Rebuild Your Mind; Rebuild Your Body

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.

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.