🦵Enabling Others = Tight Hamstrings
How to stop enabling others so that you can start empowering yourself.
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Enabling Others Holds You Back From Moving Forward
5 Signs You Co-dependently Enabling Others
💪 You notice everything that needs to be done, and do it, long before others notice.
💪 You pick up the slack for others who have all kinds of reasons and excuses.
💪 You are so busy holding things together you have no energy to move forward.
💪 You over-anticipate what *might* happen if things don’t get done.
💪 People are competent, but they pretend not to be so you will do things for them.
If this sounds oh-so-familiar…
You are (gulp) an ENABLER!
While you cannot change how other people behave, you can draw firm boundaries around what you will and will not do for someone.
But how?
What does enabling have to do with tight hamstrings?
Here are some key things to know about your hamstrings…
🦵One of their main jobs is to move you FORWARD - to help you take steps- towards your goals and destinations.
🦵Your hamstrings are HARD-WORKERS. They feel responsible to pick up the slack when other muscles (glutes, quads, adductors, abductors) aren’t doing their jobs.
🦵Hamstrings are great enablers in the co-dependent relationships they have with the other leg muscles.
🦵When over-worked, your hamstrings get tight. The more work, the more they hold “worry” and get “anxiety” and get tighter…. but they try not to complain.
🦵When your hamstrings do complain, it is because they are telling you that you are over-anxious and over-worried about things you shouldn’t be doing (enabling).
Here’s an example of hamstrings enabling the adductors.
The adductors have a relatively easy job. They keep your legs plugged into hip sockets, creating stability for your body. Essentially, they hold things together!
The adductors are like the lazy couch-potato-man-child who expects everyone else to take care of them so they don’t get interrupted from their video-gaming-netflix-binging fun-funs. They are lazy bastards!
But when these lazy-bastards get up off their butts and do their jobs or internal stability, you feel EMPOWERED because you are working from your CORE. Empowerment comes from the core. (I’ll write about that in another post later this month).
Your hammies are the mother-hens of your legs.
They notice everything.
They take care of everything.
They DO everything.
When the hamstrings sense that the lazy adductors are not doing their stabilizing jobs, the hammies just do it, because the hammies need stability to be able to move you forward.
But the stabilizing work is REALLY hard for the hammies to do. It’s not their natural job, not what they are designed to do. When the hammies have to do it, they get worried and anxious and tired, and they can’t do their own jobs nearly as well.
Then, nothing works well, and the enabling cycle gets worse and worse and worse. Your hamstrings are likely to eventually buckle under the over-tightening pressure of over-doing, rendering you powerless, useless, or “hamstrung.” If you keep enabling and doing and doing and doing for others, you’re gonna kill all your own dreams and render yourself powerless.
If you are over-enabling the people in your life, your hamstrings and adductors are mirroring your life habits and behaviors!
If you are an enabler in life, your adductors are gonna get the message that it is okay to be couch-potato-lazy-bastards-playing video games and not doing their jobs. But, if you teach your hamstrings to stop enabling, they will teach YOU to stop enabling people in your life too!
You can teach yourself to uphold those boundaries by teaching your hamstrings to stop enabling your adductors and training them to get their lazy-asses off the couch and do their jobs!
Here’s how…
Mindful Practice - Activate Your Adductors
The following content is for paid subscribers only. What follows is a 2-minute how-to video that will:
teach your adductor muscles to stop being lazy
release your hamstrings so they can stop worry and anxiety and start focusing on moving you forward in life!
train your brain and nervous system to relax (no more over-worrying and excessive anxiety) because you are internally stabilized.
Subscribe at this link. The first week is free.
Personalized Support
If this post hit home for you, and you are an over-enabler, you might need a little extra help in coaxing your adductor muscles (your self-empowerment muscles) to kick into gear. I’d love to talk to you about your dreams and how enabling others is holding you back with worry and anxiety. Book an initial consultation to see if personal mindfulness coaching is for you.
Coming Tomorrow in Mindful Yoga
Tune in tomorrow for a 2-minute yoga sequence that teaches all your leg muscles to do their own jobs and makes everything in your body and life work more effortlessly, efficiently, and effectively.