Embracing change
Whether it’s the hustle at the office chasing our ambitions or trying to stick to our gym routine and eating habits, we all have our own ways of coping and pushing through our days. But before long we can easily fall into a trap of mechanical repetition, which can in turn lead us to hit a wall, being professional or physical.
We are also often blind to these daily automated habits of ours, and we can’t always seem to realize that even the smallest of changes could lead to profoundly more positive results. Knowing the path is a different thing than walking the path, and vice versa.
Chart the uncharted
It’s only natural to enjoy the comfort of “staying in your lane”: move from one task to the next, rinse and repeat - especially when it comes down to eating and working out. Picture yourself at the gym: are you going to do only workouts that play to your strengths, or are you willfully going to face something completely new? For example, the back squat makes a lot of us feel pretty bad-ass and strong, while our gymnastic skills can use some more attention. Yet most of us keep squatting away at the rack rather than spending time handstand walking.
It is understandable; we all want to experience success as much as possible. It’s a rush! The same goes for food: as creatures of habit, we play favourites and stick to what we know, so we often miss out on interesting and downright delicious or alternative healthy options.
Mundane actions in your daily life can add up to big factors in the long run. It’s valuable to stop running through your daily checklist once a while and consider where all your daily actions are headed in the long run.
The magic outside the comfort zone
Making changes or running into them rarely feels natural or easy. Just think about all those New Year’s resolutions that we intend to keep, yet rarely do. Wired for routines, we are pretty allergic to change and often want to retreat back into our comfort zone. Normalcy is safe, as it doesn't provoke fear and it allows us to live our lives without facing things that could potentially hurt us or build us up.
Yet pain and change in your life are inevitable - and necessary. Just as you cause little tears in your biceps while doing curls to make them grow afterwards, so does your life need the occasional struggle to make you grow, as a person. Ironically even at our most organized, our lives are more or less filled with change. There is the change we can control and change that is out of our hands. The uncontrollable change might sound daunting, but being mindful of this fact is essential to growing as an individual, improving as an athlete and as a human being.
All the small things
Breaking an established mindset always sounds like a huge undertaking. In reality, it’s all about the small decisions we are faced with each day, the decisions we have control over: decisions on nutrition, work-life balance, workout regimen all have a part to play in the larger scheme of things. Instead of waiting for these huge Hollywoodesque crossroad moments to pop up in our lives and make a change, we can turn to actual choices that will have an impact on our daily lives.
In the end, change is not inherently good or bad, and certainly can be either. But it’s guaranteed to occur time and time again. That’s just the nature of life and it’s up to you how to deal with it.