Edel Coffey: Trusting the process is an essential part of life — and the hardest thing to do

Author Edel Coffey pictured at home in Galway. Photo: Ray Ryan

I have always been wildly inconsistent when it comes to my fitness. 

I will go months without going to the gym before re-committing to a healthy lifestyle and fitness regime. I will go at it hell for leather and stick to a rigorous regime until I reach my goals, at which point I will down tools thinking I’m healthy now, so I don’t need to exercise any more. Inevitably, that rationale leads me straight back to square one where I have to start the process all over again.

After a lifetime of this success-failure cycle, I wanted to introduce exercise into my life in a sustainable, continuous and non-disruptive way. 

And so last September I returned to the gym partly to address the pandemic-shaped damage my body had incurred, by which I mean nightly couch-eating rather than any directly covid-related damage, and partly to address the need to protect my bones and muscles as I finally accept I am a middle-aged woman.

I struggled with my body’s slow and stubborn progress. It took months for me to notice any changes even though changes were of course happening. I didn’t believe that I would ever get back in shape. 

This was just how my body looked now I told myself, and often, why am I even doing this? Then one morning my trainer said to me, “trust the process, Edel” and something clicked in me.

The phrase, trust the process, can seem like one of those meaningless terms that we hear a lot in the world of fitness and wellbeing but in a world of instant gratification, trusting the process is probably one of the hardest things we can do. 

We want radical results and we want them now, but my trainer’s words gave me hope and something to focus on when I felt like quitting. I love the high of a before and after picture as much as the next person. 

But look a little closer at the timelines involved and often you will discover that years of work has gone into these transformations.

We live in a world of fast food, instant downloads, and next-day delivery — it’s no wonder we expect the same from our bodies, our careers, our lives. 

I realised that every day I went to the gym or ate a little bit healthier was a step in the right direction. I thought about how trusting the process actually applies to so many areas of our lives, whether it’s writing novels or raising kids or having relationships or planting flowers in the garden that won’t bloom until next year… trusting the process is an essential part of life.

We often hear of writers getting six-figure deals and seemingly appearing overnight with novels.

I was one of those authors. But it didn’t happen overnight. My youngest child was six months old when I got the idea for my first book and she was six years old when it was published. 

Before I wrote that book, I wrote a memoir as a kind of practice run to see if I was even capable of writing a long-form book. I partook in exercises and writing prompts and accountability tweets to try and improve my writing habits. 

There were lots of small steps on the road to achieving the ultimate goal of publishing a novel.

The truth is real change in any area rarely happens overnight and achieving our goals is usually the result of small committed steps on a long road, with incremental progress made over time. It’s not sexy but it works.

While our long-term goals may seem impossibly far away, if we trust the process and take the daily or weekly small steps, they eventually lead us to where we need to get to. 

Don’t get me wrong. Trusting the process is not about being blindly optimistic, or deluding yourself into thinking that if you wait around long enough your goals will magically happen. 

As Denzel Washington said, “dreams without goals are just dreams.” There must be an actual process in place before you can trust it, goals, small steps that will lead you to the bigger steps, and above all, consistency.

I am six months into my fitness process now and I’m starting to trust it more and more. I even have some muscles to prove it’s working and my old clothes fit me again. 

On days when I don’t want to go to the gym (which I’ll admit is most days) I trust what I now know; after six months of being more or less consistent, I feel better and my body is stronger and fitter and if I keep doing this I’ll probably keep feeling better and stronger and fitter. 

The annoying thing is there are no shortcuts. It all takes time, consistency, commitment. But I know if I keep putting one foot in front of the other on any road to any goal, the process will eventually get me wherever I want to go.