No Limits

Those are the chapter titles for the book.

8 virtues → 8 gold-medal winning events.

If you’d like to get yourself all fired up, you may want to watch a few of those events on YouTube. Check out gold medal #1: The 400 Individual Medley + #4 The 200 Fly (where his goggles filled up w/water and he couldn’t see yet still won gold and set a world record) + #7: The 100 Fly (won by 1/100th of a second) + The Medley Relay (#8!).

Now let’s look at Ideas on how Michael became the most decorated Olympian ever.

Wow.

It starts with setting your goals high. Phelps is known for the goal sheet he and his coach Bob Bowman would have each year—mapping out the precise times they wanted to hit in each event.

How’s your goal sheet?

That’s step 1. With clear goals set, now it’s time to work conscientiously, EVERY day toward their achievement. Phelps and Bowman liked to see how many days of consistent, INTENSE training they could get in a row.

Which leads us to: “Successful people make a habit of doing things that unsuccessful people don’t like to do.”

This is certainly one ridiculously awesome way to do it:

7 days a week. 365 days a year. For 5 years.

Christmas? Thanksgiving? Birthday? See you at the pool.

(Reminds me of Stephen King who famously writes every.single.day. See Notes on On Writing.)

How about you?

Have you set your goals high? Are you conscientiously taking a step toward their achievement every.single.day?

Here’s to getting 1/7th better than our former selves.

See you at the pool!

W.I.N.

That’s genius.

The question to ask: What’s important now?

NOT: What do I feel (insert whiney voice) like doing?

We come back to this again and again and I love the fact we now have a W.I.N.ning acronym.

David Reynold’s (see Notes on Constructive Living) tells us that any given moment calls for one simple question: Now what needs to be done?

Here’s how Eric Greitens puts it in Resilience: “I told you that I was less interested in how you feel and more interested in who you want to be… I asked you to write down those same three words in the opposite direction. It’s the direction that holds the most promise for your life:

IDENTITY
ACTION
FEELINGS

You begin by asking, ‘Who am I going to be?’ You decided to be courageous again.

So what’s next? Act that way. Act with courage. And here comes the part that’s so simple it’s easy to miss: the way you act will shape the way you feel. You act with courage and immediately your fears start to shrink and you begin to grow.

If you want to feel differently, act differently.

This ain’t complicated, my friend. But it’s amazing how many people get it so wrong for so long.”

Remember: IDENTITY → ACTIONS → FEELINGS. (Not Feelings → Action → Identity.)

And, finally, Michael Beckwith (see Notes on Spiritual Liberation) tells us: “The gift of self- discipline is that it has the power to take you beyond the reasoning of temporary emotion to freedom. Think of how empowered you’ve felt on occasions when you haven’t given in to the ‘I don’t feel like it’ syndrome and honored your commitment to yourself. What does not feeling like it have to do with it? The combination of love for something with the willingness to do what it takes to practice it—discipline—results in freedom.”

Genius: What does feeling like it have to do with anything?

Let’s W.I.N.

Decide what’s important now. And do it.

In our growing mental training collection, we come back to the fact that 90% of athletic performance is mental. Yet, for some odd reason, most performers don’t invest anywhere near the time you’d expect into their mental training.

Of course, the same holds true for any (and every!) performance in life.

Ultimately, whether we show up at our highest potential in pressure situations (whether that’s with our spouse or kids or colleagues or …) comes down to our mental strength. And the only way to build reliable, consistent strength is to TRAIN it.

Begs the question: Are you training your mind?

Here’s how George Mumford—Michael Jordan + Kobe Bryant’s mental toughness coach—puts it in his great book The Mindful Athlete (see Notes): “Think about the eye of a hurricane, or the calm still center in the middle of a cyclone. No matter how intense the storm or what’s swept up in its gale-force winds, that calm, blue center is always there. This is the metaphor I like to use when talking about the space between stimulus and response. We all have this quiet center within us. Mindfulness reconnects us to this center space, where we fully experience the present moment and have access to the transcendent wisdom that’s often associated with conscious flow. In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, neurologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl famously described it this way: ‘Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.’”

Something happens. Do you have the ability to step in between the stimulus and your response to CHOOSE the most empowered response, or do you fly off the handle with an out of control knee jerk response?

How do you train that?

A few of my favorite practices: 1. Meditation + 2. Doing What Needs to Be Done + 3. The Equanimity Game.

1. Check out Meditation 101 for the Why’s + How’s of meditation. Know that you’re LITERALLY building grey matter with every minute you meditate. Bringing your attention back to your anchor is the equivalent of taking another rep… and another… and another…

2. Every.single.time you choose to do what needs to get done whether you feel like it or not, you’re building your mental strength. Of course, if you have a habit of being guided by your emotions rather than your commitments, you’re going to need to build up this muscle just as if you were hopping off the couch and training for a marathon.

But know that each time you get yourself to take impeccable action you’re building a new, stronger identity. “That’s like you!” to do the right thing. Let’s build the self-image and mastery of a mentally strong champion.

3. And, here’s a quick look at the equanimity game. Basic idea: Anytime you find yourself off balance, see how fast you can restore your equanimity. Find the most empowered response to even the most mundane annoyances. Build your muscle for the small things so you can be strong enough for the big ones.

Here’s to hitting the mind gym. Hard.

365 x Forever.

See you at the pool! :)

→ “You can’t wake up one day, announce you’re going to do something, and expect it to be a success.”

Reminds me of Todd Henry’s brilliant concept of “The Lag” in his equally brilliant book, Die Empty (see Notes). Here’s how he puts it: “The lag is the gap between cause and effect. It’s the season between planting a seed and reaping a harvest. It’s the time when all the work you’ve done seems to have returned little to no visible reward, and there is little on the horizon to indicate that things are going to get better.

When you are in the lag, the only thing that keeps you moving forward are (a) confidence in your vision and ability to bring it to fruition, (b) a willingness to say no to other things that tempt you to divert from your course, and (c) daily, diligent, urgent progress.”

Then there’s being a hero in the beginning: arambhashura—one of my favorite words + Ideas.

In The Art of Taking Action (see Notes), Gregg Krech tells us: “It’s not really the feeling of excitement itself which is the culprit here, it is the loss of excitement which then prompts us to abandon our efforts towards fulfillment of our dreams — dreams which were, at one time, very exciting to us. If anticipatory excitement moves us to action, the loss of excitement often prompts us to stop. Action dissolves into inaction.

Meditation teacher Eknath Easwaran tells us of a Sanskrit word — arambhashura — which means ‘heroes at the beginning’ — people who take up a job with a fanfare of trumpets but soon find that their enthusiasm has tiptoed down the back stairs.”

What’s your goal? How’s your lag?

Let’s do this!

Can’t vs. Won’t.

There’s a big difference between those two words.

Phelps tells the story of the GRUELING workouts Bowman would put him through. He’d get to a point where he’d literally feel like he couldn’t move any more.

“… You can’t see straight. Things are blurry. You feel like you can’t move. But you can. That’s what I came to understand. At that point it’s pretty much just goals. If you want to meet your goals, this is what it takes.”

How about you?

What do you REALLY want to do and give to the world? What will it take to get there?

Is it an issue “can’t” or “won’t”?