For Iceman 
“He who has a strong enough why can bear almost any how.”
Nietzsche.
‘Life’s a journey, not a destination’
Ralph Waldo Emerson
This week’s post starts where we left off last week. With me
I wrote this in a blog post on goal setting last December -
“You also need to consider why you want it. Your ‘why’ should motivate and inspire you. Your ‘why’ is what will drive you through the journey ahead. When you feel like quitting, and you will, it is your ‘why’ that will get you through.”
Over the last few days I’ve been thinking a lot about my training goal for the year – my now postponed birthday photo shoot. I’m still committed, still determined and still focused on the task ahead. I’ve been tweaking and fine-tuning every element of my restructured plan. I haven’t actually set an end date; I’m keeping things simple and focusing entirely on just following the plan, relentlessly, day after day after day. I don’t know exactly where I’m going, but I’ll know when I get there and in the meantime I’m going to settle down and enjoy the journey
It’s not all about me this week though as I’ve also been talking with a lot of my personal training (I assume you all know I’m a personal trainer in Edinburgh by now) clients about their goals. Two of them stood out for the same reason – their ‘why’ isn’t working.
Luckily I had the answer – get more leverage
I’ve been listening to motivational speaker and success coach Anthony Robbins recently. I like Anthony Robbins; I find his voice a bit irritating but I always manage to blank this out after a few minutes and focus on what he is saying, which after all is the important thing.
What he says about leverage makes a lot of sense -
“The ultimate leverage in human beings always comes down to our ability to change what we link pain to and what we link pleasure to.”
Given this information then the key to making a change simply comes down to
“…making the change as pleasurable as possible and making not changing as painful as possible. The lever of those two will drive you to create the change…”
So if your why isn’t working you simply haven’t found the right leverage. Bear in mind here that some people are in extreme, life threatening situations, and they still don’t change. Why?
“…truth of the matter is that we simply haven’t gotten the right leverage for this person…”
When we are getting leverage we have to
“…do it so intensely your brain is not even willing to consider the possibility…it’s gotta be outside your frame of reference…”
So if your why isn’t working you’ll simply have to dig deeper and get more leverage. It may not be easy but in the words of Sir Winston Churchill in a famous speech he gave at Harrow School in 1941 -
“Never give in–never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”
Above all remember that it can be done, I know two people who did it only this week
P.S. It’s only a day to my birthday . I almost put three smilies here as I’m becoming quite excited about this, my thinking being that if Edinburgh Supplements are worth two smilies my birthday has to be worth three but I’ve have controlled myself as it is not actually my birthday, only my birthday eve .
P.P.P.S It actually is my birthday now
