'The Forrest Harvests The Earth, . . . Be Patient My Friend'

In 10 minutes or less you will learn:

1. That you can catch your negative thoughts as they happen.

2. Mental fortitude, grit and persistence are skills . . .

3. You are in control of how much time and effort you put in

When it comes to Personal Excellence I wasn’t always the most motivated, or the most determined, hahm in fact, there was a point when I didn’t even care. And honestly? I think doing the ‘75 HARD’ programme changed that. I actually think it is even before that! Have you ever gotten to the point where you become just aware enough to realise that what you’re doing doesn’t feel quite right, and might even be wrong? This is how I felt. I yearned for something better, something more.

Now I am aware that this topic isn’t the most popular amongst some people, I get it, but please, be patient with me through to the end of this segment.

. . . I was lazy, and even though I was a Personal Coach at the time, I felt there was a gap in my performance, I felt inadequate which created anxiety . . . a lot of anxiety.

My colleague and friend A. O. enthusiastically urged me to try this programme, he said, ‘bro, do you know who Andy Frisella is? Have you heard of 75 HARD?’, my answer at the time, was of course, ‘no’, ‘Sorry, I haen’t heard of him’, he then replied with ‘it doesn’t matter, if you listen to is podcast the MFCEO Project, it will guide you through the steps’. I think it took me 24 hours to decide, may be less, but I said, ‘Aron, I’ll do it’ hoping this would get rid of my anxiety forever, or at least help with it. I didn’t want to feel inadequate anymore!

After completing the 75 HARD bootcamp part of the programme I felt different, in control of what goes in my body, and my brain. I had the ability to say ‘NO’ when it was necessary, and awareness of my own actions and inner dialogue increased exponentially. I want to address this topic ‘inner dialogue’ for a few moments, and if you take anything away from this segemnt, this will be it!

Inner dialogue is something we all have; and there’s both positive and negative inner dialogue. Your negative inner dialogue (Andy Frisella calls it ‘the bitch voice’) is the voice that will always, always, always know what to say to sway you to ‘the comfort zone, and worse, towards the decisions that are bad for your health. It’s the voice that will say, ‘oh common a pizza today won’t harm you’ (I use this because pizza is one of my “weakness foods”), or ‘you can do a shorter workout than you originally planned’, OR ‘ You deserve a rest, watch T.V. for a bit’. Now, the reason this is important, even the dialogue about the ‘shorter workout’, is because when you fail to make any promise to yourself your confidence and self esteem drop!

This is absolutely fundamental to understand. Every time you make those promises to yourself, such as ‘I will do a 30-minute session today’, or ‘I will avoid the pizza and have chicken, vegetables, and rice instead’, you should stick to them! Because if you don’t it has a major effect on your confidence and self-esteem. When this happens, that’s when anxiety kicks in, and one day during work, you wonder why you have this sudden surge of anxiety, or anger. Sometimes you don’t even know where the anger came from, . . . and you end up lashing out, at a friend, a family member, a colleague. Trust me, I fucking know! And I don’t want that for you! It’s an awful, awful feeling, . . . the feeling of ‘lack of control’. Sometimes you can damage relationships this way. I’ve previously damaged relationships with my parents because of this.

On the other hand, the postive dialogue (Andy Frisella calls this ‘the BOSS voice’), is usually the one who tells you to stick to your goals, and to avoid buying a pizza today. The positive dialogue is the dialogue always battling against the negative dialogue. Think of it as an angel on one shoulder, and the devil on the other.

Once you become aware of this, with practice, you can actually catch yourself in the moments where your negative dialogue starts to creep in. There’s been a few times I’ve told my negative inner dialogue where to go! I did this on a morning run before heading to Pure Gym (my place of work at the time), . . .I didn’t realise somone was walking their dog near me till it was too late, . . . he must’ve thought ‘what a lunatic). May be he thought I had tourettes or something. Regardless, I just kept on moving. I wasn’t going to hault my run because of what someone might have thought.

At that point, when I’d built up the awarness and begun to learn how to catch my negative thoughts as they happen, I realised something else as well - anxiety never leaves you forever, that’s obsurd. Just like developing the awareness to catch your negative thoughts and voices as they happen; working towards your other goals and improving other areas of your life, requires you to practice these skills. Because contrary to popular belief, they’re skills, and NOT traits! Developing your mental fortitude by adhering to a programme with no exceptioms to the rule’ is a skill; devleiping your reading ability, and your ability to retain information is a skill, learning a new exercise or performing a particular movement or lift, is a skill. The reason where people muck up (because this used to be me), is the struggle to follow through with any plan or any list, consistently. Then they tell themselves, ‘oh this is just too hard, I give up’, or, ‘this is taking too long, I am going to quit, because it’s not worth it’. The problem there is, some of the population seem to have a misconception about how long developing skills like that actually take, and then taking longer to master them.

This goes into everything you do! Think about it for a moment, would you ever get fit, if you quit after just two weeks? Would you ever get a degree in your chosen field, if you quit after one month? ‘NO’. Things take time. Even more so, is the time you actually have during the day. You have more time than you think.

Some say ‘Time’ is the greatest commodity; Codie Sanchez (business owner, and newsletter publisher) says, ‘no, time isn’t the greatest commodity, your attention is’. Meaning your focus to the task. And this makes a lot of sense - the more intense you focus on something, the faster you are more likely to get it done.

Thank you for staying with me through this guys. I appreciate it more than you know.

I also have been taking requst on what people would like to see more of on this newsletter within the sports, exercise, nutrition, recovery, stretching, and personal excellent space, so look out for those in the next coming weeks. I you wish to see more of a particular topic then you can email me directly at: [email protected].

Thanks for reading!

Brad