Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.
—John Lennon
There are no sideline-sitters. No benchwarmers. You have to take your lumps in order to succeed.
Life is a full contact sport too. It’s full of twists and turns. Crises. Obstacles. Chaos.
You can’t plan what will happen to you during your time in your fitness journey. All you can do is be responsible for your reaction to unexpected life events.
You can’t control life
You can only control your behaviors and attitude.
We’ve seen our share of major life events and crises.
Births. Deaths. New relationships. Breakups. Children arriving. Children leaving. Getting hired. Getting fired. Serious accidents and illnesses. Fires, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, pandemic and other random acts of Nature’s fury.
Yep, there’s never a dull moment here at PA HQ.
There are plenty of excuses for falling off the PA Coaching wagon.
Some excuses, frankly, aren’t very convincing. Others are justifiable.
And through it all, there are folks who simply persevere. Endure.
These people put their head down and do their best to keep slogging. They turn problems into learning opportunities and crises into enlightenment. They aren’t always cheerful, but they’re always committed to doing the right things — whatever they can do, every day.
These are our PA Coaching “endurance athletes”.
Through mud, rain, sleet, dark of night, and crises of life, they just keep trudging along.
These folks had every reason to give up… and didn’t.
What makes these folks so special?
- They’re committed to the program. They know to stick with the plan even when times are tough.
- They trust us to help them. They know they aren’t the experts.
- They stay positive and proactive, even when things suck.
- They do the best they can with what they have. They don’t try to be “perfect”. Just as good they can be on that day.
- They keep checking in with us. Even if they can only spare a few seconds to touch PA base, they do so.
- They forgive themselves. They treat themselves with compassion and generosity. They recognize that it’s not all-or-nothing. They know that sometimes, just staying in the same place while the world is pushing them backwards is a victory.
- They treat problems as challenges to overcome and puzzles to solve, not opportunities to whine, withdraw, or curl into the fetal position. (They don’t always love those problems, but they’re committed to tackling them anyway.)
- They fall down and get up. They focus on their successes, as tiny and hard-won as those successes may be. They forget failures and setbacks, except to learn from them.
How can you run life’s obstacle course better?
These abilities aren’t unique, of course. You can learn and practice them too.
Over the course of the program, we’ve discussed many ways for you to address challenges productively.
If you’d like to improve your resilience, all you have to do is practice.
Pick one very small action to do every day to improve your “obstacle course” skills. For instance:
Build resilience.
Find some small annoyance once a day, and figure out how to “bounce back” from it immediately.
Learn to be proactive.
Every morning, ask yourself, “How can I take responsibility for one thing today?” Then do it.
Anticipate, plan, strategize.
Every evening, take 5 minutes to plan your next day so that you anticipate and strategize around one small potential problem.
Focus and re-focus on doing the things that truly matter, every day, consistently.
Book time to check your lessons and do your habits to the best of your ability.
Re-frame problems as opportunities to learn and practice your skills we teach you.
Think about the challenges you currently face, and ask yourself how you could implement some of your skills you learned from us in difficult situations.
Ask for help.
Once a day, take a few minutes to connect with someone in your support network, even if that’s just someone who will gently remind you that things will be OK.
Play in the mud.
When possible, treat challenges as games. Have fun getting dirty!
You get the idea. Running life’s obstacle course is a skill you can learn. All it takes is 3 Ps: practice, perseverance, and a bit of playfulness.
In the meantime, enjoy some wipeouts. See? It happens to everyone, eventually! (And high-fives for the guy who still crawls across the finish line.)
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