Nobody quits
I’m really into gym related analogies lately. You’ll just have to forgive me. One reason I love physical challenges is that they parallel real life. About a year ago we took our family to Colorado to hike one of the 54 mountains that tower over 14,000 feet. We’ve only done class 1 or 2 trails and these aren’t “bring an oxygen tank” type hikes but they’ll wear you out for a few days. My youngest daughter was 9 at the time of her first ascent. This past school year, as she was trying to complete a “ very hard “ division worksheet I heard her say to herself “If I can climb a 14er, I can do this.” That’s what those kinds of challenges teach us, that we can do more than we thought we could. They stand as landmarks in our lives of when we thought we could do no more, but we did more anyway.
Last week I went to a weight training class called “body pump.” I’ve gone a few times before and it’s not a walk in the park. If you talk to the teacher before or after class she’s a doll. Just the sweetest lady. She smiles during class and I wonder if she’s hurting too. A few times when I thought she wasn’t looking I skipped a rep. She was looking because she yelled into the microphone, “nobody quits.”
She gains nothing from me being there. I have no responsibility to her. But I wasn’t about to stand there and look like a quitter. Because everyone in that room knew it wasn’t them who had skipped a rep. I wanted to put my bar down and lighten my load. I wanted to pretend I had an appointment and skip out early. But she said, “nobody quits.” Sometimes I just need someone to yell at me to keep me focused on what it was I said I wanted. I was there because I wanted to be. No one made me, my goals are my own. Hearing her voice pulled me back from my internal pity party
That made me think about June. I thought about how maybe you might want to just pretend you didn’t have a goal in the first place. Or, maybe change your goal to make it a little easier. I thought about how you might want to walk out and pretend you have something else more important. To that I say, make a call. Call your director and let her see you skip a rep. Let her see you shaking. Be transparent and she’s likely to very sweetly say “nobody quits.”
If you don’t want to call her. If you don’t want her to know. Then I’m here to very lovingly yell. “NOBODY QUITS.”
You showed up here because you said you wanted something. Now don’t stop until you’ve reached that goal!
Originally published at https://blog.pinkoffice.com on June 11, 2018.
