Dominate Life

So normally these blog post come from one of the coaches at Fuse Fitness Coaching. All of you are well aware of the Burn it to Earn FIT Challenge and many of you are participating. This blog is actually an email one teammate sent to the rest of his team and it's too good not to share with everyone. He quotes me in his email but even if I wanted to write something like this I could not have done it this well. Enjoy!

During my workout with Matt Welters this morning we discussed the topic of mental toughness. Matt felt that maybe 20% of lifting is convincing your mind that you can do it. We all know that negative thoughts are counter-productive to meeting our goals in life – and it’s no different in the gym. Matt says he thinks about lifting a car off one of his boys when he’s lifting heavy weights. Intense. I reflected on this as I drove back to the office, and I tend to visualize the lift and have complete tunnel vision when it comes to focus – I block out everything else in the room. I confirmed this for myself when looking at Matt’s FB post of our workout this morning. I had a good laugh looking at my facial expression in the pictures – I had no idea I looked so scary!

Mental focus, concentration, and determination all mean the same thing: the ability to totally put your mind to the task you want to accomplish. A major aspect of mental focus is visualization— seeing yourself performing the task. I learned a lot about visualization from a swim coach that I trained with in Indiana. He taught us to swim our race in our minds long before we entered the pool. “Visualize every stroke, every breathe, every flip turn…are you concentrating on every detail?” I already knew a little something about focus, concentration, and determination, but I really wasn’t familiar with visualization. Initially this seemed silly to me, but I openly welcomed the break from our often relentless workouts in the water. I knew that "psyching up" for a race meant getting focus, concentrating, and believing you could do it, but visualization was foreign to me. Over the years, I know that these lessons in visualization have served me well. Not only in the water, competing, but as applied to my business and life in general. People tend to visualize things in one or two different ways: 1) where you see yourself doing something from your own eyes, and/or 2) when you see yourself doing something as if you were watching a video of yourself.

It’s often said that champions of anything in life seem to all have this great focusing ability—and like any ability, for some it comes naturally and others have to work hard to develop it. Also like any ability, even if it comes naturally, if you don't use it, you lose it. My swim coach used to always say, “Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.” You are all incredibly strong individuals. My challenge to you today is to practice visualizing how you’re going to dominate life. One day at a time… You can do this!