This article follows on from Do You Live A Fantasy Life, Or Do Your Fantasies Control You?

Fitness Fantasy!
I confess that I don’t like exercising just for the sake of exercising. If some other enjoyable purpose is involved then I’ll exercise. That limits me at this time to just dancing. I started to learn hip hop dancing and had private lessons for about a year before joining a group. I stopped in after a year and a half because my fitness level just didn’t cut the grade and I felt I was hampering the group as a whole. I decided that if I wanted to return to dancing and to achieve better standards then I would need to go to a gym, i.e. I would have to exercise for the sake of exercising. In order to generate some desire for doing that I fantasized about how I might do that…

I imagined myself going to a gym in my neighborhood and spending many hours there. The gym is a little expensive but very plush and cool. I imagined myself taking a daily swim in the pool (very fast and powerful, of course). I imagined myself lifting weights and then in between sets doing little dance exercises and movements. I imagined myself doing intensive aerobic bursts and then sitting in the café area with my laptop doing writing, administrative tasks, connecting with people over the web and so on and then every 15-minutes putting it away and doing more exercises. I imagined myself finding a quiet room or area and practising six-step, swipes, headstands, and dance choreography.

I let my imagination run away with me. I did that because I really had to let loose and find ways to build up some genuine desire for doing something that I don’t want to do. By sticking all sorts of other benefits onto it I hoped to use the traditional method of ‘psyching myself up’ to get me to take action. I did indeed get enthusiastic but then I decided to take a reality check.

Undoubtedly my idealised scenes would make for a fantastic reality but in all likelihood, based upon past experiences, my current lack of fitness, and the very high-level of desires and expectations involved I would not prove adequate to make the fantasy a reality. I would soon face the horrid truth of my inadequacy and I would stop enjoying it and start procrastinating and then I would quit. I can say this with confidence because that happened with every other gym membership that I had…

I feel a bit embarrassed retelling this story as my imagined scenario was fantastic and really detached from reality. Sadly, I could retell many other stories like this! Fantasizing is a very stimulating experience because it imagines the fulfilment of great desires and it triggers off a lot of very positive emotions. These emotions can lead us to take action, which is great if we have the ability to fulfill the desires. If we don’t then we lead ourselves into taking action that will lead to defeat. Fantasizing indicates that we do have strong desires for certain things and that we do want to take action. However, we must take care about what we commit ourselves to otherwise we set ourselves up to feel bad almost from the very outset through expecting unrealistically high standards that prove impossible to meet.

Getting Real
After generating this fantasy I then asked some important questions:

• How easy and realistic and practical is this idea?
• Will I procrastinate out of inadequacy and shyness?
• How can I align these desires to my current levels of ability so that only small levels of inadequacy are felt?
• What represents the practical, realistic, incremental and enjoyable likelihood?

I then came up with the following list of likely activity at the gym for me:

• A leisurely swim from time to time with occasional bursts of hard swimming
• Initially fairly shorts bursts of cardio-vascular activity that get gradually longer with improved fitness
• Initially low value weight lifting that very slowly increases
• A lot of time spent feeling exhausted in between exercises
• A lot of time spent in a sweaty condition
• A perpetually aching body for many weeks
• Perhaps little desire to do useful work in between vigorous working out
• Probably little desire to do other dance activities in between exercises as I would stand out and feel a bit of an idiot

That list represents the probable and practical reality of how I would actually behave in a gym. So I then asked the question, “How can I make it more enjoyable and compelling?”
On occasion:

• Listen to good music
• Use the time to listen to new music, something that I have stopped doing
• Distract my mind from the exertion by devising ways to occupy my mind with absorbing activities
• Relish making excellent and productive use of time
• Relish vanquishing a previously intractable problem
• Focus on developing a better body that will look better and make dancing easier and lead to better advancement
• Chat to people
• Have low expectations and just seek small incremental improvements

This end result is far removed from the fantasy at the outset but it does show what will likely happen and how to deal with that and find ways to support going through the initial difficult stages. A commitment based upon an outlandish fantasy can succeed in overcoming heavy resistance to an initial first step but it proves unsustainable and will lead to eventual defeat in most cases.

Related articles: Fundamental Motivation

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