2021 - Your Fittest Year (Mindset)

2021 - Your Fittest Year.

“Absorb what is useful. Discard what is not. Add what is uniquely your own.” - Bruce Lee.

It was a long 4 years of 2020. It’s been a whole vibe. You made it to the end, look at you go, champion. This blog series will be focused on addressing the five pillars of training to crush it in 2021. It will be a 6 part series over the next couple of months.

The principles in the blog are taken from a variety of podcasts, books, mentors and my own learnings. Drawn especially heavily from the podcast of chasing excellence, a brilliant series by Ben Bergeron.

The five pillars are - Mindset / Training / Nutrition / Recovery / Connection.

Each pillar will be covered with 3 principles.

Mindset 

This is the most important aspect of all. At the very top of the competitive game, every athlete is super fit. They all work hard and have incredible work capacity and grit. What separates the athletes at the top is mindset. Developing a champion’s mindset will serve you well in your daily life as well as smashing you fitness goals.

This means developing fortitude, grit and resilience. It means eliminating the practise of negotiating with yourself, it means having the courage to keep the integrity, the promises you made to yourself.

This year you’re going to work to develop a growth mindset around training. With the fixed mindset, people will actively avoid anything that makes them look like they’re struggling, even if they have never attempted the new thing before. To quote Jay Shetty “It’s not that we fear starting, it’s that we fear being seen starting at the bottom.” Growth mindset is adding the words “yet” to the end of every “I can't do xxx.”

Having a growth mindset is understanding that If you were to start doing everything with your non dominant hand tomorrow, you would look like you’re terrible at most things you try. You just haven’t developed the neuromuscular co-ordination yet. But every minute you practise, your brain is creating new neural pathways to lay a powerful foundation for that skill. The growth mindset allows us to reframe adversity into opportunity.

Which leads beautifully into the first principle.

Principle #1 - "Opportunity in Adversity."

Possibly the most powerful principle of the list. Entire books have been written about this (See, 'The Obstacle is the way' by Ryan Holiday).

A guiding principle which will transform the way you interact with and relate to the world around you. Adversity is crucial to any sort of growth. Development with compression rapidly increases the efficacy of the stimulus. After developing this skill, people will begin to relate to you differently. You will become the person who never complains, never makes excuses and never criticises others. You will be able to find a sub optimal situation, or an outright shit storm of an event and think “excellent, how can I turn this into an opportunity to develop and grow?”

Changing your mindset into the reframing of situations and stimulus will allow you to find the opportunity and leverage what is available to you. “We do what we can, with what we have, for where we are.” Getting creative what what we have, we get to do so much more.

You will hear the tribulations of a friend and be able to see an entire network of all of the opportunities that you can gently nudge them into. It’s a skill, with time and effort, it will become a default mindset.

Principle #2 - Gratitude.

The mind is incapable of processing emotions anger or unhappiness whilst in a state of deep gratitude.

There is so much literature on why we should be grateful. I’m much more interested in the how. The actual process of cultivating it into daily life, so let’s dive in.

Developing the mindset of gratitude starts, as many things to do, with awareness. This in turn is developed by a little bit of reverse engineering. My partner and I tell each other three things that we’re grateful for each evening whilst having dinner. This small habit then creates a constant awareness of finding little things to be grateful for each day, knowing that we get to tell the other about it in the evening.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to sip this campos coffee with cinnamon whilst listening to a spotify study fantasy sound track and writing this blog on the laptop that my father lovingly gave me as a parting gift the last time I saw him in South Africa. This brings me back to the gratitude of having such an incredible mentor that taught me the values and principles to live a life of integrity and immense kindness.

The above is an example of how awareness around the tasty cinnamon coffee can evolve and create immense gratitude that blossoms and becomes a powerful driving force of mindset. You will be able to find the opportunity in adversity, and even become grateful of the adversity.

Lastly, we can develop gratitude by bringing attention to what we have in life, rather than what we lack. It's by saying "I get to, rather than I have to. My partner and I also keep a digital gratitude journal each day, with space for a photo of the thing that we're especially grateful for that day. There is something incredibly powerful about checking what I was grateful for three tuesdays ago.

Principle #3 - Focused Intent.

This one is actually two principles that I’ve blended into one powerful practise.

Deep focus can only be maintained for short bursts, and becoming aware of when and where to apply this focus is key. Have you ever had that friend that seems to be able to just do that really complicated little thing super well? They step up almost immediately and manages to sort the issue that everyone else has been struggling with. 

That’s focused intent. Setting the intention and immediately executing with the highest level of focus that you’re capable of. Flow state is a prime example of this skill. It can be developed and tuned. It will serve you incredibly well and with a mindset of focus backed by intent, you get to crush whatever goal is in front of you. 

I tap into this when disconnecting the autopilot through a few hundred feet before landing, and use focused intent to ensure the landing is executed exactly as it needs to be, whatever the adverse conditions, or to ensure that the missed approach is executed safely and precisely. In fitness and training, it’s shifting into the mindset of focus and having the intent to really nail in the technique and mechanics of firing the muscles form core to extremity whilst completing a muscle up, or an olympic lift. 

Prime your mind by creating intent, and leverage focus to accomplish the task with excellence.