Creating Chaos - For Fitness & Sport Professionals

One of the most important aspects when understanding, communicating with and motivating yourself and your clients is knowing how they view and approach the world. People are either the cause of their own reality or the effect. People who are the cause of their reality accept full responsibility for themselves and their situations. They are resourcefful, responsible, in-control and commonly see the bright side of any situation. However, people who are the effect of their own reality often blame external factors, feel out of control and struggle to see the bright side in many situations. The fact is, we can only ever control things that are within our control. This sounds blatantly obvious...and it is, but many people focus on things that are not within their control which often has them feeling miserable, upset and restricted. By looking at things that you can control, you're able to always affect change for yoruself and find ways of creating positive situations. The one constant is that you can always change what you are thinking. We all have the power and ability to do this. One of the most powerful examples of how focussing on a positive I have ever come across was from my days in the forces. I completed a course which was to train soldiers in knowing how to act and behave in the event of becoming captured. We met and were given stories of incredible situations that had occured. Back in the conflict of Vietnam, an american pilot was shot down over a jungle and was taken prisoner by the viet cong. He was stripped naked and help captive within a cage, physically abused, mentally tortured and in a horrible situation. Having found a photograph of his family and some of his details, the captors told him that they were going to abuse his wife, children and family. This went on for not just weeks but years...in fact, almost 10 years. He was completely mentally broken down and conditioned. However, during all this, in his head he decided that a great way to escape the situation was to distract himself. In his own mind, he decided to build and develop a hotel complex in Mexico. He built it brick by brick, hired staff, calculated a rosta, set holiday periods, pay packets, management structure, marketing strategies, client retention programmes and eventually, he turned it into an international franchise. The reality of the situation was horrible, he had very little hope and wasn't aware that the threats against his family were purely loose threats. However, he had full control of what he thought about and mentally focussed on. He knew that focussing on the what he didn't want to know would do him no favours for his own sanity and survival. He knew that getting angry and emotional would lead to further torture and abuse. After over 10 years of being captive, the pilot was eventually released and returned to his healthy and pining family. Remarkably, the pilot was still, after all that horrible exposure, very emotionally balanced on his return and had full sanity.
Needless to say that ideally, being at the 'cause' side and taking responsibility for thoughts, life and reality helps us remain much more focussed on what we want in life and not what we don't want. The mind is an amazing and powerful thing but is something that we are all able to control like a muscle. Before you decide what to think about and spend your emotional energy on, it's always worth while checking that it is what you want. For more on how you can very simply help to motivate or reframe situations for yourself and clients, send me an email and I'd be happy to advise.

Phill