How did i end up here?
For a long time, I was waiting for a moment. A ball to drop. A big, grand change. An exciting "before and after" transformation.
Time and time again, I felt frustrated…there was no perfect routine and the goal posts kept moving at a pace that made me feel like I couldn't sit long enough to make the "big transformation" happen.
Then one day something shifted, but not in the way I expected.
I was reflecting on a difficult conversation I had to have at work and noticed something small but significant…the way I responded was different to how I would have responded 12 months ago. I wasn't reactive, I didn't take things personally. Instead, I looked for a solution to the problem.
I felt proud. Proud that I had the capacity to respond calmly. Proud that I could step back from my emotion and focus on what actually mattered in that moment.
Somewhere along the way…I had changed.
That reflection led me to think about the way I have viewed my training and body.
Coming from a health and sport background, I always battled with the logical arguments. "Size doesn't matter." "Training isn't just about aesthetics." "How sad would it be looking back on my younger years knowing I spent so much time hating how I looked." Logically I understood all of this, but knowing something and feeling it are very different things, which constantly left me conflicted.
For a long time, I told myself that when things finally settled down, when study was over, when work slowed down, that would be the moment I would "lock in".
But little did I know, day by day, I was already changing.
I changed my environment, and with that came a shift in how I viewed training. It was no longer a chore or something I tired to how I should look. It became something I genuinely enjoyed doing again, which I hadn't even realised I lost.
With all this positive change, in the back of my mind, I still believed my big transformation was yet to come.
What I didn't realise was that I was already in the middle of it…
Because transformation, as it turns out, rarely looks like an 8-week challenge. It's not a short course, or a dramatic reveal. It's showing up again and again, especially when you fall off. It's doing the things you genuinely love and surrounding yourself with people who inspire you to be better. It's being willing to walk into rooms where you're not the best person there and leaving your ego at the door long enough to realise how much you still have to learn.
Maybe it's just life experience, but slowly, day by day, conversation by conversation, experience by experience, I started to see the shift in myself that I had once placed on a pedestal, believing it would arrive suddenly.
I used to think success meant the perfect morning routine. The perfect diet. Training as hard as possible every session. Handling every hard conversation with perfect articulation.
That was the standard I measured myself against…but now I see something different.
Overtime, I simply got better. Not perfect. Never perfect. But a little better.
And when I look back on the past 12 months, as a person and a professional, I can say with absolute certainty I have transformed.
Just not in the way I expected.
It didn't come with confetti or likes on Instagram. It came through hard conversations. Through challenging my own beliefs. Through putting myself in discomfort and surrounding myself with people who made me want to grow.
So when did we end up here?
Not through a quick fix. Not through a grand moment. Just months and years of showing up with the promise to try be a little better than the day before. A promise to myself that growth will forever be at the very core of my being and how I choose to move through the world.
Jac.