No matter your goals, your ability to harness the power of your mind is crucial to your success. Equipping yourself with the right mental tools will supercharge your pursuit of achieving your health, fitness and performance goals. Use the following fitness success principles to help guide you on your path to success!
Believe in Yourself
We are all capable of achieving much more than we believe we can. We all place limitations on what we are capable of achieving because of past failures, lack of belief, lack of understanding or “good excuses”. Regardless of your age, race, genetics or prior experience-until the day you die, you can make positive changes to your health, fitness and performance…continue to strive towards your physical potential every day.
Take a Personal Inventory
Where are you now? The first step in the quest to reaching your ultimate physical potential and reaching your health, fitness and performance goals is to understand where you are presently. Without this knowledge in hand, you will not have a clear vision and understanding of the direction you need to take. By taking a critical look at yourself and your habits, you will be able to determine the areas of your lifestyle that require an improvement. Carefully evaluate each area which impacts your physical potential, i.e: nutrition, exercise, and lifestyle-determine where change is needed to reach your ultimate goal.
Create a Plan
You can convert your burning desire you possess into its physical equivalent by using the Six Ways To Turn Desire Into Physical Achievement with six definite practical steps to determine you physical goals (credit to Napolean Hill-“Think and Grow Rich”):
1. From your personal inventory, determine in your mind what areas you want to improve. Perhaps you want to reduce your body fat or blood pressure or increase your strength and flexibility…or get in the best shape of your life! Be as detailed as possible about the specific areas you would like to improve upon.
2. Determine exactly what you intend to give in return for the physical achievement and attainment of the goal in regards to efforts and positive changes in your exercise, nutrition and lifestyle.
3. Establish a definite date when you intend to obtain the physical achievement goals, no matter if it is in 4, 8, 12 weeks or 1 year.
4. Create a definite plan for carrying out your desire, and begin at once, whether you are ready or not, to put this plan in to action.
5. From the previous steps, now write down your specific goals, the goal date and what you intend to give to achieve these goals, and include the plan you will use.
6. Read your written statement aloud, twice daily, once in the morning and once before going to bed. As you read the statements- visualize yourself like you have already achieved your physical goals…leaner, stronger, more flexible, full of energy.
Once you have completed these six steps you will have established a clear path towards your goal. Next, from where you are presently, to the point of your goal, work backwards and set incremental goals between these points and establish a time line to achieve each goal. For example, if your goal is to reduce your body fat 12% in 12 weeks, when working backwards your increment goals would look like this:
Week 12 Goal: Decrease Body fat 12% Total
Week 8 Goal: Decrease Body fat 8% Total
Week 4 Goal: Decrease Body fat 4% Total
Week 1- Starting Point
Setting incremental or smaller goals will ensure that you are on the right track towards success. By achieving all of your individual incremental goals you will easily be able to reach the end goal, in this situation is decreasing your body fat 12% in 12 weeks. Once you have clearly defined your goals and are in pursuit of them, do not let yourself get off of the “optimal path” by persistently staying focused on your goal and putting forth the required effort in your exercise, nutrition and lifestyle to achieve your goals. With a solid game plan and the burning desire, there is literally nothing that can get in your way of achieving your goals. Take clear and decisive action everyday! Once you get rolling, momentum will build and will propel you forward towards your goals.
Daily Affirmations
Daily affirmations can be helpful to keep your mind free from negativity, and focused on positive, goal-oriented thoughts. Affirmations are statements of a desirable intention of your mind and are deliberately meditated on and/or repeated. By utilizing this technique, you will create a mental program for your mind to be directed towards your goals of achieving your physical potential. Affirmations are always phrased in the first person and usually in a present tense, "I am", rather than a the future tense ,"I will", in order to increase the realization of the statement. For example, you could repeat your affirmations while exercising. Such as “I am getting stronger”, or “I am getting leaner”, or “I am getting healthier”. These affirmations will help to keep you motivated. Soon they will be part of your thought process and will help fuel you forward to achieving your goals.
Visualization
A simple, yet powerful technique. Close your eyes and in the “theatre of your mind” (credit to Dr. Maltz-“Psycho Cybernetics) as vividly as possible picture yourself achieving your goal. Visualization can help you develop a clear mental picture of where you want to be or what you want to achieve. This technique can be used with affirmations to make a powerful combination, fueling your physical achievement. This can be directly applied to anything that you may believe to be physically challenging or difficult. By practicing visualization techniques you can instantly improve your bodies abilities! Use this on a regular basis to overcome self-doubt or fear when striving to reach any physical goal.
Eliminate Negative Thoughts
Fear, self-doubt and negativity are the enemy of progress and physical achievement. A great way to reduce all of these is to constantly be focused on your goals and be thinking about taking action. By staying focused on action, you will have less time to ponder and think negatively. If a negative thought enters your mind, quickly replace it with a positive thought…tell yourself, “I can, I can, I can!”
Associate with Like Minded People
The individuals you associate with will have a dramatic influence on you. As the old saying goes, choose your friends wisely. By choosing to associate and spend time with others that have similar interests and goals as you, will help you reach higher levels of personal physical achievement. You have the right to be selective to whom you associate with. You should discontinue relationships that present negativity, and may hinder you from achieving your goals. Stay clear of people that are negative and pessimistic, they can quickly derail you off the path to your physical potential. Surround yourself with positive, optimistic individuals that choose to live a healthy and balanced life style.
Failure is Not an Option
After you have set your health and fitness goals, and you determine what must be done to achieve the goals, never consider failure! From the beginning you should tell yourself that failure is not even an option, and you are bound to succeed. By eliminating failure as an option, you will quickly reduce self doubt and fear which will fuel you forward to achieving your goals.
Use a Spam Filter for Your Mind
Always be very cautious of what you allow into your mind. Limit your exposure to negative stimulus such as negative people, negative news coverage, or any other source of negativity that will inherently bring you down. By limiting your exposure to negativity, you will prevent your mind from being filled with useless clutter allowing you to focus more on the positive aspects of your physical achievement.
The human body is our greatest asset. Realize your true physical potential. Continuously set health, fitness and performance goals and work hard to achieve them! Put these principles into action and you will be sure to achieve your goals faster than ever!
