man, holding the elephant’s ear, had made a different discovery. “What are you talking about, brother? Isn’t it obvious to you that elephants are actually like giant leathery leaves?” The third wise man, having wrapped his arms around a leg of the elephant, piped in, “Say what?! Are you both screwy? How could you delude yourselves into believing that an elephant is anything other than a tree-like creature… that hops!”

By this time, the fourth brother was relaxing against the elephant’s side. “I’m surprised and disappointed by you three,” he said, sadly shaking his head. “Have you taken leave of all your senses? Can you not see that an elephant is like a huge, breathing drum”? The unfortunate fifth brother had come upon the elephant from the rear, and was reluctantly holding its tail. “Any realistic view of an elephant,” he pontificated, “will admit that an elephant is nothing more than a hairy rope that smells bad and produces falling chunks of odoriferous, mushy paddies. Yuk!! Icky!”

At this point, the brothers, each having stated his honest opinion based on objective observation, proceeded to argue about who was right. The elephant, having more important things to do, happily shuffled off in search of some nice ripe fruit… leaving the five brothers to their deliberations.

As far as I know, they are arguing to this very day.

What meaning does our story illustrate for you?

If we use our story as a model, we might imagine that our experience will typically be limited to a particular point of view. Like the blind brothers in the story, we may grasp one particular aspect of a situation and ignore all others — as if there is only one “truth” and any other point of view is, at best, “wrong”. Unlike the story, in real life we do not randomly select our point of view. Rather, we come to situations full of predisposing biases, or beliefs, that we carry with us.

In our story, each brother has a valid perspective on, or understanding of, the elephant. What makes the brothers look ridiculous is not so much their limited perspective as it is their inflexibility. Each seems incapable of accepting the idea that there might be other valid aspects of an elephant. One of the tell-tale symptoms of mental health problems is inflexibility. And in this case, what is true for individuals is also true for relationships: inflexibility can create serious issues for a relationship.

I will leave you, for now, with this question: what might the brothers have done that would have improved their understanding of elephants?