Are You Comfortable?

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With a new year comes reflections and resolutions. Mine have been especially strange recently coming off a year of travel, and trying to get back to real life.

In my head, I think I put traveling as the end-all-be-all of my bucket list. The things Lindsay and I saw and did were incredible, life changing, and then they ended.

It’s a more difficult place to be than I thought for someone with a hard on for adventure and a serious addiction to adrenaline.

When I first started personal training, my goal was to be the best trainer ever. It was all consuming. I read everything I could get my hands on about fitness. Articles from powerlifters, bodybuilders, pilates instructors, athletic trainers, yoga teachers… everyone. By year 5 of training, I had already put in well over 10,000 hours of study, training, reading, and writing about fitness. I’m not telling you that I’m the best or that I know everything – cause that would be a total lie. But I do have a good grasp of not just the foundations of training, the biomechanical technical nitty-gritty. But also the human side, the mental and motivational components.

I can train large groups of people, or 1 on 1. I can tell you more about your body after a 1 hour stretching session than you’ve ever learned from all your previous trainers, and medical folks who would rather give you muscle relaxers and statins than fix the underlying issues.

I’m not just trying to brag right now.

I’m comfortable.

I’m entering a new stage of life right now where things are easy. No real stress, and Lindsay and I are settling into relationships/friendships/community in Phoenix. I feel like I’m personally entering the teenage years of my adult life. My braces are off (not actually since I wore them my senior year), our curfew is a little later, and we finally talked our parents into putting a TV in our bedrooms. Shit is tight.

I personally have been feeling a bit complacent. As great as everything is, not much in my life challenges me right now, and I don’t think that I’m growing as much as I could be. I think it’s easy at this stage to settle back and ride out a wave of easy months. I fear that I would blink, and a year will have passed, and next January I’m in the same stage that I am today.

I’m writing this note right now for any of you that are feeling this way or are in a similar mental place. I want you to realize your potential, and to remember the things that you’re capable of.  I don’t want any of us to rest on the laurels of previous successes, and drift through the next few years comfortably.

The talents that I see in each one of you are so impressive, it’s scary. It scares me to think what I am personally capable of, and I think that fear can handicap me into stasis. What if I’m not as smart as I think? What if I can’t live up to my own expectations? Fuck. That. Shit.

You are smarter and better than me in your areas of expertise, and I want to encourage you this new year to set big goals for yourself.

What does the person you want to be look like?

How does that person behave?

Aristotle (and other people) said “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit”.

Everyone fixates on the last bit of this quote, but I like the first part. “We are what we repeatedly do”. What are you doing repeatedly right now? Are those the things that will take you to the places that you want to be?

If you want a bangin body and a 6-pack, your habits should reflect that. If you want to improve your golf game, don’t TELL ME that. Show me the time and money you’ve spent on the golf course. If you want to learn Spanish, DON’T TELL ME. Show me your homework.

“How we spend our days, is of course how we spend our lives” – Annie Dillard

This year, fuck normal. Fuck complacency. This is the season to create the life you want. Now is when we lay the base for our future. I don’t want us to wake up one day and think “what happened to the last 10 years?”

So my challenge to you is: Pick something that you would like to do, be or accomplish by 2018. Maybe it’s saving a certain amount of money. Maybe buying a house. Maybe learning a language. Maybe it’s a physical goal like dropping the baby weight or running a marathon.

Whatever that goal is, work backwards. If that’s the place you want to be in a year, where do you need to be in 6 months?

Whatever you decide, just know that I care about you and your success, and look forward to seeing what you do with your amazing unlimited potential. Let me know if I can help you in any way.

Hugs and snuggles,

N8

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