Jul20Control The Controllables
If only life would all go according to plan. Of course, this doesn’t happen.
Things happen. A pandemic occurs and you get laid off, your car breaks down in a snowstorm, an asteroid destroys your house (let’s hope that last one doesn’t happen).
These are things that you can’t necessarily control. You can’t decide what and when something will happen. They just happen. But do you know what you do control? Your attitude and actions. Now before you go and ask, what does this have to do with fitness? The answer is everything – actually it has everything to do with life – and I’ll explain how shortly.
Focus On What You Can Control
As I said above: you can only control your attitude and actions. These are the only things you truly own. Bad things can happen, but it’s up to you how you respond. Miss a workout due to an emergency? Busy workday and didn’t have time to cook a meal? Sometimes we can’t choose what happens to us, but we can choose how we’ll react and respond to those things.
Focusing on what you can control is a much better use of your time versus focusing on what you can’t control. Because the truth is that life stuff happens, and we can’t always plan for it. These things might seem to derail our fitness goals, but they are just slight detours. Actually, if looked at it in a positive light, these obstacles can be seen as a good thing. Obstacles are a chance to become better – stronger, dialed in, finely detailed – so start seeing them like that.
What Can I Control?
As I’ve said above, the only things you truly control are your attitude and actions. How you view things, and how you respond/react. You can’t control what someone will say, the car driving down the road or the weather. Say for instance there is a winter storm and you can’t get to your next H4 session that you were really looking forward to. What now? Time to binge a series on Netflix and down a pint of ice cream? Maybe; or maybe, we can decide that we will still train, albeit a home workout session using challenging bodyweight exercises (and maybe check out an H4 video on YouTube).
When we focus on changing how we view things and how we respond, we find that we can still reach all the goals that we set out to achieve. Nothing should stop you from meeting your goals; you might meet some resistance, but it should be welcomed as a chance to become even better.