Blueprint for Personal Growth - Part 1
Written by Drew Duglan, PhD
Many of us have or have had a difficult relationship with exercise. We know we should workout, but may not be impressed with the results, or even stick with it long enough to notice any.
In this two-part series, we will broadly lay out the mental and physical why and how of working out, and how this mindset is a blueprint for all kinds of personal growth. In this first part, we discuss getting over the initial hump, where to aim our efforts, the power of goal setting and sticking with the process.
Waiting for Godot motivation
If you’ve ever seen or heard of the play Waiting for Godot, then you’ll know it’s a tragic comedy based solely on the fact that two characters continue to wait and wait for a man named Godot, who simply never comes. Bizarre, huh? And what does this have to do with working out? It’s the mentality. The same mentality we apply to anything that’s difficult to achieve. Except that our Godot is instead named “motivation.”
We often think about waiting to do something until we feel “motivated” or “inspired,” which usually ends up being the perfect rationalization for never taking any action at all. Instead, we wait on something that never arrives, condemning us to inertia and leaving us more uninspired than when we started. The way to break this cycle is by recognizing that cause and effect should be reversed. It’s the art of taking action which ignites your motivation to pursue a goal, fitness or otherwise, generating a new positive feedback loop that breeds success. In other words, the more we begin to do something, the more we want to do it. This phenomenon of active, rather than passive, motivation empowers you to realize your potential, in the process making you more immune to external forces. So, then the question becomes, what action are we taking and what goals are we setting?
Shoot first, then aim
What are your goals? That is the big question. While those who are already athletically inclined may have a sport-specific achievement in mind, for many of us, we simply want to feel stronger, healthier and more capable, as well as look better than we did before.
A double-edged sword of our digital age is the unprecedented access to information on any given topic, which can bring decision-making to a halt and thwart progress before it’s even begun. The topic of fitness and working out might just be the poster child for this issue. A quick browse of pop news items, fitness websites or magazine articles and you will likely get a wide array of complex, and often opposing, exercise prescriptions that claim to satisfy a given goal. We are left paralyzed by the tyranny of choice.
Liberation comes from realizing that the optimal path of reaching your goal, and in many cases the goal itself, will be refined over time. This is why it’s initially good practice to shoot first and see where it lands, and then aim thereafter. By taking those first steps and observing the outcome, we can build on it or change course as necessary. These healthy “mistakes” should therefore be seen as essential milestones that fuel your motivation to continue the journey.
Micro goals
The path towards any meaningful endeavor is never linear. Beyond the initial hump of taking action, as complexity or effort in a given task increases, so does the likelihood of hitting a plateau or seeing a temporary drop in performance. This is even more so the case with working out, where intense exercise is heavily influenced by nutrition, sleep, sickness, stress and our headspace on any given day. When these plateaus occur, reaching our big shiny goal can seem insurmountable.
A critical way of judging progress and sustaining motivation over the long-term is by delineating micro goals. We do it every day in our working lives to evaluate our skillset and update our CV, so fitness really shouldn’t be any different. Reaching these graduated benchmarks lets us know we’ve physically levelled up. They remind us that we’re on the right track or redirect us should we fall behind.
There is also tremendous psychological value in these physical trials. Have you ever worked intensely on an amazing, but challenging project, only to be left with a longing and slight emptiness once complete? Although we feel satisfaction from attaining the goal, this is merely fleeting. Really, we tend to get the most reward from the act of moving towards a goal. By continuing to upgrade our micro goals and place value on the given process, we can begin to transform our string of successes into sustainable fitness habits.
When habit becomes character
Consistency in the process is a precondition for success, but also one of our biggest challenges. Work-life balance, travelling and social events are just a few things that make it remarkably easy to fall off the wagon. While we should remind ourselves that we’re only ever one workout away from being back on track, there’s no denying that your exercise goals and therefore schedule needs to become a priority. As we’ll outline in part 2, it’s not necessarily a significant weekly time commitment, but it should be taken seriously. By telling ourselves that we will complete just a few non-negotiable workouts each week, and strive for excellence in each of them, we can reduce the likelihood that we bail on any given workout when a convenient excuse comes along. The benefits of this mindset compound over time, so that soon the regular practice is incorporated into your character and broader identity, making motivation less of a conscious battle.
And the key word here is incorporated. Working out does not need to become your identity, it should be carefully balanced with other interests and elements of your character, hopefully producing a well-rounded self. Rather than becoming obsessive, which can lead to its own mental struggles, we can learn to treat ourselves with a detached self-regard. Ultimately, the healthy detachment protects you from being ruled by your ego, which could easily be shattered by negative thought patterns, threatening your whole identity and likely derailing your progress.
Cultivating mental fortitude
People often falsely equate comfort with happiness. Admittedly, uncertainty can be scary, but it’s also exciting and where all the learning in life takes place. Pushing ourselves through discomfort not only makes us happier, but also expands the limits of what we’re capable of. If we can learn to really push ourselves physically, this drive and motivation will often translate to success with new cognitive and psychological challenges. How you do anything is how you do everything, as the wise saying goes. So, by gradually mastering our body, we can nourish our mind, build character and shape ourselves into the person we truly want to be.
More on the how in part 2….
