SPARK Blog

We kicked off our annual #beYOUtiful campaign yesterday, featuring a discounted collection of Motivate Wraps. We also introduced a set of limited edition "I am..." Motivate Wraps, designed to remind you that you are #beYOUtiful. And powerful. Over the course of the campaign, we'll be featuring inspirational blog posts from some of our Ambassadors, starting with Amanda Stewart:

I am very committed to my identity as a runner.

It's my go-to answer to:

"What do you do for fun?" Run.

"How do you stay fit?" Run.

"How do you make friends?" Run.

"How do you practice self care?" Run.

For the last ten years, I've been a runner. It's my go-to fun fact. I'm almost always training for my next race. I'm proud of the fact that I've run seven full marathons and one ultra marathon. I'm proud of the fact that I can run very, very slow for a long time.

Running is also something I share with my Grandma, who inspires me every day to be stronger and work harder than everyone else expects me to.

So it means a lot to me, but at some point, I started to realize that there might be more to fitness and strength than running. What if there was more to me than my identity as a runner? 

I decided to join a Crossfit gym to find out. 

What if part of me wasn't challenged by running long distances anymore? I set a goal of being able to do pull-ups unassisted. But what's left of me if I'm not a long, slow distance runner?

Answer: That same, powerful woman. 

I ran an ultra marathon in the Summer of 2017 and it broke me. It left me stripped and angsty and, truth be told, I'm still trying to get back on my feet. I'm still trying to lace up my shoes because I want to, not because I have to. And yet, when I think back to my first marathon in 2014, I think about how empowered I felt. It was a huge accomplishment and it was truly the first time that I ever felt that I was capable of achieving whatever I set my mind to. It was the first time in my life that I celebrated my body instead of hating it. It was the first time that I made decisions for me, and not for anyone else. 

I could go on and on with all of the lessons that running has taught me. Running kicked off a fitness journey for me that made me feel powerful and empowered at the same time. Powerful as a woman, empowered as someone who can tackle anything she sets her mind to.

...and my Motivate Wraps have been there along this journey as additional reminders of my self worth, my sense of adventure, my persistence and my love of coffee. And now, I am so thankful for the reminder that I am powerful.  

We are all powerful. It's time for all of us to unleash the power within.

Join us as we celebrate #beYOUtiful you. It's time for us all to realize that we are more than what we look like, what we do or who we know. We are strong, powerful and amazing women. We are more than what society says we are, and we are proving that to society a little more every day. 

Be sure to shop our newest Motivate Wraps. Download your free #beYOUtiful poster, and show the world what you are. Share your images on Instagram—tag @momentumjewelry, #momentumjewelry and #beYOUtiful so we can celebrate with you.

Today is the day: It's time for you to reclaim the beauty and power that is YOU. Join us as we launch our #beYOUtiful campaign. By recognizing your own gifts, beauty and strength, you ultimately let your unique light shine through. That light represents your potential, and it leads you toward all of your dreams. 

When you push back against a world that compares, that passes value judgements and measures you against an "ideal" standard—you impact the people around you and ultimately make the world just a little bit better. 

When you work to create a supportive community that encourages others to recognize and value their own unique beauty, when you educate others on what healthy actually is and how it can look different from person to person—you empower the people around you and remind every single person that every body is beautiful.

When you celebrate every body, every level of activity, and the achievement of every individual's own goals—you acknowledge that progress is more important than perfection, and that it's also an individual concept.

When we are authentic and true to ourselves, we are beautiful. When we celebrate others, we are beautiful. 

Together, we become powerful. 

And we are always, absolutely always enough. 

Join us as we celebrate being #beYOUtiful. Remember who you are, and share that with the world. Select #beYOUtiful Motivate Wraps are on sale for $15/each, or you can shop our newest "I am..." collection:

We'll be featuring each of these inspirational Motivate Wraps in blog posts from our Ambassadors over these next few days. 

To join the movement, download your free #beYOUtiful poster. Upload a picture to Instagram and tag @momentumjewelry using #beYOUtiful and #momentumjewelry. 

Let's work together to show the world that we are all, every one of us, #beYOUtiful and powerful.

Every once in a while, we choose a goal or shoot for a dream—and things don't go as we've planned. That, I hope you know, is absolutely OK. Life has a way of throwing curveballs, and choosing the right moments to chase (and knowing when to shift gears) is all part of the adventure that awaits you. This is why we've centered our new Fall Collection of Motivate Wraps around this theme. That now is your time, no matter what, to collect the moments you so deserve. Today on the blog, our last in the series of guest posts focused on your moments, is Katherine with a few words about choosing your moment wisely:

At the beginning of 2018, I took on the challenge of marathon training for the first time. As anyone who’s trained for one knows, it completely and utterly changes and consumes your life. And with each run I’ve gone on, I’ve found myself focusing on one thing and one thing only—Boston. So when I think about my “moment,” BQing this year was going to be it.

The problem is that nobody tells you that you may have to adjust your moment. Through all of the positive affirmations and the pump up quotes and the “you can push through anything” looping through your brain to keep you going, there’s no warning that your moment, the one you’ve centered 24 weeks of training around, may need some tweaking.

I had signed up for two marathons this year. The first would be my very first marathon ever, Colfax, and the second would be Chicago. My plan was to run Colfax in around 4 hours, and then shave off the extra half hour for Chicago. This BQ would be my moment.

After 24 weeks of training, the big day finally came. It was time for my first marathon. I wasn’t sure if this would be an utter failure or if I’d surprise myself by running a BQ. Long story short, Colfax didn’t go as planned. As pacers began passing me every other mile, I quickly watched my moment of a BQ slip away, and I cried as I crossed the finish line at 4:38.03. 

I should’ve felt proud, but I couldn’t shake that I needed to shave an hour off my marathon time for Chicago in just three months. A BQ was not mine, and Colfax was not my moment.

Fast forward a month to the start of my training for Chicago. I was more determined than ever to hit my BQ. Challenged with 3 months to speed up, I was chomping at the bit to make this moment happen. But somewhere along the way, things started to go haywire. I was struggling with IT Band Friction Syndrome, which is a complicated way to say certain muscles weren’t firing in my leg, and my knee cap was rubbing against my IT Band.

But I was still fighting to make this race happen.

When I wrote the initial draft of this post for Momentum just a few weeks ago, I had every intention of making Chicago my moment. BQ or no BQ, I was choosing Chicago as my moment. I was going to focus on “fighting to get to Chicago, to get through Chicago, and then stuffing my face with all the pizza.” Except last Thursday, I dropped out of Chicago. I gave it the good fight, but my body was not going to make it through. I played it smart, not selfish. And with that, I chose to switch my moment from Chicago to my comeback.

If anything, all of this has shown me one thing—you need to choose your moment. My Colfax time was far from a BQ. My knee is in pain. I’ve had to drop out of running multiple races, including Chicago. But with each one of these heartbreaks, I’ve picked myself up, adjusted, and I’ve chosen to discover new moments within the wreckage of my original goals.

So I challenge you to choose your moment...want it more than anything. Your moment is going to come when you make the conscious choice to accept it into your life, and then push forward to make it happen. The path to your moment may take twists and turns and flips and flops and alley-oops and spirals, but it’s up to you to choose to make sure you get there. And I hope you fight like hell to get there.

...and we'll fight with you, too. We're so proud of Katherine and her ability to recognize that a new moment was needed, and that you never have to really give up on a moment. Setbacks happen, and if you choose to adjust, we believe you'll find the ability to choose wisely your next great moment. And that's why we created the new Fall Collection of Motivate Wraps. Because everyone needs their own cheerleader, and we're ready to be yours. Be sure to follow us on Instagram, and tag #momentumjewelry so we can see your moments.

As we continue to celebrate the launch of our new Fall Collection of Motivate Wraps, we focus on all the moments you collected throughout your lives. Every moment counts, and adventure and growth lie within all the steps we take to make those moments happen. All of these moments have their place in your life. Even the bad moments, the setbacks that frustrate us...they're important moments, too. Today, we're going to talk about the small moments. Tiffany is here to tell you that they matter, too. Consider them your "B-roll." Let her explain:

Sunday, September 17, 2017: It was a bright, unseasonably warm fall morning that would have simply blended in with the rest of them except for one small detail—I was training for my first marathon and this was day one. I laced up, planned my course, got my adrenaline pumping, and set out on what would prove to be an absolutely gut-wrenching, exhausting, slightly embarrassing four miles. But I did it. No excuses, I just went out and gave it everything I could.

Friday, December 22, 2017: It was week 14 of my 16-week training program and a massive snow storm was scheduled to hit on Sunday, the day I was scheduled to run my longest run ever—20 miles. In an effort to avoid the snow storm, I decided to capitalize on the comparatively warm (36 degrees) weather and took a half-day off work to get my miles in. My husband had the day off, so we found a new course, dropped water, loaded our belts with nutrition and took off. I honestly don’t know if I’ve ever had more fun on a training run than I did on this one. Oh, I was in pain, but this seemingly small moment has been etched into my brain forever.

Sunday, January 7^th, 2018: I crossed the finish line of my first marathon at the most magical place on earth, but none of it would have been possible without the moments leading up to it. Believe me, there were good days, plenty of bad days, days when 14 miles felt like 6 and 4 felt more like 20. The medal I earned for that big moment was so much more than the 4.5 hours I spent running around Disney property.

Do you remember your greatest moments? How about the ones that got you there? Every little adventure (or mis-adventure) that paved the way for you to achieve your moment? So often we only focus on achieving the big moments that we forget to appreciate the little ones each and every day.

As a result of our social media-driven culture, many people only see our highlight reels—the moments that represent the pinnacle of our days, months, and years of hard work that build up to a single moment that everyone sees. I challenge you to think about your “B-roll” (the supporting footage intercut with the main shot). You should rejoice in the big moments, but also take time to reflect on all of the little moments that got you there: the people that helped you, the training runs that you fought through, the late nights you spent working on a project, the moments that inspired you to go for it.

As we move into fall, a time for reflection, I invite you to consider your path this year. How are those goals coming that you set in January? Have you achieved your moment? Are you on track? Have you failed at something this year? Have you succeeded? Honestly, I hope you’ve done both because the experiences build you to your moment. If you’re not where you thought you would be right now, you have the power to change your path and achieve your moment. Maybe your goal has changed—and that’s okay. Every single moment has a place in your story. You just have to go for it.

Just remember to be kind to yourself as you reflect and re-focus your energy this fall. And please remember: your moment doesn’t always have to be a finish line—it can be the little moments in between that affirm why we do what we do; moments that challenge us to grow. Appreciate every single moment because each and every one of them is uniquely yours.

We want to see your "B-roll." Follow @momentumjewelry (and Tiffany, too) on Instagram and tag your photos with #momentumjewelry so we can celebrate your little moments. (We'll celebrate your big moments, too!) Need inspiration? Shop our new fall collection. 

Right now, we are celebrating you and all of your moments. We believe that now is the time for you to focus on all of the things you want to achieve, and our new collection of Motivate Wraps was designed to keep you inspired. In fact, we believe that it's never a bad time to embrace your moments. Even when the journey toward those moments is filled with setbacks. Back in January, Kelli from Run Happy Eat Happy shared her 2018 goals on our blog. Today, she's back with an update—and a message for you about overcoming setbacks:

I like to think that I am tough, that I am brave and that I can overcome any challenge that is put in my way. I find myself driven by overcoming challenges, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t also find myself in doubt. Especially when it comes to marathon training. Am I capable of achieving my goal time? Am I getting injured? Should I choose a slower goal time? Those are just a few of the many questions running through my mind during a typical marathon training cycle. Reflecting on this now, I realize that I have never really, fully embraced the amazing journey that I am on so that starts here.

I ran two marathons earlier this year and I can admit that neither race was my moment. Through that journey, I trained hard, overcame one injury and was ultimately happy with the outcomes. Deep down, I knew that I could do bette—that I could be better.

I knew that training for the California International Marathon could be the answer that I was looking for. I was not planning on running a third marathon this year—in fact, I was feeling pretty burned out after the other two. I just had a feeling that this could be my moment for the year, so I signed up right away. Unfortunately, I immediately began to doubt that initial feeling as things seemed to be piling up around me.

I learned that my mom needed surgery to hopefully rule out cancer. I was also learning to deal with more stress and less sleep at home with our new puppy. I also stumbled upon my second injury of the year. Training for this next marathon was starting to become the least of my worries and my excitement was quickly fading away.

Luckily, I remembered this one thing that my yoga teacher always said:  “ignite your fire within." It always inspired me. I knew that I had the courage within me to overcome the stress and mental setbacks that I was experiencing. I just needed to find it. There are many things in life that we can’t control and sometimes we need to stop worrying about those things and accept them for what they are. Of course, I would still worry from time to time, but once I began to accept my setbacks, I found that my excitement to embrace my journey, and life in general, never faded and was always there within me.

I am currently still in the process of this amazing journey that I am on, accepting my setbacks and embracing my moment. One of my favorite Motivate Wraps describes this perfectly: “adventure awaits.”

...and I can’t wait to see what the next few months have in store for me!

And we can't either! One of the things we love so much about our #momentumjewelry community is that each one of you is constantly pushing toward adventure, and ultimately having moments...multiple moments...that "ignite the fire within" you to keep moving. And ultimately, inspiring others. So remember, setbacks spring you forward. Embrace them. Remember your "why" and add moment after moment to your awesome list of memories. 

Need an extra dose of motivation? Shop the new collection of Motivate Wraps HERE.