Rebuild Your Mind; Rebuild Your Body

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.

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.

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.