Force Function Health
Force function is to create a state where taking action is not a choice. It could be selling your car so you have to walk to commute, parking in the far end of the parking lot so you walk further, taking a room on a second or third floor of the house so you use the stairs more, etc. It is similar to taking money from your pay cheque and putting it into investments or savings first and then spending what you have left over versus the alternative order. You create a space where you have to live off the money left rather than choose to push the budget a little further each month and have little left over.
Last post I wrote about the health journey I have shifted my perspective on and accepted the invitation, welcoming the clarity of values that has come with this. Well, after some more reflection around my work-life balance, the creation of a cost-benefit analysis, and contemplating a change in the amount of time spent at work, another revelation came to me. By staying in a job with benefits, rather than seeking out an overall higher pay cheque that would not offer me the access to benefits immediately if at all, I am force functioning health.
FIrst off, just a disclaimer that the situation is much more complicated than this, but I want to highlight the value of these benefits that is beyond the dollar value in action. What I realized is that by having the access to this and seeing this as one of the big opportunities of this situation to me personally, it is allocating those dollars to health, and health alone. I can choose not to use them, but I cannot choose to budget them elsewhere. There is a time cost to me - it takes up a lot of my free time to be going to appointments and doing exercises, etc. I would love to not have to do that, but it does seem to be the way forward in my greater goal of being free of chronic pain. In choosing to stay in this situation, it offers the benefits of force function health. It means I have a greater abundance of dollars to invest in health support- more than I would invest on my own and has allowed me to experiment with different modalities and different practitioners.
Things are often complicated and complex. The easy answer when frustrated with a situation is to stop, find a different way. Sometimes that is the exact right answer, get out - while you still can. This time, I felt the whisper that there was something I needed to stay for, even just to break the pattern of changing things up all the time and settle in. Turns out there is great benefit in me staying, it is the way my search for pain reduction is being answered and it is a rich journey to participate in. Once I take that initial big question off the table and decide to stay, then the other questions get some air time. How would I like to show up? With this situation as a consistent, what other factors do I have in my life that I am in control of? In many ways it feels now that this job and this situation are working for me, they are gifting me the answer to a question I have been asking for a long time, and in those harder times when I ask why I am doing this, I’ve got a powerful answer to keep me on track.
Where can you force function the habits and decisions you want in your life? When you are feeling motivated and the will power is high, that is when you put a plan in action that will be your default mode when things get harder and your motivation is low.
