Moving towards better is a gradual process of small wins.
Chasing greatness can sometimes transcend linear understanding. There are days where you seem to make monumental improvement, only to fall backwards the day after. Improvement is not a linear progression. In order to maintain an upward trajectory of growth, your mindset matters.
What you believe you can do, and what you believe you cannot do are both true. You set the parameters for your reality. The hard fact is, if you don’t make an effort towards doing, nothing will get accomplished. Your beliefs will dictate the quality of your experience as you move towards your goals.
A Quick Sidebar On Goal Setting
The fascinating thing about setting goals and making an effort to move towards it, is that there should be a mix of fear and excitement. Goals are new. The experience of achieving it, and the new standard you live by after you have achieved it is something that is foreign territory. New is exciting. New is also different, and different can be scary!
If you don’t have a healthy dose of both fear and excitement as you’re progressing, either your goal is not much of a goal, or you’re undermining the quality of work required to achieve it.
Goals Without Fear
Let’s say you’re gunning for a new personal best doing squats. The weight you’re going for is heavy, but you don’t recognize that. You attempt to do it without any thought put into the ramifications of failure, and you injure yourself.
The double edged sword of goal setting that instills fear through humility is this: if there is none, perhaps your goal isn’t much of a goal after all – it’s within the realms of what you’re capable of doing. Your goal doesn’t challenge you enough to push your boundaries.
Too lofty of a goal however, can be a major turn off. The difficulty of the task seems too Herculean – you’ve set yourself up for failure, and the mental venues for possible contingency measures to protect your ego are now in place. “It’s okay if I give up, the goal was impossible anyway.”
Establish a goal that instills just enough fear in you that you can still taste the excitement of tackling the challenge!
Mindset Matters
Within the realm of self-improvement, your mindset matters, and here’s why: the only opponent that you’re up against is yourself. If your mindset is set to the mode of self-doubt, where you diminish your potential for whatever reason (maybe you think other people are already so much greater than you, that it’s not even worth it to try, or you’re not talented enough) it really won’t take much to “improve.” That’s okay, because small steps are still improvements!
You, on the other hand, want to make leaps and bounds of improvement – so be sure that the you that you’re going up against is an opponent worthy of your effort.
Accomplishing In Fractions
A fun way of spinning my mindset in order to break my own personal limiters is to utilize a rule I call accomplishing in fractions. Let’s explore this rule a little bit.
Diving into the realm of athletics, we can look towards world records as being the apex of what’s humanly possible. I also like to use athletics as an example because the metrics are easily understood with physical performance. However, this method of thought is applicable to all realms of self-improvement!
Push Ups
Did you know that the world record for most amount of push-ups done (non-stop) is 10,507? Don’t believe me? Google it. The record is absolute insanity. Let’s break it down like this: the record holder did 1 set of 100 repetitions of push-ups, and proceeded to do that again for another 105 more sets – without stopping!
To me that’s absolutely incomprehensible, so lets take a look at the record for most push-ups done in an hour: 2,220. Still an insane amount, especially within 60 minutes, but more comprehensible.
Now let’s spin it like this: if there is a human out there who can accomplish this many push ups in an hour, why am I not able to do a fraction of what they can do? A fraction. At 1/10th, I’ll be asking myself to do 222 push-ups. By any standard, that’s actually still quite impressive!
Most people can’t even do 30 push-ups in a row before gassing out – however if I’m comparing to the average person, I’m setting myself up to be average. I’m chasing greatness – and greatness is a standard set by people who stand in the zone of outliers. So the next time I choose to workout, the goal I set for myself is to accomplish 222 push-ups before I leave the gym.
Running
Let’s take another example using runners. The average individual is happy running anywhere from not running at all, to roughly 20 miles a week. World class marathon runners when training for their events can run anywhere between 90 – 140 miles a week.
Let’s take an even 100 miles a week as an example. That’s about 160km. If we break that down to the number of kilometers per day, that would be about 23km a day of running!
I know I am nowhere near the endurance level of marathon runners, but if they are living proof that it’s humanly possibly to run that much a week, and do that consistently, why am I not able to do a fraction of that?
Reframe Your Mindset
By flipping the script on the belief that what the best are capable of doing is completely out of reach so we shouldn’t even try, start thinking about it in a way that motivates yourself to do more. People are out there proving that it is possible, therefore “I should strive to taste a fraction of their greatness.”
Applying the rule of accomplishing in fractions will reframe your mindset from impossible to improbable. The impossible was a mental limiter that you just broke – you acknowledge that the precedence for what’s humanly possible has been set. All that’s left is for you to try to get after it – to chase after a fraction of the collective human potential!
No Responses