Rebuild Your Mind; Rebuild Your Body

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.

From personal experience, there is little that it more crushing to motivation than having an injury. You’ve set goals, perhaps have created milestones on the way to get there, and now you’re sitting in your broken down car on the edge of the highway watching the traffic speed past.

The answer is that you never give up. Everyone suffers setbacks, even the best. Think back to the last season of your favourite sport – how many sportsmen suffered injury?

Setbacks are what defines those who will succeed and sets them apart from those who will fail. Setbacks are there to challenge us. Do not ever let them get you down.

OK, now there are some injuries which will put you back a long way. If your wheel falls off then you need to wait for the tow truck, but otherwise it’s time to start pushing. This is where a social network really helps because if you’ve got a friend to step in and help push then it gets a lot easier.

Some injuries you need to sit and wait on. I pulled a muscle on my ribs, don’t ask me how, but it made almost every exercise impossible until it had healed enough. With my current one, there are going to be exercises that I can’t do, so instead I’m going to work on gentle stretches on the damaged muscle and then exercise around it. I’ve had a few days off and next week I’m away on holiday for a week so it’ll be a complete break from the weights.

Tomorrow I’m going to see what I can do with my normal routine. I’m pretty sure that I won’t be able to do overhead press, so I’m going to try bench press with lighter weight. While I’m away I’m going to switch over to a bodyweight routine.

Bottom line – don’t give up.

No matter how we try, the one thing that we can count on is failure.  What makes us though is how we deal with it.

My program was on track, everything was coming along just nicely until I picked up a new injury.  That is par for the course, at least for me.  If you push the limits then sometimes you are going to overstep them.  There I was happily pushing more weight because the last time I’d done this routine I’d noticed that I needed to increase the weight – it was an exercise I’d not done often before.  I’m still not sure what went wrong and I’ve replayed it in my head a number of times.

But that isn’t the important point.  It’s how you deal with it and I have to admit that I dealt with it poorly.  Not intentionally, but because it was a rib injury it impacted on just about every exercise I did, even the cardio.  So I gave it a break.

It was the right thing to do.  Better to take a couple of weeks out than create something which would keep me out of training for months.  But, here is the mistake;  I allowed myself to shift my daily routines – I mean it wouldn’t hurt would it?

Well four months later, I’m now struggling to re-establish those routines.  And there is the lesson.  I don’t know about you, but I’ve got more things I could do, more things I need to do than time to do them.  There are solutions to that, but in the end we have to make choices.

We are going to fail.  If you are prepared for it then you can cope with it and move on.  If it catches you by surprise then it can shift you into a new paradigm without you even realising it.

So how do you deal with failure?