on by 1 Comment

I know I have heard it somewhere. Showing up is half the battle or showing up is 90%. I agree with a lot of that statement but like so many of the clichés out there I think this is an unfinished statement, it’s only a half truth and at the end of the day it’s the easiest part of the equation. We are built to try to take the easiest path, that is our nature but it is only how the species survives, not how it thrives. I actually do believe that showing up is one of the hardest things to do. Hell it took me a full year to show up and post my first blog post even though I have been paying for this domain for almost a year. But there is a huge chunk we have left out… Just completely forgotten about.

So yes if you want to win the battle you have to show up to even have a chance. But what is your weapon? Your ammunition? How do you not just play but win?

Think of the difference in people you know in your life. Those you work with, go to the gym with, or just generally spend enough time doing something that is more than downing a pint with. There are people you know that do the same shit day in day out, week in week out. Man they are incredible at showing up but they don’t really improve and if they do it is never sustained for very long. You see them at the gym 3, 4 even 5 days a week and they look exactly the same as they did 3 years ago (and they aren’t already on the fit side), the golfer who has been a 16 handicap for the last 10 years or the person whose business has operated at basically the same level as long as you have known them. Now I am not hating on these people, I think we should actually commend them while helping them find what they are missing as they are doing a hell of a lot more than most people. At least they are showing up, that’s a lot better than most of us.

But after a while showing up becomes pretty tough when the results don’t come through. I don’t care how relentless you are, what crazy work ethic you think you have, at some point if it isn’t improving we should probably throw in the towel right? Well before we do that I ask that you add one more ingredient, that you finish the sentence. The missing piece here I hope is obvious but it may not be and it wasn’t obvious to me for a long time. The second part and what I feel is a 1B to the 1A of showing up is to bring some damn INTENTION.

Intention is the ultimate difference maker. It means the difference between maintenance and improvement. And I will get into it at another time but maintenance may be the biggest fallacy we have ever known. There is only getting worse or getting better and if all you are doing is showing up you are just slowing down the inevitability of getting worse.

Where do you find it?  Let’s get the “find” it out of the way, you don’t, it isn’t something you can find. It is not something on the outside to be searched for, it is something you decide on. You decide on it each and every day, sometimes you might even need to decide on each and every moment. Now that being said getting that granular can be pretty anxiety inducing. Are there days where your intention may just be showing up? For sure. I actually had one of them this morning. The fact that I even made it downstairs to workout blew my mind, but if you truly want to improve, those days need to become fewer and farther apart until they are almost non existent.

Well then what is it? How do you craft it? Honestly it’s much simpler than you probably think. It is walking into every situation in your life aligning the feeling you would like to create for yourself and those involved and then doing the things you believe fulfill that intention. Rather than reacting to a situation once you are in it.  Remember intention has nothing to do with outcome. It is not I will bench press 300lbs but I will execute every rep with perfect form. It is not I want my wife to feel beautiful but more of I will do 1 little thing a day that will lead to my wife feeling more beautiful. The funny thing is that while it is not outcome driven if you enter enough situations with proper intention you are probably really going to like the outcome over time.

Now I can only describe what intention is to me, I can’t tell you what yours should be and honestly it is going to vary based on your vision and values. But I can help and would love to hear from you on how you craft and execute on your intentions! It would be great if you dropped me a comment with your thoughts on this post and where you are nailing intention and where it might need to be a little more thoughtful.

on by

Life is hard. We inherently know this. What we don’t realize is it is also the point. Not saying you want to purposely put road blocks in front of yourself. But it isn’t so bad when given the choice to take the hard path every once in a while. If you think about it what’s the fastest way to something you want? Usually the hardest. And so many of us (yes me too!) don’t realize how often we try to take the easier route. Or avoid doing anything altogether. Yet we expect things to be different. Well I am sorry to burst the bubble but if you want things to get better, get used to hard, train it into yourself. In the end he who can cope with more shit probably has a happier life.

Now hear me out. This isn’t some doom and gloom blog where I tell you to suck it up and get tough. While I believe there is a time and a place for pushing harder what I really want for you and what I have had to train into myself, is to disassociate the word hard with bad. Think about where your brain went in the first paragraph. I wrote hard, you though something bad. Right? If I tell you to do 50 push-ups it would typically feel like punishment, it by no means needs to be a reward but push-ups are the single handed best bodyweight exercise a human can do? Wouldn’t that help make you stronger, tighten your core and reduce back pain. Are those bad things? Not at all, they are actually awesome. Doesn’t make them any easier, especially at the start but the reward at the end far outweighs the short term hard.

Unless you live under a rock and have denounced all electronics you’ve probably been to a movie or watched one at home in the last couple of years. It doesn’t matter at all what the movie was, could be a rom-com, horror or a children’s show. Think about the movie for a moment. Was there adversity in the movie? I can guarantee it. As a species we literally crave the shit. No one wants to watch a movie where the premise is everything’s easy and nothing goes wrong. Adversity is built into our DNA, it’s built into every living things DNA. Almost every story we ever tell has adversity in it otherwise it probably isn’t worth telling. We are meant to strive, to work hard for what we want and to maybe make a sacrifice along the way. Easy is boring it’s vanilla and it doesn’t put us in the situation where when it is our time we are ready to succeed.

I am a guy that had to learn this. And I learned it the hard way. I was 32 I had a 2 year old daughter and I was soft in every way imaginable and my life was crumbling around me. Now when I say soft I mean I was breathing heavy going up the stairs, a minor inconvenience would cause a meltdown and I couldn’t cope with anything, sometimes even when it went the way it was supposed to. I would either grab a drink or wallow in my own self pity. I was close to destroying my marriage and I hated myself. I would love to pretend I didn’t know how I got there but even as it was happening I knew, just like you probably do too. I spent most of my energy avoiding anything hard, procrastinating and just generally trying to have the easiest life possible. I thought that was where happiness would be.

But there is a funny thing about happiness. It is never where we are looking for it but always right where we left it. Think about it. Have you ever finished a workout and been upset with yourself? Nope, typically your pretty content, maybe even a little proud. But then you don’t go back to the gym for a week while you are out searching for happiness like it is somewhere you don’t know of yet. All the while you probably have a building frustration as to why you can’t find happy. How have we become so dumb and brainwashed that we cannot retrace our steps to happiness. Why do we always need to search for it in a new place rather than the last place we had it? What a funny thing when you really think about it. Happiness has never been lost, It can’t be but what we seem to forget is that it has to be earned, it is made and the payment is hard work.

But the best part about the hard work is it’s all relevant and hard and fun don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Your hard is just that YOURS. It may take something completely different for me to feel I have put the necessary work in. But isn’t that awesome? You get to define the rules of  the game and the more you understand that and work at it the better you get at the game. It doesn’t get any easier but you know what is really fun? Being the best at the hardest game, not winning the easiest one.