Mid Life Fitness

Successful people never work on their own and while they may have people working for them, the real reasons for their success are the people who work with them.

We cannot be experts at everything, nor can we have unlimited resources to hand. By the very nature of choosing to go after a goal we are forced to put aside other things in order to free up our own resources and focus. But by leveraging other people who are good at those things we gave up, or perhaps never even started, we can have our cake and eat it.

To stand out above the crowd you need to build a team whose resources will add to your own. Of course if you take then you need to give, but when they need your help what you give them should also help you towards your goal. If you are expert in how to exercise then you might find yourself a nutritionist, an injury rehab specialist, a motivation specialist and so forth. The one thing that you must have in common with them is that they share your goals.

The closer you work with them, the more congruent you will all become. As you get closer to success in your goal, you will be both supported by your team, but also you will be bringing your team up to success with you. The better you get, the better they will get as a result. Let’s say you are that expert in exercise routines – as you learn more and become even more expert, then so too will the exercise routines of your team. But it is vital that they share the same aims, otherwise they will act as a drag instead of a helping hand.

Make success happen

Success does not just happen; it has to be planned. You have to know what you are doing at every stage and at every moment. With the right focus you will be aware of opportunities which otherwise you might have missed. Bouncing ideas off your team will keep you on track and their special insights may be just what you need to make the next step forwards. Others might think that you are just lucky because they see only the results – they see only the swan majestically gliding across the pond; they don’t see the legs pumping away under the water.

Be aware that you are where you are now because of your mental attitude and because of how you relate to other people. Your mental attitude is the one thing over which you have complete control. If you want to build a good team then you might want to consider how you relate to other people. Treat them how you would like to be treated, don’t try to use them because that will very quickly rebound on you. Hate and anger are much stronger emotions than love and they burn into the memory much harder.

Build your team

Today, not tomorrow because there is no such thing as tomorrow, there is only ever now.

Review your goal and make sure that it is concrete with exact details of what you intend to achieve, how you intend to achieve it and when you will achieve it. Put it in a form that you can share with your team, so that they understand both your goal and your next actions.
Find someone in your immediate family who will be part of your team, then find someone you know who is interested in your goal and make them members of your team.

We are consciously aware of only a small part of what happens around us, and indeed of the actions and reactions that we take. Your body does see, hear, feel or smell those things, but you are not aware of it. It is estimated that we each make in excess of sixty thousand decisions each and every day, but our conscious minds make only make a tiny fraction of those decisions. The question you should be asking then is how are the other decisions being made?

The reason we don’t make all of those decisions with our conscious minds is that there are too many of them and frankly we have more interesting things to be doing. As the information comes into your mind, the mind makes an initial choice as to whether it can handle it by itself or if it needs to pass it up to your conscious mind. Habitual actions and learned actions don’t need the conscious mind to make decisions about. When you tried say a deadlift for the first time your conscious mind was actively involved. Once you’ve learned the right form for the exercise your body can take over the decision making for that and you can start paying conscious attention to the effort involved in lifting the extra weight you added to the bar for that set.

Stop running on automatic

If the body can handle those things automatically why do we care? The problems lie in the areas of bad habits, changing habits and routines. I’ve mentioned before that routines are ruts. When you are in a routine, the conscious mind is not at all involved and instead the body handles whatever it is that you are doing. The more often you do something the less the conscious mind needs to pay attention, until one day it doesn’t pay any attention, and what’s worse you don’t even realise you aren’t paying attention – and if you don’t realise that then you aren’t able to do anything about it.

At this point you might be saying to yourself “well OK, but so what?” So I’d like to direct your attention back to the opening sentence and to rephrase it. All success derives directly from having a clear purpose. A clear purpose is set by the conscious mind, and directly changes the filter process about what the mind handles on automatic and what is brought to your attention. Ever been in a hurry and found that all the lights were red, or the person in front was infuriatingly slow? This is what happens when you set new priorities and your selection process changes so that things you are now interested in are brought to your attention instead of simply being filed away.

Start learning to win

Once you realise that this is the truth of how you live then you can start to see why some people succeed and others are doomed to failure. Whatever your conscious mind pays attention to that is what you will find your mind attracting. Pessimists are constantly reminded by how bad things are and optimists are reminded about good things are even though both may be considering the same set of facts.

Why do people fail to stick to a program, why do they constantly chase the holy grail of programs? These are not the actions of self confident optimists. Any event can be interpreted in a number of ways. How you interpret it reveals how your emotions are invested and how you perceive reality. If you can realise this then you can detach yourself from the situation and change the filter on how you interpret the situation.

It isn’t enough though to remove the negative belief, you also need to replace it with a positive one. If your goals for what you want to achieve from your workouts are clearly written out you already have the foundation on which to build. Ask yourself then what you intend to give away in order to achieve the goal, because you don’t have the time or resources to do everything, and something has to not happen in order for your goal to happen. Write that down too and repeat aloud to yourself both your goals and what you are giving away several times a day.

Never underestimate the power of positive affirmations. This is how you refocus the hardwiring of what is brought to your attention and what is dealt with on automatic. Just having a goal is not enough. Not even having a plan is enough. It needs to be refreshed in your mind constantly until you have changed your filter enough that your plan becomes the automatic decision.

Take possession of your own mind today.

Life can throw you curves, but how do you respond to them?

Training is hard, eating when you don’t want to eat is hard, going to bed when you’d rather be chatting with your friends is not easy.

But if you want to be exceptional, to achieve what others haven’t got the grit to achieve then you can’t just hope that its going to happen. When the going gets tough and all that is all very well but closing your eyes and hoping its going to work out isn’t always best even if you use your pent up aggression as fuel. Save that for the weights instead.

A useful trick is to change your mental outlook. Harder to do than to say but its a question of practice. Just like you wouldn’t expect to walk into a gym for the first time and deadlift 500 pounds, neither should you expect to be able to be able to overcome a serious obstacle without practice. So start small, start with easy things and work upwards. What you need to do is to retrain how your brain interprets situations.

Last night I lay awake worrying about something at work. There was a chance that I’d made a mistake and I it hard to get back to sleep. What was going to happen was that the next day I’d avoid trying to think about the problem and eventually might get round to it and would pick at it hoping that I wouldn’t find a mistake. Instead I decided that I had made a mistake and I would find it in the morning, and I’d attack the problem aggressively.

Worry is a self destructive thing because you are making yourself stressed about something that has not happened and may never happen. By reframing it in my mind into past event, I removed the fear of having made a mistake an turned it into a problem to be solved. Now that works for me, it may not work for you, you will need to find something that works for you.

All of us encounter negative situations, but most of the time the situations themselves are neutral. We assign the situation as negative in our minds. It is us then who have the power to assign a different meaning to the situation. All it takes is the ability to take a mental step back from the brink. To not allow our emotions to make decisions for us.

Change your life today.

All of the religious and spiritual systems have one thing in common – they have a method for grounding. You might know it as centring, prayer or contemplation but despite the names it is all a form of meditation.

In our daily lives we are especially beset by confusion. We have multiple levels of distracting communication coming in at us, any number of things which act to stress us; things we need to do, to respond to. Multitasking is commonplace even where we try to avoid it, and the end result of this process is to leave us fragmented and without focus.

We can also find ourselves withdrawing from the pressure, putting up walls and allowing ourselves to stagnate and become depressed.

Stresses damage your body

Depending on your belief system you might view your response to these problems as being an issue with your energy being, your mind or just with your spirit. We have a physical body but we also have an intangible, mental or spiritual part, the part which makes us who we are.

To improve your body you need to have focus and this means you can’t afford to be fragmented and confused, but neither can you afford to hide from the pressure either. Both will result in not scheduling your workouts, nutrition and rest properly and even when you do workout the chances of maximising what you are doing will be slight. It’s all too easy to muddle your program and not give the exercises the focus they need because your mind is somewhere else. Mental stresses will impact on chemically on your body, reducing your ability to cope and this too will slow or even reverse your progress.

The solution is to put the time aside to ground yourself. To be effective this cannot be something that is done once in a while, you need to make it a regular process and if you can’t do it every day then at least do it before each workout. You need to make sure that your focus is on what you want to be doing, to make sure that you tick every box necessary to achieve your goals.

Meditation exercise

Most meditation systems start with breathing. If you have your own system – you do yoga, Alexander technique, martial arts or belong to a religion, go and learn that part of the system and apply it to yourself. You may not have been taught it, but if you ask your teachers they will be able to help.

But if you don’t have a system or simply want to start now then follow this:

Take a seat, wherever is comfortable, close your eyes and breathe.

Open your mental eyes on your inner space. Where are you? Are you in your head, are you floating about outside your head? The first task is to bring yourself back into your head, and you do this by focusing on your breathing. As you breathe pull your awareness back inside your head.

Once you have it there, you need to start to bring it down into your body, breath by breath. Take it down past your neck, past your chest and all the way down to your pelvic floor. You can do this by visualising the bones of your chest or the backbone and go down one vertebrae each breath. If you are familiar with chakras then go down one by one, it doesn’t matter how you get there so long as you do. This is the seat of the body. I find that when I get there suddenly my breathing slows down of its own accord and I relax.

As you continue to breathe you need to be aware of the energy of the body and how it flows. You can think of the energy or spirit being drawn in as you breathe and then pushed back out as you breathe back out. If you think in terms of chakras then apply your knowledge and for example you may want to spin the root chakra. Find a visualisation that works for you.

It need only take five minutes and it may take several attempts before you can achieve it, but if you can start the energy flowing then you can clear or ground yourself. The energy is like the incoming tide, it will sweep away any disturbances; any scattered sand or water that has become backed up in a pool, leaving it fresh, clear and ready for the day.

Be present in yourself

When you are grounded then you are present in yourself, you know who you are and you are in control. If you are not grounded then life tends to live you and not the other way round. When you are centred, you are in touch with your core values, the things which you are passionate about, the things which make you who you are. If you do this before a workout then your focus is fresh, your motivation reconnected.

Taking the first step to success

The one thing which defines a person who is successful is that there is clarity in their mind about what they are doing. Knowing what you want is all about defining goals, but simply setting goals is far from enough to ensure success; it is merely the very first step. Remember though that every journey begins with that first step and without it there is no journey.

To begin a journey you need to know the destination. The final destination can be a little vague but the next step in the journey has to be known with crystal clarity if you are to arrive at the place you wanted and not somewhere else.

There are always two things which need you need to be clear about with your goal; what you want and when you want it. You can imagine a goal to the effect that next summer you can have a body which will impress people when you take off your shirt. But what exactly does that mean? As a goal it isn’t very useful – does it mean you will have large muscles, that the muscles are well defined or just what exactly?

Precision about the goal

Be precise about the when. By Summer, do you mean at the start of June or do you mean July or even August? Pick a day and fix it in your mind and if there is something which will act as a lock to stop it shifting such as a competition, a party or a holiday, then so much the better.

Then decide what it is that you want and again be precise. Is it to gain or lose a certain number of pounds? Do you want to add a certain number of inches to your chest or arms? Do you want your body fat percentage to be a certain level?

If you are vague then you are setting yourself up for failure. If you have no clarity about the goal then it’s because you don’t really know what you want. How will you know if you have you really achieved what you wanted or not? If you can’t define the goal with clarity then it means that the goal isn’t really important for you, and things which aren’t important get sidelined very easily.

Rebalancing your life

To achieve a goal you have to create the space in your life to allow the goal to happen. In order to move towards the goal you must move away from something else; you will need to sacrifice things you are doing now. For most people one of the sacrifices will be financial – fitness and health are never cheap options and there are some very expensive ways to spend money. If you have enough money to satisfy every whim, you have very little chance of having enough time to indulge all of the whims which you can afford, so one way or another you will have to overcome limitations.

Achieving goals is all about tipping the balance away from its current stability and creating a new balance where there is no choice but to achieve the goal. The goals you choose and your ability to pay the price necessary to achieve those goals are dictated by your personal values and by your passion for those values. If you have no passion for your new goals you will never muster the energy to make the necessary sacrifices and overcome the obstacles which will block your path. If you can’t muster that passion then perhaps the goal is not in line with your values and you should consider either choosing a new goal or a new time frame in which to achieve it.

The key is to sacrifice those things which have no value for you in terms of the goal. To give up the things which are holding you back – relationships, habits or simply ways of killing time or money in ways that are no longer useful to you. You will not reach your goal unless you take action.

Narrowing your focus

In order to make real progress you need to restrict the number of goals. Every goal will have at least two or three activities related to it – so to build muscle you need to workout, eat well and sleep for example. All of those take time and focus. If you set three goals then you may have nine activities to manage, and very quickly you will lose focus because each activity might have its own challenges. Eating well for example means buying the right foods and taking the time to prepare and eat them. Sleeping well means reducing stress and allowing enough time, but neither of those are easy if you are trying to shoehorn working out into an already crowded schedule. I’d suggest that you have no more than three goals at any on time and even then in an ideal world just work on one at a time. If you really want to be become extraordinary, to do better than the average, then you will need to have only one goal.

Clarity

The degree of clarity you have about the goal and the specific next actions you need to take in order to achieve them will dictate whether or not you succeed or fail. If you review your goals once a week or once a month how likely is it that you will achieve them? Goals need to be reviewed every day; either in the evening or first thing in the morning. Review them and reawaken your passion for achieving them.

Having the actions you need to take fresh in your mind will affect the choices you make during the day. By being in your mind you will notice actions which otherwise might have happened while your mind was on autopilot and busy with another task. Having noticed the trigger point you can make a decision about how to act. Do you eat the cookie or the apple? Without focus your hand likely would have been in the cookie jar long before your mind actually noticed it. People on diets consistently under report the amount of food they eat, simply because they don’t realise that they are eating it. It’s the same as when you drive on a regular journey and have no memory of the actual drive.

Putting it all together

Remember your passion and use it to swing the balance of your life such that achieving the goals becomes easier than not achieving it. Have clarity about your goals and about what you are doing today to move towards the goal.

Every thing that you do either moves you towards your goal or away from it. Every step away from your goal means having to take another step just to get back to where you are now, a step that would otherwise have moved you towards your goal. It’s easier and faster to stay on track than to deviate.