Feeling the Burn

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I don’t particularly enjoy exercise. I’m not a gym bunny, or someone who eagerly looks for extra classes to “feel the burn”. I exercise simply because I want to be healthy for my two children (aged 2 and 6) and have the energy to keep up with them (both relatively virtuous reasons), but also because at the age of 40, vanity is becoming more of an issue (not so virtuous)!

I attend a fitness class at the same time as my daughter goes to gymnastics. As she bounds into her class downstairs, I trudge up the stairs of doom to attend mine. I don’t share my misgivings with my little girl but inside I’m like a petulant teenager who is being forced to attend some grim extended family event, when she’d rather be hanging out with her friends.

 

Nevertheless, with heavy heart and even heavier legs, I go.

 

JP, our fitness instructor is like a machine. He is ripped, tight, lean….…bear with me readers, this post isn’t about to turn into some middle aged lust fest……because that’s where the machine analogy ends. He doesn’t see the people in his class as bodies to be sculpted, but lives to be made better. Week in, week out, he talks through the best way to keep fit in body and mind, talks through the exercises with such enthusiasm, encourages us to raise our own personal bars, demonstrates how we can use really small spaces at home to replicate the same exercises so we can continue our training regime throughout the week.…all very nice.

 

I still hated it.

 

Up until last night, that is.

 

Last night, something clicked. A couple of the women were chatting throughout the exercises, making off the cuff remarks and I was laughing along with them as I was doing my lunges and squat thrusts.

 

JP started talking about the class as we continued to exercise. “It’s one hour of your week, that’s all. You can talk about your weekends and your families before or after the class. One hour. That’s all I’m asking of you to focus and push. I can show you how to make the exercises harder. I can show you how to make them easier. The only option I’m not giving you is to stop. Nothing in life can be achieved through giving up at the first hurdle, or when it hurts a little. Yes, you’re tired. Yes, your muscles are beginning to feel fatigued. But I’m here to help you work with that in a good way so your bodies respond positively. You can be tired in life, but there are always ways to make life better. You can make life go faster, or slower, but there is no option to stop – except a very extreme option of course! In this hour, you don’t need to worry about mortgages, or spreadsheets, or what is going on at home – this is about focused attention. On what is going on within you. On stretching yourselves beyond what you believed possible. I will not let you be unsafe but I will encourage you to dig deep and do what is necessary to surprise yourselves.”

 

And in that moment, everything changed. I thought – this is exactly what I teach! Why hadn’t I made that connection before? My whole life and business is around helping people get better in their lives, their work, their focus, their approach and yet I’d never applied that same thinking to me and my exercise!

 

Here was a man who totally believed in his message (so do I); who passionately wanted to help other people achieve more (so do I) and who wanted them to challenge their own personal boundaries and beliefs (so do I).

 

In that moment, I became super focused. Good grief, it still hurt. I was POURING with sweat (sorry for that picture!) but I kept going. I would not give up. I pushed on through, keeping focused on JP’s instruction and what I needed to do. I felt fantastic. Sore, aching, but fantastic. And JP was super encouraging – he noticed my effort and the focus. As one of my personal core values is to recognise when others are really trying, that meant a lot.

 

I’m actually looking forward to next week’s class. Life can be made harder or easier, faster or slower, but there is no option to stop. So what needs to happen for YOU to feel the burn and push through what life is throwing at you? Anything I can help you with? I'd love to hear your comments or challenges!

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Stop, Start, Continue

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Take a look at your diary over the past week. What has your week been filled with?

Meetings; telephone calls with customers; conference calls; training; one-to-one's; coaching; research. Then think about how you felt when you were involved with each of these. Some of this "stuff" will be contributing to you doing a great job. Some of it will be simply padding out your time, but not adding any real value. Other activities will be simply draining you from an emotional and time perspective. It's time to do an overhaul of your working week and see what can be done to energise you more – and therefore get you working on the right things! You can do this by simply breaking down your working week into three areas: Stop; Start; Continue.

STOP. These are all the actions/tasks/attitudes/viewpoints that you believe are not helpful. It could be something as simple as your attitude when gearing up for a particular meeting. Are you moaning quietly to yourself as you go to attend? Are you someone who is the "kiss of death" to any new idea that's suggested – always finding reasons for why something won't work, rather than looking for ways to make it work? Is it a task that you're doing out of habit, but it could be stopped, or delegated? Try and identify 1 or 2 of these areas from your week that you can simply stop.



START. What do you need to start doing? This could be linked to the things that you identified in the "Stop" category, such as starting to delegate or coach more. Or they could be completely different. Maybe you've identified the need to start believing in yourself a bit more. Or maybe you've identified a gap in your skills for which you need to start developing in. Or perhaps you need to start looking for the positives in a particular person whom you work with, rather than feeling really niggled by what they say and do. Try and identify 1 or 2 things you could start, which would really make a positive impact in how you feel about yourself and your work.



CONTINUE. What are some things which you enjoy and are good at? Things which you know are enabling you to be successful and effective in your job? This could be dealing with a particular customer; a specific process you follow which has proven time and again to be really effective for you; coaching and developing another member of the team so they can be even more successful in their role. What are some areas you'd hate to give up in your job, because you enjoy them so much? Identify 1 or 2 ways of doing them even more, or even better, so everybody reaps the rewards.

Focused Action:

  • Work through your diary from the previous week and identify at least 1 or 2 actions for you to Stop/Start/Continue
  • Look at your week ahead. Identify how and when you can put these actions into place, so you start to see a positive impact from them by the end of next week
  • Keep a note of what has the best result and do more of it!

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Attitude Determines Altitude

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I've just spoken at a national conference of a UK organisation, charged with giving a "motivational and inspiring talk" to the teams. Prior to my slot, the audience had been on the receiving end of a variety of talks from key senior members of their company, designed to inform them about the business and the year ahead. 

Every one of them majored on telling the 150 people assembled there that 2011 was going to be tough. Was going to be difficult. Was going to be challenging. As each person said their bit, I saw the audience shuffling, squirming and sinking further down in their chairs.

 After almost 3 hours, it was my turn and I talked to them about "Attitude determines Altitude" - i.e. How high you can fly will be a direct result of how high you BELIEVE you can fly.

Okay, the world economy has taken a hit. But we are where we are. If we sit around continually telling people how awful everything is, how challenging everything is – seriously, do you expect people to be inspired by that? To be motivated by that? To be spurred on to take massive, positive action?

There has never been a time when there have been no challenges of one sort or another. But whatever the circumstances, the people who seem to fare best are those who look for ways over, around, underneath or through the obstacles that get in the way of their visions and goals.

First things first, they expect there to be obstacles and challenges, but they're not deterred by them. They're defined by their attitudes which determine to keep focused, keep moving, keep taking action and keep their eye on the overall goal.

What you tell yourself and what you tell others has a powerful effect on how we all approach our day, our work, our relationships, our goals. Is what you're saying inspiring you or others to stretch more, step up more, overcome more, be more? Or is it demoralising them? Is it creating a sense of anticipation, or a sense of despair? Does it make people want to fly – or stay firmly on the ground?

Attitude determines altitude. Just like a pilot has to negotiate flight paths, birds, thermals, turbulence, weather conditions – his or her attitude determines the path of that plane. Whether they have to rise above the turbulence…..or duck down underneath it. They keep their eye and focus on their desired destination, but adjust and work with the obstacles, rather than against them, so they reach their destination on time, intact and safe.

Life is exactly the same. We all have to make adjustments to negotiate the turbulence life can throw at us sometimes. But if we stay focused on our goal, our destination and choose the right attitude, flying high doesn't just become a possibility, it becomes a probability.

So how high do you want to fly?

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Choice and Circumstance

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Spring is the time for new life, for sowing seeds and for spring cleaning. Whereas we tend to turn our attention to things such as our homes, our files, our diaries, our gardens, it is just as important to sow fresh seeds in our life and minds. Get the dust out, the cobwebs, the negative self talk – a spring clean of our minds! In doing so, we approach this spring – and indeed the rest of the year – with a real sense of hope and a real sense of desire and a real sense of ‘this is going to be a positive, productive and fruitful time.’ I really hope that you’re up for that. I certainly am :)

What triggered this post was a quote I recently came across from George Bernard Shaw: "People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can’t find them, make them."

Wow. Now that could have been said by any motivational speaker/coach today, but this came from a book written by George Bernard Shaw in the nineteenth century. I love that the wisdom of it still rings true today. 

In order to get the best out of ourselves – and inspire others to do the same – we need to look at where we're at and how we're responding to where that is, irrespective of the circumstances around us. Are we applying ourselves in the best possible way? Or resigning ourselves to the "fact" we cannot change the circumstances we're in?  In order to maximise our potential in any situation, good or bad, we must look at how to apply ourselves in the best possible way so we became the success story in the situation.

Although we can all find ourselves in situations we wouldn't necessarily choose, the choice we do have is in how we respond to those situations.

How are you responding?

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