One year ago, after almost a year of talking and procrastinating about it, I told the world that I had a blog and that my first two posts were up.  I was excited and nervous, and I was proud and scared.  And I had bigger plans too…I was going to do so many things.  I wanted to start doing more nutrition coaching from the angle of saving food relationships – not just focusing on weight loss but on health and enjoying good food without guilt.  I wanted to do something to help people learn to Meal Prep since I got a lot of feedback about how overwhelming so many people find it.  I was gonna post daily like a good blogger should and give all kinds of insights into all kinds of things.  Launching the blog was the hard part…the rest would come together.

Fast forward a year…and it hasn’t happened.  The blog has been great and I could burst with gratitude whenever someone shares, comments, engages or reaches out about it.  But the rest?  I’ve started all of it; I’ve got brain dump files, I’ve got photos, I’ve got content…but nothing I’m ready to launch for the other things I wanted to do.  Some of it is my own bad habits with procrastination.  Some of it is fear.  Some of it is family stuff became more important and stressful and I had to back-burner things.  I still want to do those things…you will see them happen…but sometimes stuff doesn’t come together because the timing is off, or I’m off.

I use social media daily.  Some days I share a lot…some days I’m radio silent.  Part of this is that I try to be present in the moments of life all the time and not lost in trying to get the best shot…but I also regret missing opportunities for sharing things that have a lot of potential value.  I’m working on the balance as someone who wants to work with, and help people feel good in their skin.

I’ve always struggled with being impatient.  If I decided to do something I want it done now.  I need to make it happen while I’m excited and use the momentum.   But while working hard through adversity is commendable, it can cross a line into forcing things that aren’t working and the result will be that things aren’t going to come together the way you want them too.

I probably say to someone at least once a week “if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” Because the fact of the matter is that even when we’re successful, if we look back on how things went to get there, they probably look nothing like what we prepared for…or maybe even what successful ends up meaning might look very different.  When I was losing weight I thought successful would mean that I ate perfectly “healthy” all the time and felt no compulsion to eat junk food…but what success has actually been is me being able to eat treats without binging, to not give up completely on the day when I hit a drive-thru for lunch and to not be obsessing about whether I’ve earned my calories or not.

Success with the blog though is what I thought it would be…it’s that a handful of people have reached out and told me that it helped them.  It’s people relating to comments and thanking me for sharing.  It’s that at least one person has felt less alone in a struggle they thought was a failing on them, that is really just a part of being human.

I don’t care if I have thousands of followers – I just want the followers I have to feel that what I’m putting out there is helping them.  That most of the time they relate and maybe it helps them relate to someone in their life they didn’t understand before.  My own parents have commented on some of the things I’ve shared over the last year saying that they never really understood some of what I’ve gone through…and I think that’s one really big thing I’ve learned this year, that we take for granted that the people who know us best will understand us even when we aren’t sharing/can’t share/don’t know how to share what is going on in our heads.  So there you go, I’ve been learning things from the blog too.

There’s going to be two small changes to how I do the blog in the coming year:

      1. While I’ve been posting PREDOMINANTLY on Tuesday’s most of this year, going forward posts will be up later in the week on Thursday or Friday.
      2. I am going to only use one Instagram account for content so the G&B account will no longer be the place to go for new posts.

 

When I started the blog I got all caught up in the hype that the name of the blog had to be in your Instagram name. And as a personal trainer I didn’t want to take my name out of the handle on my main account, as that is my main gig.  Regardless as to whatever happened with the blog, my first love is helping people get and stay healthy.  I get so much energy and motivation from working with people in person – in classes, small groups and one-on-one – and that is my main focus.  But the blog is another way I can help MORE people and it is a priority for me too.

But here’s the thing, both of them ARE me.  I am both Coach Trishabell AND Grin and Barrett.  They are together and now sort of inextricably intertwined and for me, it just doesn’t feel authentic or practical to keep them separate.  My life is being documented on my instagram in a lot of ways and obviously the blog is almost a journal. It feels much more valuable for me to keep the two together.

So here’s what’s gonna happen.  Over the next month I’m going to share each post I’ve done over the last year onto my main Instagram page (@coach_trishabell).  During that time I’m probably not going to put out any new content on the blog (I say probably because if something strikes me I still might…I’m a rebel what can I say.)  During that time I’m going to use my blog writing time to work on another nutrition certification that I feel is more valuable and in line with my perspectives and will give me a larger scope of practice for providing advice about nutrition and health; which I think will make me feel a lot more comfortable launching my other side projects.

As a side note, a lot of you have asked if there’s a way that I could make the blogs available audibly and I am working on setting that up as well but since I’m not currently sure what it will entail I have absolutely no estimate on when that can happen…could launch tomorrow…could be six months.  But it will happen.

When I started this I said to my Dad, “What’s the point in my having gone through all of this stuff if I don’t try to help other people?” And I thought that was very profound and important but his response was, “Well the point in you going through it was you being able to live a happy life.”  Mic drop. That is absolutely true.  If I’ve learned anything at all in the past couple decades it’s that if you aren’t happy with yourself, if you aren’t secure in who you are and what you’re about, if you don’t love yourself enough to want to take care of your mind and body – then no amount of love, acceptance or caring from anyone else is going to be enough.  I had to go through what I have so that I could look in the mirror every day and know that what I saw was enough – to become content in my life. I am happy with where I am and what I’ve done…even the less pleasant stuff because it had a purpose – that doesn’t mean I don’t want to do more – but I am happy now, in this moment, as is.  But you know what else makes me happy?  Helping others.  Knowing that something I’ve learned eases even a moment of suffering from someone else makes it worth it to put it out there – even the ugly parts.

If you’ve been here with me over the past year, I cannot tell you how much I appreciate you.  I hope that you find what I share to be worth your time each week and I hope that you’ll continue along with me and reach out if there is something in particular you want me to talk about.

I’ll be 38 in about two months and when I sat down to write this today (with absolutely no idea what I was writing for a change) I thought, “man, if 20 years ago, at 18, you had told me I would be putting every difficult thing I’ve gone through out there on the internet I would have been HORRIFIED.” But here we are. And even though the year didn’t go according to my grand plans, I am beyond grateful that I do put it out there and that anyone even reads it is pretty surreal.

Happy one year anniversary to Grin and Barrett – cheers to life not going according to plan.  It might be a wild ride sometimes – but it is always worth it.