Mid Life Fitness

I believe that for many people, the main obstacle that prevents them from reaching the body that they desire is nothing to do with exercise or even nutrition. The thing which decides if they are going to succeed or fail happens without them even realising it.

After giving a talk to some people about their personal growth, I was reading an article by Geral Blanchard, a respected psychologist, and one part sprung out at me because it fitted so well with the main theme of my talk:

I was particularly challenged one winter night in the North Country by an elder of the tribe. He asked a series of probing questions about my profession and, with storytelling, hinted at other ways to assist healing. He queried, “What is that bible you psychologists use, the one where you call people names?”

Of course he was referring to the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), which only has words for diseases, disorders, and dysfunction, but no diagnoses that suggest a person is resilient and can change. He asked quietly, “Doesn’t that freeze people?” referring to being known thereafter only by the assigned label. He concluded, “We don’t let our children call each other names; we must set an example for them.”

I love the wisdom of that last line and if I could pay homage to the man for that directly then I would do so here and now.

What we can or cannot achieve is in large part decreed by our abilities, the gifts that are unique to us. The problem is that few of us are able to use but a small part of those gifts in any meaningful way because we have limited ourselves. When you look at the history of some of the greatest men and women, surprisingly often they have come from humble beginnings and there has been one thing which catapults them onto the path to greatness.

That trigger could be Lincoln accidentally buying law books whilst working as a penniless grocery clerk, or it could be any one of a large number of similar moment, but always it result in the person discarding a limiting belief. Lincoln could have remained a clerk, but instead he became one of the most powerful and influential men on earth.

When we apply labels to ourselves, those labels can be empowering or disempowering. Call yourself a hardgainer and you sign up to a hundred limiting beliefs and excuses to justify your lack of gains.

What label are you going to create for yourself today?

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.

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.