Be Proud of Your Accomplishments

I have a client, a teenage girl who is a 100 pounds overweight. Lives at home. I've just started working with her. She's been biking for a couple of weeks. She lives on an incline, so she can coast down the hill to start her bike ride, but she has to bike up the hill - and biking up a hill is a helluva lot harder than coasting down it, aas I shouldn't need to tell you.

Well, yesterday, she did a 3-mile bike ride, and then, for the first time, managed to bike all the way up the hill to her house.  That is quite an accomplishment for someone who is as out of shape as this girl.

So she goes into the house, and her dad asked her how far she'd ridden, and she said, "Three miles."

And he dismissed it. "Oh, that's nothing. That doesn't accomplish anything."

And she was quite hurt. She didn't say anything to him about it, but she poured out her heart to me this morning.

I had to be very careful in my response - I felt like telling her to tell her dad to drop dead, but of course I didn't. One musn't criticize the parents when working with a teenager!

I just reaffirmed to her what she already knew - that she was getting fitter, that biking 3 miles and then non-stop up a hill was a great accomplishment - something she could not have done a couple of weeks ago. It was only going to get better from here.

I also pointed out that parents didn't always mean to be mean (there are some verbally abusive parents out there, as well as neighbors, schoolmates, etc, but I think this guy didn't mean to be mean, he just wasn't thinking.  In fact, I might have a word with the mother - she's who hired me to work with her daughter - and suggest that she tell hubby to be a bit more supportive, no matter how slight he thinks his daughter's accomplishments are!)

Accomplishments are relative. Back when I lived in a town that had flat areas to ride and no damn wind, I was biking 10-15-20 miles a day no problem. To someone like that, biking 3 miles a day is a bit of a laugher. But when you consider that this girl could not even do that two weeks ago - it is a great accomplishment and I was very proud of her.