Whether you’re refueling after at tough workout or looking for a greens & protein packed breakfast, this simple post workout green smoothie will hit the spot.

This spinach-packed, surprisingly delicious, post-workout green smoothie has been a serious staple for the past month. If you follow along on Instagram, you might have seen that I’ve been doing Kayla Itsines guides using the Sweat with Kayla app. They consist of 3 resistance workouts which are high intensity intervals using mostly body weight for 28 minutes, then 3-4 low intensity steady state workouts a week. They’ve been quite challenging but also really rewarding.

Typically after one of the resistance workouts, I’ll make myself this dank green drank to help supplement my protein and greens intake for the day. Bonus, it’s totally delicious. Doing these workouts have had me thinking a lot about why I workout. And it comes down to this: I am trying to be the best version Georgie. As Gretchen Rubin points out in her fantastic book “The Happiness Project,” a huge part of happiness comes from simultaneously loving and accepting yourself, while at the same time you’re challenging and pushing yourself.

So I wanted to talk about this idea of embracing progress and process over focusing solely on an ideal achievement.

Whether it’s fitness, work, relationships, passion projects, you name it, humans crave growth. As ambitious people, we strive towards ideals that we set ourselves. However the joy we feel results less from actually achieving that ideal, but instead it comes from the process and forward motion towards that ideal.

Imagine this: You’re a brand new runner and you set a goal to run 4 days a week and at the end of 12 weeks you plan on running your first 5k. Each week, you get out there and run. Some days you feel great while others you’re discouraged and want to quit. But you don’t. You stick with it and on race day you finish the 5k at a faster pace than you had run in any of your training.

Crossing that finish line is far more rewarding than if you’re an endurance athlete who competes regularly and on a whim decides to run that same 5k and finishes much faster. The destination is the same. You’re running the same race but it’s a completely different experience because one of the runners had to push, challenge and extend themselves, while the other stayed in their comfort zone.

This is important for a couple reasons. It’s important because you realize that the ideal is far less important than the process itself. For so many of us, myself most definitely included, we get this backwards. We get hung up on thinking that being a certain weight will bring us joy or that making a certain salary a year or being in a certain relationship or having a certain number of followers on Instagram is the thing that will bring us happiness.

But then we get there and we feel lost.

There’s a momentary rush and then we feel kind of empty. We neglected to enjoy the process and savor the growth.

It’s funny, I look back at some of what I consider my greatest “achievements” and usually it’s not the final performance, race or result that I remember fondly. It’s the moments when I pushed myself in training, broke through a writer’s block, stayed up late finishing a design or the times that I got to collaborate with a partner who challenged me, that I felt the most joy.

It’s clear in retrospect, that these were the same moments I was growing. I was becoming more Georgie. In you’re case, you were becoming more of who you are meant to be.

So when you’re feeling that inevitable frustration and funk that comes with doing hard stuff, that comes from pushing yourself. Remember – this is the important work. These are the times that bring you closer to the best version of you. Don’t be afraid to have fun with the process. To celebrate the little wins, they can be just as satisfying as the “big wins.” 

And while you’re at it, you can celebrate by refueling with this simple post workout green smoothie. See what I did there 😉

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Your Turn:

• Do you have any highlights from the process of your last achievement? I’d love to hear your stories <3

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