Having worked out for many years, I have a fair idea of the things which work and the things which don’t. But more importantly I have some understanding of why the things which don’t work, well, don’t.
The question I’d like to pose you, is if you have something you need to know, something which is frustrating your progress.
If so then drop a comment below and I’ll do my best to run you up an answer.
I’ve spoken before about the stories we tell ourselves, you know the ones where we’ve done something before, so we know how it will pan out. We can’t gain muscle because we’ve tried ten different plans or we can’t lose that bit of flab which covers up our six pack even though we’ve starved ourselves forever.
Stories lie
Well, you know, the trouble with stories is that we know the ending and often that is enough to either stop us starting or at least to sabotage us if we do make the effort. First little hurdle we hit, bang, there is the story playing out in front of our eyes like a dvd player which won’t turn off.
To succeed you need to be a visionary, a seer if you like who has unflappable faith in your ability to succeed. What the seer knows is that life is there to teach us lessons. Every time you stub the toe of your ego on some obstacle, that obstacle is there because your ego has an issue that you need to resolve. And life is going to keep on stubbing your toe until you either give up and walk away or you actually take a look, see what the problem is and do something about it.
Failure is fantastic
Society today is all about success. Unless you are a success then you are a nobody and a failure. The problem with this is that failures are necessary for us, they are a stepping stone on the path which will lead to success. Sometimes it’s necessary to take a different route if the obstacle in your path is so big you just can’t get round it, but most of the time all it needs is a little mental readjustment. The reason I say that is because the obstacles are nearly always because what you think of as reality isn’t quite the same as what reality really is.
If that sounds obscure, think of it this way; what you think of as the door to moving onwards is in fact a door into a storage closet and the real door is the one next to it. The problem is that your pride won’t allow you to see that you are opening the wrong door, and so you keep on walking into the storage closet and wondering why you are finding yourself blocked in.
That is the power of the vision. To be able to see reality as it really is and not how we think it is, or how we’d like it to be.
Next time you hit an obstacle, take a moment to step back and have a better look at what is really happening.
…for business or did it shut down from lack of demand?
A harsh question perhaps, but it is all too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you know the answers. We all do it, myself included, but a closed mind cannot learn, cannot get itself out of the ruts and like a train is forever cursed to follow but a small choice of all the possible routes. Do you want to ride the train or is it time you jumped off and got in the 4×4 and found your own path?
Teachability
This is an important quality to develop. It means being able to learn as well as to listen. Learning means making mistakes and growing because of them. It means changing your mind, seeing something in a new light or taking advice from those you’d rather not listen to.
Making Progress
Pride is the biggest obstacle to having an open mind. None of us have all the answers and we need to admit to this and as a result be willing to learn.
Can you admit to mistakes? This is a process which makes you feel vulnerable, but in the long run it is the foundation for strength.
There is a large segment of the personal development community who think that you get what you believe. Some take it to the extremes of suggesting that you can get anything so long as you believe it enough. But even if you don’t accept that it is hard to avoid the realisation that how you look at the world fundamentally changes what you get out of it and the results that you gain.
If you have doubts about what you are doing it will reduce the degree of effort you put into it. Just this morning I had put the weight on the bar ready to do some squats and I felt weak. For a moment I doubted that I’d be able to complete the set. Failure loomed large in my mind until I realised what I was doing. I took a moment and refocused. When I lifted the bar off the rack it seemed really heavy and again the doubts crept in, but I kept to my resolve and my belief that I could do it and I did. Once I’d completed the set and put the bar back in the rack, I realised that I’d put too much weight on the bar! I’d glanced at my training log but accidentally run along the line above which was the shrug weight and nine kilos more than my planned weight for the squat set. So instead of failure I set a new personal record.
You get what you expect
Too many people focus on their problems, on the failures and they allow those thoughts to dishearten them. The one and only defining trait of a successful person is a strong belief in themselves. That doesn’t mean that they can’t be realistic but no one who consistently expects to fail will ever succeed in the long run. There are some strategies you can use where you can expect failure in order to reduce the stress or worry of failure, but on the whole even then, deep down you need to have the resolve to keep trying. Failure is certain. Giving up will ensure that failure is the final result. Successful people use the failures as a learning experience and analyse them so that they avoid that mistake when they try again, and again, and again. But those new attempts are calculated; not just smashing your head against the wall of failure – instead climb it, find a way under it or around it.
Your mind can be what you want it to be. It is the only thing that is really under your control. You may by nature be a pessimist, but you can use that pessimism to minimise the risks. Optimists can fail because they fail to think about the risks. Pessimists fail because they assume the risks are too great and so never try. Learn from both of these, use the middle ground and leverage it for success.
To reach your goals, be they to add muscle, lose fat or improve performance, you must create a great capacity in yourself for belief. The starting point is to believe in yourself. To know that you were born with the ability to succeed and that only your own doubts and lack of focus have ever sabotaged that success.
Create the mind set for success
Know what you want and how you intend to get it.
Repeat every day, several times a day your appreciation of getting it. This helps to retrain the mind into believing that success is assured and so reduces the doubts.
Keep an open mind and take action. If you don’t take action you will not succeed.
Remember that defeat when it happens, and it will, is merely the world letting you know that something is wrong in your approach and that you need to correct it. Defeat is a challenge not a reason to stop trying.
Keep a strong and burning desire to succeed. Remember that you will reap what you sow and if you have doubts then failure is the inevitable reward.
Trying too hard can cause failure as much as not trying enough. Too hard can cause injuries, too soft will have no result. Train hard, but train smart and believe in yourself.
Attracting the best people to your team is clearly the key making your support team more effective and thus accelerating your progress towards your goal, but how do you convince those people to work with you and not someone else? If they are good then they will already have other people who want to work with them.
The answer of course is to stand out from the crowd, but not in a wearing a loud shirt sort of way, rather it’s to have a reputation as the guy who gets things done, the guy who can be relied upon. They are building their teams just as you are and would you rather have the expert who can’t be relied upon or the guy who is good and makes sure to put you first? It cuts both ways, but how do you get that reputation?
The problem with this approach is clearly that it won’t work at first, but the more you work on solving this, the better your reputation will become and better your future team will become. You might even by example be able to turn the average team you first attract into the best team; the team others want to steal away from you.
Route to Success
The route to success in this is to go the extra mile. This works for you as much as it works to build your reputation because it will transform your own results from mediocre to outstanding. The downside to it is that it really reinforces the concept that you cannot do everything and that you need to sacrifice goals which are less important or which perhaps are not relevant any more.
It is also easy to become resentful of the extra effort required to go the extra mile, and martyrdom will counteract the benefits you are seeking to create, so make sure that you maintain the positive mental attitude and do the extra mile because you want to. Remember that most people will fail to complete the first mile never mind complete the second one so this will really make you stand out.
Each time you perform the same service you will seek to do it better. Better might simply be in terms of doing it more efficiently so that you complete it faster, or it might be a higher quality product, but either way it will make your work excel and that will make you much more attractive to the other team members and to potential team members.
Expand Your Mind
One of the best results of this exercise is that it will improve your imagination as you constantly seek to find better ways of doing things. That is an area where your team will be able to provide you with very useful feedback because they will consider the problem from different viewpoints and while they are unlikely to provide the solutions you need to improve, they are likely to provide you will the inspiration for where to look in order to find the solutions.
