The previous post “How to take charge and change your life, pt.1” discussed the basics of empowerment and how to use athletic training to help us transform our lives and the realities around us. Let’s make this more real. Let’s start taking charge of ourselves today.
As discussed in Part 1, training for empowerment essentially involves two elements: (1) a mind-body practice to learn and strengthen ourselves and (2) detaching and refocusing our thoughts so that we can frame our reality and realign ourselves more effectively.
Athletic training is a great method to satisfy the first element, more so than basic fitness training. As outdoor athletes we work to strengthen both our bodies and minds to function as empowered actors in our natural environment. This goes a lot further than just “working out” to “stay in shape.” There’s an intent to be someone who can be strong, responsive and capable in a challenging and sometimes even dangerous and scary environment. In athletic activity our minds and bodies are both fully engaged and acting as one, and both are receiving powerful training benefits. It is generally when our minds and bodies are engaged together that we achieve our highest states of inner harmony and peak performance (sometimes described as “flow states” or “the zone”), abilities that we have not developed deeply in our culture. When we interact with our natural environment our training builds our ability to respond to a dynamic environment. Fitness regimens that deaden the mind with repetitive churn (like treadmills, weight machines, and even most free weight workouts) may build our toughness to tolerate grinding discomfort but do not empower us in this way. In addition, the common practice of relying on headphones or TV screens to distract ourselves from the boredom of our workouts robs us of some of the potential mental benefits of our workout. These comforting distractions hold us back from taking ownership of our minds during our workouts. A better remedy for workout boredom is to examine how we can add stimulation to the workout itself.
Immediate Actionable Steps:
Replace some gym workouts in your schedule with athletic activities outside (for example: trail running or mountain biking.) If nothing else is feasible, running or biking outside on a road or path is a great start. If you already do cardio work outside but perform our strength work inside, break up your routine and try some rock climbing or get outside to do some strength exercises in the fresh air. I’ve been doing hundreds of pull ups and dips at a local playground and working with sandbags and kettlebells in my backyard. I haven’t set foot in a gym for 6 months and I’m feeling strong, mobile, energized, and inspired. Note how you feel after your outdoor workouts.
Ditch your musical distractions and tune in to your environment and to what happens in your body and mind while you train. Take the opportunity to own your attitude and give attention to training that skill. Be the person you want to be in your head. Congratulate yourself for taking steps to free yourself of your dependence on passive entertainment. Contemplate that you are training to seize life more strongly.
Our athletic training also builds our skills of mental fortitude and courage which are vital for living empowered lives. Embracing discomfort is probably the single biggest skill that is required for living our strongest lives. When we build a regular practice of accepting discomfort in our athletic lives it will serve us elsewhere in life. Naturally, certain types of discomfort will be easier for us to embrace in life than others (for example, dealing with a painful workout is a lot different from dealing with something like rejection in our professional or social lives). However, the essential mental skill of balancing discomforts against their corresponding rewards applies universally and can serve in new realms. Acting as athletes in nature also often helps us develop the skill of courage (i.e., acting in the face of fear). Nature can be a scary place filled with storms, terrain that can break us, avalanches, uncertain conditions, and things that can trigger some of our innate animal fears (water, heights, darkness, snakes, etc.). There are many good reasons that we tend to hide inside in our modern lives. Taking an empowered stand in life involves a very different set of fears so the work we do as athletes does not translate directly. We’ll still need to unpackage and better understand any fears that stand in the way of acting in empowered ways. However, what does carry over is the basic mental skill of acting in an environment of fear because all forms of fear appear to involve the same fight or flight physiological response.
Training works largely because it is a series of affirmations, both in the habits that we build and in the stories we tell ourselves. The exercise habits that we develop reinforce our identities as people who set their minds to a vision and will do what it takes to see it to fulfillment; this reality serves us in every area of life. Verbal affirmations are a powerful tool that we can use to take this to a higher level. As a 24 hour mountain bike racer the top affirmation I regularly told myself was “I am an unstoppable force.” This is basically the law of attraction and it works. After enough repetition, stopping ceases to exist as an option and therefore it doesn’t happen. Really powerful use of affirmations goes beyond the bathroom mirror. The real magic comes when we do it in the pouring rain, under the sweltering sun, in bone-chilling cold, in agonizing discomfort, and on the darkest nights. For athletic affirmations that can serve us in the rest of our lives it makes sense to focus our verbal affirmations on the mental skill that we are developing. I didn’t actually consciously think about this so I think I just got lucky with my “I am an unstoppable force” affirmation. It is helping me today in new ways. Had my affirmation been “I am a great mountain biker” its value would clearly have been more limited.
Immediate Actionable Steps:
Contemplate how discomfort has served you in life. If you desire to live your strongest life, discomfort will be one of your closest friends. It always helps to show gratitude towards our friends.
Come up with a kick-ass affirmation of who you are training to be. It doesn’t have to be perfect - you can continue to refine the affirmation as time goes on. Start repeating this affirmation to yourself when you get up, when you go to bed, and as you train (especially when your good friend discomfort shows up!).
We need to be careful, however, with the use of affirmation and the law of attraction. These powerful tools can be misused and can even be harmful. It is not healthy or effective to force life with affirmations and the reinforcement of identities that don’t fit. We can do this to a pretty high degree and use it to accomplish many goals but it can separate us from our hearts and result in unfulfillment and distress (perhaps even major health problems). This is quite commonly done in our culture; as someone who probably never belonged behind a desk or in the legal or financial sector I can relate. Effective training is equally a process of listening to ourselves and following our inspirations. As we continue to adapt our training disciplines to our bodies and deal with our personal challenges in training we get to know ourselves well. In addition, as we move our bodies we also often have our greatest insights and ideas (I find exercise and outdoor time to be much better than the shower for this). The greater the inspirations that we follow and the more we challenge ourselves, the more intimately we begin to know ourselves. This is crucial for living life on our own terms.
Immediate Actionable Step:
Start a training journal. This is something beyond just a log that tracks data (like how many miles we ran at what pace, how much weight we lifted for how many repetitions, or how many calories we burned). More important for the process of learning ourselves are some notes about how our body feels, how motivated we feel, what’s challenging us or holding us back, and what’s inspiring us. This doesn’t have to take more than a couple minutes. This is a worthwhile time investment for deepening our self awareness.
Our work as outdoor athletes is also ideally suited for the second element of training for empowerment: detaching and refocusing our thoughts. In our modern lives, it’s particularly easy to get stuck in ineffective, restrictive or unimaginative thought patterns. We can go pretty far down conceptual roads without ever stepping back to question the bigger picture. These are all signs of separation from our truest and strongest selves and signs that we may be applying limiting filters to our reality. In our athletic lives we can counter this separation and reframe reality as needed. As we pull our minds back out of their thought patterns and into our bodies and into nature, we can realign and refocus ourselves in more effective ways. This is not a structured process but is more a practice of moving away from structured processes. It happens quite naturally; as we immerse ourselves in our environment and our moving bodies, we increasingly pull away from limiting thought patterns. When we re-engage with our lives following athletic immersion, our realities often no longer appear quite the same. New opportunities may have appeared before us and new perspectives may have surfaced.
This detachment in our athletic lives can operate at a few different levels. Sometimes we stay in our thoughts as we train. Pulling ourselves out of our lives for a while gives our minds some distance and an opportunity to process stuck thinking. For example, often when we go for a run or a bike ride we clear our heads of certain frustrations, have some “Aha” moments, and move into decision-making mindsets. Other times we can go deeper and can detach ourselves further from our thoughts and find new creativity, inspiration, or even “flow states.” On an even deeper level, experiences in nature as athletes can occasionally pull us sufficiently out of our heads and our normal patterns to facilitate radical re-examinations of our realities and of ourselves. Deep experiences in nature often serve as catalysts in helping us to make major transitions in life or to challenge the status quo in original ways.
The practical thing to focus on is maintaining a regular practice of engaging our bodies in nature. It’s also useful to at least occasionally plan adventures that will pull us far outside of our daily realities and that will challenge us greatly. The more we give to our challenges the more we tend to gain. Certain things are safer (and of course more enjoyable) to do with friends but it is also very beneficial to make room for some serious self-absorbed solitude. For most of us with office jobs we have a lot of options and we can generally follow our inspiration. I’ve pursued dozens of outdoor sports in oceans, deserts, and mountains and there are plenty of sports that can serve as pathways to bring us to more powerful and life-changing re-examinations of reality. The empowering benefits that we realize have more to do with how much we immerse ourselves than with the specific activity we do or the specific place that we do it.
Immediate Actionable Step:
In our training journals, we note how our workouts and athletic activities affect our thoughts. In this way can start to track and appreciate the power of our athletic lives in our minds.
When we stop and think about it, there are always thousands of things in our lives that could use some work and thousands of things in our society that could use some healing. We have many options about how we want to approach them. We can drink some alcohol or pop some pills and numb ourselves. We can find sources of entertainment to distract us. We can complain or make sarcastic comments. We can point fingers and blame others as we indulge in our own self-righteousness. We can try to ignore them and grind onwards. We can just throw our hands up in despair and hide under the covers. Or we can go train and start living more boldly. This is a decision we can make today.
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