Rebuild Your Mind; Rebuild Your Body

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.

To achieve your goals; your purpose, there are many paths which you could take. But of those paths, those which are optimal are much fewer and indeed there may only be one path which is a short cut, the best path.

Do you have the courage to walk that one path? Or is it closed to you because there is something barring you from it?

Fear is the mirror of freedom. Fear exists in the child part of our mind, a part which is not fully rational, not adult enough to take a dispassionate viewpoint. Fear should be a guide post, a warning sign, it should not be a barrier across the path saying, “this far and no further”. It warns us to be careful, but never should it be enough on its own to stop us. We might decide that the risk is too great for the proposed reward and choose a different path, but that is a very different thing from being afraid to walk the path.

Fear though, is not just of physical threats; it can be of emotional and social threats. The fear of looking foolish can be stronger than a fear of physical danger.

Are you afraid of what your friends might think if they learned of something which you are considering doing? Would they laugh if you took a dance class? Would their laughter be amusement or ridicule? Would your action be a threat to them? Friends are there to support you, and if they are instead dragging you down, then perhaps its time to cut them loose and find some new friends, ones who have your interest at heart, not their own.

Most fear reactions are repetitions of something you have already experienced. Once you have experienced fear then the child part remembers and blocks the action without any rational reasoning as to whether the fear is still valid. To remove the fear is not easy, but it has to be faced. This is not as bad as it might seem for you have already done this once. What we need to do this time is to look at it from a dispassionate view and change the outcome. If you can, go back in your memory and find that first time. Meet the memory and accept it, just allow it to be remembered and then accept it for what it was, take away its power. Reassure the child part of your mind that you now have faced the fear and it is no longer something to be afraid of.

This process works best with irrational fears, but it works too with rational fears where we have allowed the fear to grow out of proportion to the threat it represents. You control your response to fear, not the other way round.