Evan Sanders's Blog, page 82

How To Stay Positive And Motivated

 

How do you stay positive and motivated all the time? (My Youtube channel addresses this!)  The thing is, you don’t. You have to experience the balance of life in order to really feel true emotions. It’s when you go overboard in one way or another that you can truly set yourself up for massive mood swings. I think we really have a bit more choice in the matter, and that is exactly what I talk about in my video blog today. It isn’t always about staying positive or motivated, but rather keeping your end goal and vision in mind and working through the obstacles to achieve it.

80% of the time you are going to wake up feeling average and okay. It’s going to be your choice whether you want to have a good day or a bad day. There are so many thing that are in our control, we just have to open ourselves up to the possibilities of living a truly unique and adaptive life and we will find answers

Hope you like this!

Live bold. Dream Big. Dare greatly.

Join the movement of men and women looking to inspire and change the world – http://btrman.me/1uSFjaq

 

How To Stay Positive And Motivated is a post from: Inspirational Stories About Life

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Look Em’ In The Eye & Speak From The Heart

 You have to speak from the heart. If you don’t the most vulnerable moments of life will pass you by. 

My best friend wrote that quote above from Hemingway in a hollowed out book he made one one year. In fact, that has seemed to stick and every year, we attempt to make each other hollowed out books. The important part though, is that quote, and that is what I am talking about tonight.

Speak from the heart. 

It’s easy to get lost in your own intentions sometimes. We all have an agenda, but I have found through my own learning year after year that removing your agenda from a situation and leaving a space open for vulnerability and love is always the best answer.

When you speak from the heart you open up so many different worlds. You allow people though to trust you fully because everything you are saying is coming from a pure and true place. When you have an agenda, people can usually sniff that out pretty quickly. Sometimes that just comes instinctually and you shatter your chances of creating that “space.”

It is true that trust takes time, but there are people who you just sense that you can trust. This feeling comes from your gut, something I didn’t trust in myself for a long time because I was so messed up inside, but now, in having sorted out a lot of my turmoil I have begun to listen to that voice inside.

I video blogged about being honest with yourself and speaking from the heart here http://youtu.be/6Pg5H2Pi650 and had a very interesting look at my past last night in regards to understand just how much of a role I had to play in everything. I think there is a tendency, when bad things happen, to downplay our own role because it is easier to blame other people for the final result. However, if you are truly honest with yourself, you take responsibility for the things that you know you should. It may hurt a bit, and your ego is going to get a pretty nice smack, but it’s necessary.

When you speak from the heart, you give other people to see the real you.

Your hands and legs may shake, you may be filled with fear of the outcome, but you will never truly regret speaking your heart when you do. There have been many times throughout my life that I didn’t say something I knew I should have…something I knew that I wanted to but I was too afraid of getting rejected. Sometimes, getting rejected by someone is the best thing that can happen to you. It’s like the heavens are waving their finger at you going “nah ah” that’s not for you…you need to go this way instead.

I believe more and more these days that I have a pretty great guardian angel looking over my making sure that I am doing okay. I understand the agreement though. There will be things that I experience in this life that are going to cause me pain – these things are not meant to be events that I am diverted from. They are meant to be things that I go through. Mother Teresea said something to the effect of I know that God will only give me as much as I can handle…I just wish he didn’t trust me so much. That may be the exact quote, but for the sake of the roll I am on let’s just say that is paraphrased.

It’s going to hurt at times, but the pain is going to be part of your pride and part of your story. Let it. It’s good for you. No one grew from being too comfortable. I know for sure that has not been the case for my life. I have battled and fought and clawed my way to get here, but now I see things for what they really are and understand that there are fundamental important characteristics to have which will make my life infinitely better.

On another note, I have formally decided to go back to school to become a certified professional life coach with emphases on health and business whatever else I can soak in. That was a big decision this week that I am super proud of.

To the future. May you be tested and grow to your greatest potential.

Oh, and always speak from the heart.

- Evan Sanders

Look Em’ In The Eye & Speak From The Heart is a post from: Inspirational Stories About Life

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Dream Body Workout | 100 Day Challenge [Explanation]

Recently, I spent the past 100 days committed to eating clean and training hard in order to make moves towards trying to get my dream body. After losing 30 lbs and shedding 12% of my body fat, I thought I would share my program and what I did to make it happen. There was a combination of heavy lifting, high reps lifting, double days, lots and lots of cardio and ab work and lastly maintaining great nutrition that I had learned from mentors and bodybuilders throughout the years.

This video is more of a structural video and will give you an idea about what the regimen consisted of and its moving parts and pieces. I will put out another video with specific workouts I enjoy for building body parts etc.

http://thebettermanprojects.com/

Live bold. Dream Big. Dare greatly.

Dream Body Workout | 100 Day Challenge [Explanation] is a post from: Inspirational Stories About Life

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Truthful Eyes | The Decisions We Make

If you travel all this way and you forget who you are, then whats the point? 

You can lose yourself in this game easily. The hate and hurt can mount up and destroy everything you have worked for and everything you dream of.

There’s no explaining these things, but in my stomach this morning I can feel the yearning for a love so deep that I can physically feel it. I remember the times where it made itself known, and how deep I would feel it. It’s like there was this bottomless pit and you could feel it sinking in like a cannonball rolling down a tube. There’s something about that moment when you look at someone you love, and I mean romantically love, and you feel it in your bones and everything else you are made of. You see them sick and you will do anything to take care of them. Even though you want to strangle them sometimes because they know exactly how to push your buttons, you can’t help but laugh and love because you have something so great in your life.  You see them hurting and all you could ever want for them is to smile. Because those smiles, no matter how few because of how much of a shitstorm life has produced, are the best part of your day.

I have had an introspective few days ::saying this as if thats not like every other day:: and I came across an interesting thought. In every situation, no matter how painful – we had our part to play (please exclude extremes). When I look back, and I did this with an honest set of eyes yesterday, I can see he piece of the puzzle that have my name written all over them. Those pieces were claimed through indecision and an inability to make choices about my own life. They say that hindsight is always 20/20, and to an extent I agree with this, but if you are looking back once in a while and being honest with yourself, your vision doesn’t actually exist.

People, emotions, and decisions are incredibly complex and it’s amazing that we even get along in the first place. So many things can go wrong. In fact, most of the time, they do. Misunderstandings and incalculable situations arise and we just have to give it our best shot. When we look back, we sometimes realize that our best shot at that time was so far off from what was needed. Our best shot can only improve with understanding the mistakes we have made and then trying to correct them.

For a long time, I wasn’t honest with myself. I wasn’t honest with myself about what actually happened, about my part to play, about why things were going on in my life and about what it meant for me to have a passion and purpose. Dishonesty with others will cause pain, but dishonesty with yourself will cause heartbreak. You will stand in front of the mirror a complete shadow of the person you thought you could be, the person you dreamed of, and realize in looking down at your own hands that you created that.

Inner conflict creates indecision and harbors negative feelings. These negative feelings I am talking about come along once in a while – those ones where you promote jealousy, passive aggressiveness and everything else in the book. You act because you are trying to do something to someone or to the world. But the answer don’t lie there. The answers are what you do with yourself for people and for the world. Throughout the years I have become better about making decisions that are for things rather than against things, but I am still learning and I am sure it will take some time.

I’ll tell you one last thing. Whenever you make a decision that is rooted in love rather than anything else, you can be proud of that decision. Sometimes your mind will try to convince you to not do something, to make you forget who you are inside, and while you might not understand it at the time (and friends might not understand what you did) you make that decision because the deepest rawest most precious emotion in your heart told you to do it.

And to me, thats priceless.

 

Truthful Eyes | The Decisions We Make is a post from: Inspirational Stories About Life

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An Inspirational Snack | 9.29

An Inspirational Snack | 9.29 is a post from: Inspirational Stories About Life

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(789) – How We Handle Ourselves

It’s never the moments that are good that test your character, it’s always the ones that challenges us – that force us to handle ourselves in the best of ways – that define our future.

As the seasons change, my moods change. Maybe I am just a little more connected to the Earth than I ever knew, or maybe it is something else entirely. I have always found the months of October, November, and December to be my most introspective months, ones that I dive deeper and farther into my soul than the months that preceded them. The weather gets colder, the plans start to die, but this year looks like something completely different than the previous.

This year, things are being birthed while everything else around me is dying.

Maybe it’s like shedding a new skin. These past 100 days have changed my life in ways that I never could have imagined, and after a day off of focused training and nutrition today, I am ready to start my next journey to make my final dive down to 185 lbs. In a months time, I will have taken something that was deemed impossible in my mind for such a long time and have achieved it. It’s just a funny feeling in my mind. It’s funny because it’s such a different taste than what I was left with before.

I think these months make me think about my past a lot. Maybe that’s the part about things dying as well. The past in my mind, the people, the things that have happened, although replayed over quite often…have a lesser and lesser effect on my present as the moments flash by. I still keep the old memories warm, but these memories can also paralyze you from making new ones if you believe that those moments were greater than the ones you could possibly create today. I think I just had a moment with myself right there.

I have been guilty of living in the past because I wanted to go back and change things for much of my life, and I never could change that until I intensely focused on something I could create in the present. I wanted to change things and change myself – and instead of using the moments I had I would dwell on the moments that used to be. I know I am not the only one with this problem. I know there are many others who live in the past or try to live in the future. But you can’t go to those places. All you have is now.

Fear is something that can either drive us or keep us in the same place forever. I’m not fully out of the woods, in fact, I don’t think I will ever be. What I do know is that I will never be returning to a place of not doing something simply because I have a fear that it won’t work out. I will force myself into the uncomfortable because I know it is the best thing for me. Life has yielded its greatest rewards from just doing that and I am looking forward to seeing what else it can bring me.

So here’s to another 30 days of the journey – to striving for perfection even though we know we will never reach it – and to acting in the face of fear.

- Evan Sanders

(789) – How We Handle Ourselves is a post from: Inspirational Stories About Life

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My 100 Day Transformation

“Never never never give up.” Winston Churchill.

This is my 100 day transformation story. My sophomore year of college, I lost my one true love since I was 5 years old: baseball. Because of physical complications with my arm, I couldn’t throw anymore, and I had to make the hardest choice of my life in hanging up the cleats. I walked out of my coach’s office with tears in my eyes after telling him I had to stop playing, and felt like my dream had been stripped from me. For years after that, I was still in pieces from losing baseball. My confidence had disintegrated, I didn’t believe in myself anymore, but most of all, I developed a deep-seeded fear that if I dreamed big…somewhere down the line I would have my goal stripped from me again. So I stopped dreaming. I stopped because I never wanted to feel that pain again…that type of pain when I lost baseball. I found out though that living a life scared and timid isn’t living a life at all.

Somewhere along the line I started “trying” again, but despite my best efforts, I would sabotage my goal right before I would achieve it because at least I would then be able to say I was the cause of it not happening instead of life taking it from me. It doesn’t make sense, but I was more scared of what I was capable of instead of failing. So I did this for 5 years and walked around feeling like I had nothing to be proud of because I was my worst own enemy. My worst nightmare was right around the corner and I knew it.

As stress piled on, I started eating worse and worse and found myself hooked into a cycle of using food to sabotage my dreams as well. I knew that it all had to end, so 100 days ago, on the brink of giving up altogether, I gave myself an ultimatum to try one more time, to go all in, and to eat clean and take care of myself for once. It was never about my body, but about proving to myself that I could achieve a dream, one that always whispered in my ear that I could do it no matter how many times I failed.

Who knows what it actually was, but things started to click. Despite this being the most physically and mentally challenging thing I have ever done, it has also been the most rewarding. 30 lbs. have shed off my body, but most importantly, I started something, found out I loved it more than I possibly could have known, and then finished it.

My life has changed completely because of this journey. I believe in myself now. I’ve started to dream again. I now know that if I create something in my mind, with enough hard work and sweat, I can make it happen. Life has a funny way of teaching us the greatest lessons, and even though there was plenty of suffering involved throughout the past 5 years, the end result is so beyond my wildest dreams that I would do it all over again.

There have been a lot of people who have been there for me along the way, and I just wanted to stay thank you for being there for me, it means more than you could imagine.

So off to the next dream.

Love. Passion. Never Quit.

My 100 Day Transformation is a post from: Inspirational Stories About Life

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The Fog Of War | 100 Day Challenge

 

I’ve been off the grid for the past few days because I have been going through some significant diet changes for the last week of preparation before the end of my 100 day challenge, and good lord are they challenging. I have never been pushed this hard mentally or physically. Between the water changes, carb depletion, glycogen depletion workouts, and dropping sodium levels my body and mind has struggled to see the light at the end of the tunnel. But today was more or less the worst day, and with two days left and carbs coming back into my life like a freight train, I can’t wait to see what the final result will be on Saturday.

I remember when I started this 100 day challenge how hard it was to even believe that I could make it to the point where I am right now. I knew that the work I had to do was monumental and the challenges would stand guard in front of me until I broke them with sheer willpower…but I still wasn’t sure if this was going to be another one of my “attempts” at it or if I really was going to go all the way. I knew that this was my last try however…and that it was all or nothing. I was right on the verge of giving up on this dream, but I stuck it out and I am sure glad I did.

They say that success has been defined and will always be defined as standing up one more time than you have been knocked down.

I think that is a great definition. I also believe that your determination is a direct reflection of how much you believe in what you are doing. I have never been more determined to accomplish something in my entire life. In fact, I calculated almost exactly what my efforts over this goal have been.

90,000 different types of crunches

200 hours of working out and cardio

14 weeks of hard work

30 lbs. lost

1 dream on the verge of completion

I want to see how far I can take my fitness in terms of building a community and supporting the dreams of others. In fact, the other day I officially decided to join the ICF International Coach Foundation to become a professional life coach and receive other accreditations as well. I believe that it will not only benefit others, but it will benefit me and my project and launch me into my final dream of becoming a internationally recognized speaker and coach. That dream has been floating around in my mind for the past 6 months, but I knew that I first had to connect my mind, my body, and my soul. My mind and my body were lacking in the food/fitness department – and I seem to be going on the right track with that with this past 100 days.

100 days has taught me a lot about the importance of consistency and persistence. With anything, if you hammer away at it long enough you are going to reach where you want to go. I used to hear that a lot, but I had nothing to truly back up that belief. Now, I have results. I can always look at what I went through this past 100 days and remember what I created. And I think that is the perfect word for it: create. I struggled for years on end to make this a reality and now I have finally conquered the beast inside of me that laid control of my habits all these years.

I will never turn back.

This life is a series of mountains and putting on your climbing shoes…and getting after that puppy. You will be challenged over and over again, and believe me, you will fall right on your ass. But like I always say, its about how fast you get up and how hard you charge forward right after you have been knocked down that matters. That is the point of all of it. To relentlessly pursue your dreams even though you are failing.

I will forever have this challenge in the back of my mind when I am in a battle for my dreams…and I will forever know that with enough sweat and determination, I can accomplish anything.

– Evan Sanders

The Fog Of War | 100 Day Challenge is a post from: Inspirational Stories About Life

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In The Face Of It | The Final 4 Days

focused

seeing changes in front of my eyes

dreams being realized

the grueling work

sweat

tears

muscles depleted and burning

mind is sharp

heart is singing

they said this would be the worst

it’s bad

but the feeling I have from finishing this war

the war of the past 7 years

is taking me quickly through the day

hungry for tomorrow

i never believed I could

until I dropped all the wrong reasons for doing it

i did it for me

and I’m doing it for those who are struggling to achieve their dreams as well

of course there’s fear

but it exits fast

in the face of action

a life a mediocrity I lived

but the life I have created now

expresses itself through opportunity

i stopped talking about my dream

and just went and did it

i talked about it before because I was scared of actually doing it all the way through

i was scared of what was possible

failing felt so comfortable to me

but I knew that I  just needed one more chance

one time to put it all away

to lock it within my soul and to cherish it forever

and I did

here I am

4 days away

vulnerable

accomplished

confident

heart’s on fire

ready to shed light

- Evan Sanders

In The Face Of It | The Final 4 Days is a post from: Inspirational Stories About Life

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10 Days From “Impossible”

90 days ago today, I started a journey that would change my life. These are not hollow words.

I have a longer story to tell about the specifics of starting it, but today, I want to talk about everything I have learned and how excited I am to unveil the changes that have been made to my body and in my mind.

This has, been, by far, the hardest thing I have ever done. There have been tears, there has been buckets and buckets of pain, and there has been fear and everything else in between. But…and this is a huge but, there has been a desire…one that I have only felt once in my life before, that has kept this candle not only lit, but burning like a forest fire inside of me.

When I started this journey, I was in a bad place. I was at my heaviest – 218 lbs and 18% body fat. I had a dream that had lasted with me for years and years and I had failed over and over again, and I decided to give it one final try. I went in all or nothing…and it clicked. Everything clicked.

Now, writing before you today, I am 25lbs down and 7% body fat with a final 10 days ahead of me. These are no ordinary 10 days, in fact, for any fitness athlete or bodybuilder, these are the hardest most brutal 10 days out of them all.

But with that same fire I enter the challenge.

The changes I have seen in my body are great, but it is the changes that I have experienced with my mind that are even more impressive. It’s not that I am not afraid anymore – that happens plenty of times – but I am willing to push all my chips in and take a huge risk and follow through to the end.

That’s something I have never had before. I never had it because I truly had never done it with anything I had dreamed up in my mind. I had a dream once, but I couldn’t finish that because of physical limitations with my elbow. But this, this dream…this one is mine…and I have taken it to the finish line.

 

I am almost there. Even after I finish, I have a secondary goal lined up to accomplish and then it will be onto the next. I don’t plan on sitting on this achievement, but rather using the momentum to propel me into the future – a future I have dreamed up in my mind and I want to create.

I believe.

I believe now, and even more in 10 days, that when I create something in my mind, I can turn it into reality. I can make my wildest dreams happen with enough hard work and sweat. And trust me, there has been a lot of that. The hardest thing I have ever done in my life has also yielded me the most pride, respect for the process, and results.

I guess that old saying about the greatest things in life are surrounded by hard work is true.

I can’t wait to see what else I can create.

- Evan Sanders

 

 

10 Days From “Impossible” is a post from: Inspirational Stories About Life

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