Hey there!
I woke up this morning at 5 am without an alarm. Not sure why but hey, it happens. A few years ago, I would’ve forced myself to go back to bed and enjoy my Sunday sleep. Instead, I woke up and read for an hour and then started to write. I love the start to the day!
Now, I am off to train after I finish writing this and then will come back and record the audio for it. Normally, I get them done in one shot but thought I’d do this differently today.
The 3 things for today are
on the continued lemon-water questions
on nomenclature and how we think about things
on failing my first-ever fitness certification (and how it was the best thing that happened)
on magic pills and lemon-water questions
Listen, if there’s a magic pill, you would’ve heard about it by now. No one will keep it a secret. Big corporates will try to bottle it and sell it to you. There just is not.
There’s nothing magical about lemon-water and ginger and cayenne pepper or what-not.
The magic happens because you discipline yourself to do these things daily and you are thinking about your health and fitness. It spills over to more things as well - like going on a walk, or making a slightly better choice when you are ordering food and so on. So, it works. But not because it is magic. But because you end up making better decisions.
And of course, a placebo effect is still a great effect!
on nomenclature and framing things in our head
most people look at fitness as a way to punish your body for what it's consumed. Maybe that's why we keep thinking "this sucks" and not "this is awesome"!
And show up gets difficult because no one wants to show up for a punishment.
This is a great observation that a friend from the community made in response to one of my other posts. How we frame things we do is going to determine the quality of effort we put in, how long we are going to be able to sustain it, and how patient we are going to be with the process.
If we are looking for immediate returns from an “I hate this but apparently I have to do this” and sooner or later, the returns slow down - you start looking for the next thing.
You look at these activities - going to the gym or eating better - as a sucky thing to get done and over with. And how long do you think you can keep that up?!
That’s why finding a short-term thing that we enjoy but is not even close to right or sustainable will work for us, over the textbook correct answer.
I was lucky in my approach that I never punished myself - I was unaware of what to do and so I did not do it. What's the point of getting angry with that?
Similarly, this tit-for-tat arrangement does not work too well - I ran for 300 calories and so I am gonna go eat a doughnut. It just doesn't. Like the comment above shows, we are transacting with our body - doing a good for a bad.
When we think "this sucks" and I need to slog it out and just figure out how to eat these veggies or slop for 3 months and I can go back to "normal", you are setting yourself up for failure.
When you think that you will find a better thing to do once you hit your goal, you are setting yourself up for failure.
The only way to make showing up easy is to recalibrate things in your head. And the simplest method is to start by doing something fun.
Once you associate fun and getting healthy, things that you might not think of as fun today - like lifting weights or going running - will become fun.
on failing my first-ever fitness certification
The full post is over here but let me get you to the main part of it quick.
This is back in 2010 when I knew nothing except that I enjoyed lifting.
I had zero hours of actual coaching experience besides trying to teach a few teammates how to squat and all that.
Mark Rippetoe is a barbell strength coach with his own skew and biases and prejudices. But his coaching methodology and reasoning and openness were amazing and we had a great time.
Starting Strength is his certification programme where one certifies to become a barbell strength coach i.e. one is tested not only on skill and technique and the geekiness but also on one’s ability to coach.
I knew zilch about how to coach. I failed within the first few hours of the cert :)
Honestly, it was a huge relief because immediately, I stopped worrying about trying to get a certification and focused all of my head being there to learn. Until then, there was a small part of me that was constantly worried about "Will I get the cert?".
It was amongst the most glorious weekends I had because it was exactly what I imagined and a whole lot more. Coach Rip was open to feedback, asked us questions on what we thought about his coaching technique and how the lifts were performed - which I found incredible.
As we went through each lift, I was just on a high. His coaching methods, his simplifications were just brilliant and even though I had read his book, I was picking up so many things. I couldn't wait to get back home and go back to lifting and tweaking my technique.
Those 2 and some days were my first-ever experience with a strength coach and being part of a learning community and it just spurred my interest in the field, rather than discourage me after failing so miserably and quickly.
And the lesson I learned from that failure resonates even today!
If I had gone in with the intention of passing the certification and putting it next to my name, I think I would've gotten the cert and learned very little.
I went in to learn and getting a certification would've been a bonus. While it was still a huge hit to the ego when I realised I failed, I quickly realised I knew diddly-squat to have an ego in this and had amongst the best weekends I've ever had.
There are many certifications and seminars I had done until then (in Computer Science and in Interaction Design) where after a while, I'd zone out and it would just be to complete it and walk away with something to write on my resume.
Failing this cert was amongst the best things that ever happened to me because it completely cured me of that mentality of mine. If it was not for this failure, I would not have taken the path I ended up taking. As a kid, I'd always think "if only that had not happened" but the adult in me constantly reminds the naive kid that failures lead to great things, most times.
While I don’t think I’ve made peace with all of my failures, this failure teaches me that there’s always a silver lining somewhere and I just need to be open to seeing what successes my other failures led me to.
Thanks for reading, and I’d love it if you shared one of the above posts with ONE of your friends or family.
Have a great Sunday!
