How we can use this opportunity to establish, or reestablish, healthy routines and habits into our days to make them more fulfilling and productive.

We suggest:

• Meditate
  
• Read (suggestion: Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl) 
  
• Take it one day at a time
  
• Meal prep
  
• Be around the ones you love
  
• Move and stay physically healthy
  
• Be present
  
• See opportunities within the struggle 

What's it like being a working mom and still making time for yourself?

Basic needs must be met during these times, including movement! It's hard, and one of those things that you hate during the moment, but it's freeing to the mind and obviously essential to your critical well-being. It's easy to make excuses as to why you can't workout, especially when you have little ones.

It's very easy to allow laziness to take over, and let yourself go. Then it becomes harder to get back into things, harder in fact, than it is to stay in them in the first place. Having a coach, workout partner, or accountability partner of some form truly goes a long ways!

Viktor Frankl, in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, often talks about how to endure struggle “in the right way”. It is my opinion, of which has formed by studying the great minds of history, that when confronted with difficult times or people, we have three choices: grow, stay the same, or backslide.

To get to the point of automation, of having habits in place, we have to consciously make the choice to do what’s hard.

To endure struggle the right way.

To have the courage to change what we can.

What we do now prepares us for something later. Therefore, when things do get hard - which they always have, certainly are right now, and will be in the future - then our choice of having been disciplined enough to embrace daily struggle and challenge, instead of the path of least resistance, will have armored ourselves for the tests of life. 

When a personal circumstance like surgery or illness, or of course a world-wide pandemic, shake us from our daily lives, it forces us to realize the things we have inadvertently been taking for granted.

We have likely all experienced things before COVID-19 that have forced us to slam on the brakes when we were cruising along at full speed. It could have been finding out bad news about a loved one or friend, an unexpected injury or illness, a beloved pet dying, or getting stranded on an island with nothing but a blood stained volleyball. 

We can feel like we're making so much progress and then BAM, the universe has other plans. Reality checks, we like to call them.

Back in June of 2019, Lili had a much needed, not-for-sissies surgery that allowed her to fully reclaim her health. Since we had first started training together two and a half years ago, she had been dealing with a grapefruit sized mass of tissue in her abdomen endearingly referred to as "Fugly". 

Many of her movement patterns had been altered to compensate for Fugly, and we had to modify certain things because it caused her too much discomfort. 

​Post-surgery, Lili had to wait 6 weeks to recover enough to start progressing back into the things we could normally do in workouts, and once she was able to, it was like she had been reborn. Possessed almost, by this unrelenting will to achieve things that a few months ago, had seemed impossible. 

But she would have never achieved these things had she not committed to herself. Committed to persevering through all the internal things telling her to quit. That it was too hard. 

Now here we are, sitting in the midst of something that is causing so many people pain and suffering, but we can still find things that keep us present. That keep us whole in mind and body. Because gratitude goes along ways, and there are still so many things to be thankful for​. 

Positive Quarantine Vibes: Episode 1 - Managing Stress with Exercise
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