Wake Up Call — March 11, 2017
A lot of people say that having a good experience is about mindset — all it takes is simply having a positive outlook, and positive results will follow. I say “a lot” because more than 19 million copies of The Secret — a book that touts the law of attraction, a theory of matching frequencies between thoughts and results.
The blanket nature of this suggested law doesn’t address the steady stream of challenges that flood the spaces between seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, and decades of our lives, and the work it takes to make the most of them.
At the risk of oversimplifying the law of attraction, the decision to simply be positive and expecting good things to happen as a result risks shutting down the conversation we can have about the way we carry ourselves at work, in our relationships and at the gym, and the power that positive thinking can have when coupled with consistent and thoughtful effort.
Exposing the hard work it takes to have a healthy relationship, a good workout, or a productive day at work, takes digging into the dirt of our days and making the most of what comprise moments throughout.
I call this the practice of making the most of micro-moments.
Let’s use a workout as an example — let’s say one set of squats for ten reps at a weight never tried before. You have a choice between hitting low-quality reps with poor form that risks injury, but still accomplishing the goal of ten reps, or you can trade those ten reps for seven high-quality reps done with good form that prevents injury in the future. Which would you choose? I’m willing to bet you chose the seven reps.
But too often, the default metric of success we have for ourselves in and out of the gym is black and white in regards to the the achievement of a quantitative or singular goal, when a truly positive experience can more often be found in the qualitative nature of deliberate and consistent effort in each micro-moment that adds up to an experience.
This can be applied in every facet of our lives, from careers to relationships.
By framing the achievement of a goal as the high-quality execution of micro-moments, we can reverse engineer a positive mindset to bring us success by prioritizing consistency, form, and effort, in and out of the gym.
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