Struggling to keep fit, stay active and regularly exercise?
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This is an example of Stuart, a client of mine. Throughout most of Stuarts schooling years, his academic performance had been pretty miserable. He wanted to finish school achieving at least something significant, so in his final year, he tried getting good at a bunch of different skills. What he quickly realised was that it takes many years of practise at something to become good enough to achieve a significant result. This is especially true when we look at competitive environments where students are up against others who have been practising for a very long time.
After trying his hand at all sorts of athletic events, the one thing he found himself reasonably good at was long distance running. Being a good endurance runner does not really require too much practise. It just requires a repeated willingness to push further through the mental and physical discomfort barrier, more so than the other competitors. At this stage of Stuart’s life, he had a particularly strong urge to prove himself.
After about six months of intense training, he managed to place well in his school and at the zone level of long distance running. He didn’t make it past the regionals but remembers vividly this time in his life.
The smaller wins had boosted his confidence somewhat and he now had better feelings about himself. Because of these good feelings about himself he still felt motivated to run long after the competition was over. He continued running and participating in other running events until as he says, ‘life got in the way’.
Years later in his early 20’s he decided to get back into the habit of going for a jog. By this time however he had become really unfit, so the feelings he got from running caused nothing but discomfort. The discomfort of feeling aches in his muscles, the discomfort of sweat running down his back and the discomfort of the burning felt when his lungs became constricted, plus the mental discomfort of realising how unfit he now was. Basically, running had become an uncomfortable thing for him.
When I asked Stuart about whether or not he could recall the same discomfort when he began running all those years ago, his answer was really interesting. Stuart said he did not notice that discomfort as much back then because his desire to gain something and prove himself was a lot higher. When he had something to prove, the experience had a different meaning attached to it. But when Stuart’s life changed, so too did the meaning. When the drive was lost, it became too hard, too much of a struggle. So Stuart basically stopped exercising and became quite sedentary for the next chapter of his life.
Fast forward to his 30’s and he suddenly started to find much more practical reasons to exercise.
He started a jumping castle business and spent many years setting up bouncy castles for children, backyard parties and events. The weight of these inflatable castles were around 100kg plus. So over the years, handling these castles by himself had started to take a toll on his body. Stuart was x-rayed and the X-rays revealed damaged vertebrae in his back from all that heavy lifting.
The medical recommendation was to lose some excess weight and reduce the pressure on his spine and joints whilst strengthening the muscles around them. If you would like to know more about this topic i suggest downloading the FREE eBook at the top of this page, this will get you started however you can also download the full version below before continuing on if you would like to jump straight into this! CONTINUE READING BELOW
After trying his hand at all sorts of athletic events, the one thing he found himself reasonably good at was long distance running. Being a good endurance runner does not really require too much practise. It just requires a repeated willingness to push further through the mental and physical discomfort barrier, more so than the other competitors. At this stage of Stuart’s life, he had a particularly strong urge to prove himself.
After about six months of intense training, he managed to place well in his school and at the zone level of long distance running. He didn’t make it past the regionals but remembers vividly this time in his life.
The smaller wins had boosted his confidence somewhat and he now had better feelings about himself. Because of these good feelings about himself he still felt motivated to run long after the competition was over. He continued running and participating in other running events until as he says, ‘life got in the way’.
Years later in his early 20’s he decided to get back into the habit of going for a jog. By this time however he had become really unfit, so the feelings he got from running caused nothing but discomfort. The discomfort of feeling aches in his muscles, the discomfort of sweat running down his back and the discomfort of the burning felt when his lungs became constricted, plus the mental discomfort of realising how unfit he now was. Basically, running had become an uncomfortable thing for him.
When I asked Stuart about whether or not he could recall the same discomfort when he began running all those years ago, his answer was really interesting. Stuart said he did not notice that discomfort as much back then because his desire to gain something and prove himself was a lot higher. When he had something to prove, the experience had a different meaning attached to it. But when Stuart’s life changed, so too did the meaning. When the drive was lost, it became too hard, too much of a struggle. So Stuart basically stopped exercising and became quite sedentary for the next chapter of his life.
Fast forward to his 30’s and he suddenly started to find much more practical reasons to exercise.
He started a jumping castle business and spent many years setting up bouncy castles for children, backyard parties and events. The weight of these inflatable castles were around 100kg plus. So over the years, handling these castles by himself had started to take a toll on his body. Stuart was x-rayed and the X-rays revealed damaged vertebrae in his back from all that heavy lifting.
The medical recommendation was to lose some excess weight and reduce the pressure on his spine and joints whilst strengthening the muscles around them. If you would like to know more about this topic i suggest downloading the FREE eBook at the top of this page, this will get you started however you can also download the full version below before continuing on if you would like to jump straight into this! CONTINUE READING BELOW
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FULL EDITION
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FAST FORWARD SIX MONTHS
Stuart is cycling and kayaking quite regularly, whilst also jogging and hiking on the odd occasion. Within the space of a year Stuart had gone from hating exercise and feeling like it is a chore to looking forward to it as a bit of fun. He even started finding himself using exercise when procrastinating about other more tedious chores like work and cleaning. So what happened during the space of a year that reprogrammed his feelings to draw him towards exercise? Let’s trace the steps to see how exactly Stuart managed to change.
Stuart tells me that he doesn’t mind walking or biking around the neighbourhood block but he is far more motivated towards mountain biking or hiking in the bush, he says he feels just a little bit more alive when he’s enjoying the great outdoors. The interesting thing here to note is that he actually used to despise the outdoors and felt uncomfortable. The thought alone made him feel funny and he craved the creature comforts of home and surrounds.
So how did he get so comfortable with exercising away from home, outside, in foreign places? During a session I uncovered that Stuart at an earlier age used to kayak frequently in the Blue Mountains National Park and that getting outdoors and seeing the same scenery had triggered these memories of happy times from his childhood. Stuart had good feelings about nature and the scenery by the Hawkesbury and Nepean rivers.
The way he felt about the sights, sounds and sensations he experienced during those times have now transferred onto other activities that share similar sights, sounds and sensations such as the bush walks and mountain biking he is doing. The key here is that he likes the great outdoors, especially if there is a river nearby.
We can see that his mind has made a connection between the kayaking of his childhood and the exercise he is now regularly doing outdoors. In order to realise this however Stuart had to retrace his steps, it wasn’t obvious at the time. Kayaking is actually physically demanding, you can feel the burn in your lungs and the strain in your muscles. When Stuart kayaks he feels all the same sensations that he associated with discomfort. But because he is enjoying the kayaking so much, he barely notices those sensations. So when his body feels those same sensations, while his eyes see the same sights and his ears hear the same noises, they all begin to blur together somewhere in his mind creating the meaning of fun.
When he goes for a hike by the river or a ride on his mountain bike, the experience now creates that new meaning of fun. Cycling is especially fun because his favourite kayak also has a foot powered function, very similar to a bike. So when he’s riding into the wind, he can feel the cool breeze relieve the sweat and heat on his face, just like when he’s paddling and peddling into the wind on his kayak.
So in his unconscious mind, you could say he has made friends with cycling because kayaking was his mutual friend. It shared so many sensory similarities that they got along much better than if they had met as strangers.
Then moving forward, we can see that mountain biking shares similarities with road cycling. As a result, Stuart was then able to start enjoying riding on concrete tracks when he didn’t have enough time to drive all the way out to the bush tracks. Again, the sensory similarities transfer, which makes it easier for him to grow a liking for this new activity.
Then when he goes for a jog along the same track, he sees similar sights and feels similar sensations. So symbolically, he has made a friend of a friend of his friend. As a result, even going for a jog feels more like a break for him than a chore. He recalls feeling like the teacher trying to force a student to do painful group work with the school bully before finding a way to change his mind.
When we trace the steps backwards, it becomes much easier to track the patterns. When it comes to figuring out where transference has occurred, the aim is to zoom down into those pivotal moments, when subtle feelings cross contaminated over from one pattern to another. And the stepping stones they use to hop across are the overlapping sensory similarities that the two patterns share in common.
In Stuarts case, it all stemmed from the magnetic feelings he had associated with kayaking. Those magnetic feelings then started transferring onto other forms of exercise that shared overlapping similarities.
But how exactly did Stuart come to feel this way about kayaking? Especially when he used to hate the physical discomfort?
Well when we traced the steps back together even further, we uncovered that it had all stemmed from his enthusiasm for fishing. He started land based fishing but bought himself a powerboat to get access to the better fishing spots. He become especially keen to catch freshwater fish like Australian Bass that populates the Nepean river. The problem is that the Nepean river was too shallow for him to get his boat down to risk getting stuck. So in his keen hunt for this Bass, he got himself a Kobie pedal powered kayak so he could continue to chase Bass through the shallow waters. Notice the process.
Let’s go deeper. Stuart already had a love for fishing and boating, being out on the water. So almost all of the elements present in the new pattern of behaviour that is (kayak fishing). These elements had carried over from the old pattern of (power boating). As a result, the similarities basically outnumbered and essentially ‘covered up’ the differences such as using the physical energy as opposed to a motor. There was some physical discomfort at first obviously, but he didn’t notice that so much as his mind was now focused on catching Bass. Stuart ended up loving it so much he started going out without his fishing gear just for a paddle down the river.
Let’s take a look at what happened here, its kind of like making friends with a mutual friend and it turns out that this new friend, has very different political, philosophical and religious views to you. Only you don’t really notice so much because you are busy chatting about all the things that you both have in common. You end up getting along so well, that by the time you become aware of the differences, it doesn’t bother you anymore. I frequently help people going through breakups and preparing to break up from their partners looking for relationship advice. I see this one particular pattern occur over and over and over again, that is either that “my partner has changed” or more commonly “after x amount of time, I have now realised that we like so many different things”. This is because when we meet a potential partner, we are attracted physically to this person and we naturally start talking about all the things we have in common. We will talk about our shared love for a particular movie or type of music, food, ideas and views, we bury the differences early on because we don’t want to see those just yet, we are building a relationship and then one day, we stop and start noticing all those differences piling up.
What’s the lesson that we can take from this moving forward? The lesson here is to pay very fine attention to all the different variables involved in how you do a pattern. Whether its an exercise pattern, a dietary pattern or any other kind of behavioural pattern you want to change. Different patterns can have overlapping similarities. And once you decide to be strategic about it, those overlapping can help you cross contaminate feelings to transfer them from one thing to another. I you have not already downloaded the FREE eBook above i highly recommend it as it is packed full of stuff and the full version has even more! but before you leave i just wanted to let you know that you can also download an audio version below if you would prefer listening to reading. Cant wait to hear from you and find out how you went! Good luck.
Stuart tells me that he doesn’t mind walking or biking around the neighbourhood block but he is far more motivated towards mountain biking or hiking in the bush, he says he feels just a little bit more alive when he’s enjoying the great outdoors. The interesting thing here to note is that he actually used to despise the outdoors and felt uncomfortable. The thought alone made him feel funny and he craved the creature comforts of home and surrounds.
So how did he get so comfortable with exercising away from home, outside, in foreign places? During a session I uncovered that Stuart at an earlier age used to kayak frequently in the Blue Mountains National Park and that getting outdoors and seeing the same scenery had triggered these memories of happy times from his childhood. Stuart had good feelings about nature and the scenery by the Hawkesbury and Nepean rivers.
The way he felt about the sights, sounds and sensations he experienced during those times have now transferred onto other activities that share similar sights, sounds and sensations such as the bush walks and mountain biking he is doing. The key here is that he likes the great outdoors, especially if there is a river nearby.
We can see that his mind has made a connection between the kayaking of his childhood and the exercise he is now regularly doing outdoors. In order to realise this however Stuart had to retrace his steps, it wasn’t obvious at the time. Kayaking is actually physically demanding, you can feel the burn in your lungs and the strain in your muscles. When Stuart kayaks he feels all the same sensations that he associated with discomfort. But because he is enjoying the kayaking so much, he barely notices those sensations. So when his body feels those same sensations, while his eyes see the same sights and his ears hear the same noises, they all begin to blur together somewhere in his mind creating the meaning of fun.
When he goes for a hike by the river or a ride on his mountain bike, the experience now creates that new meaning of fun. Cycling is especially fun because his favourite kayak also has a foot powered function, very similar to a bike. So when he’s riding into the wind, he can feel the cool breeze relieve the sweat and heat on his face, just like when he’s paddling and peddling into the wind on his kayak.
So in his unconscious mind, you could say he has made friends with cycling because kayaking was his mutual friend. It shared so many sensory similarities that they got along much better than if they had met as strangers.
Then moving forward, we can see that mountain biking shares similarities with road cycling. As a result, Stuart was then able to start enjoying riding on concrete tracks when he didn’t have enough time to drive all the way out to the bush tracks. Again, the sensory similarities transfer, which makes it easier for him to grow a liking for this new activity.
Then when he goes for a jog along the same track, he sees similar sights and feels similar sensations. So symbolically, he has made a friend of a friend of his friend. As a result, even going for a jog feels more like a break for him than a chore. He recalls feeling like the teacher trying to force a student to do painful group work with the school bully before finding a way to change his mind.
When we trace the steps backwards, it becomes much easier to track the patterns. When it comes to figuring out where transference has occurred, the aim is to zoom down into those pivotal moments, when subtle feelings cross contaminated over from one pattern to another. And the stepping stones they use to hop across are the overlapping sensory similarities that the two patterns share in common.
In Stuarts case, it all stemmed from the magnetic feelings he had associated with kayaking. Those magnetic feelings then started transferring onto other forms of exercise that shared overlapping similarities.
But how exactly did Stuart come to feel this way about kayaking? Especially when he used to hate the physical discomfort?
Well when we traced the steps back together even further, we uncovered that it had all stemmed from his enthusiasm for fishing. He started land based fishing but bought himself a powerboat to get access to the better fishing spots. He become especially keen to catch freshwater fish like Australian Bass that populates the Nepean river. The problem is that the Nepean river was too shallow for him to get his boat down to risk getting stuck. So in his keen hunt for this Bass, he got himself a Kobie pedal powered kayak so he could continue to chase Bass through the shallow waters. Notice the process.
Let’s go deeper. Stuart already had a love for fishing and boating, being out on the water. So almost all of the elements present in the new pattern of behaviour that is (kayak fishing). These elements had carried over from the old pattern of (power boating). As a result, the similarities basically outnumbered and essentially ‘covered up’ the differences such as using the physical energy as opposed to a motor. There was some physical discomfort at first obviously, but he didn’t notice that so much as his mind was now focused on catching Bass. Stuart ended up loving it so much he started going out without his fishing gear just for a paddle down the river.
Let’s take a look at what happened here, its kind of like making friends with a mutual friend and it turns out that this new friend, has very different political, philosophical and religious views to you. Only you don’t really notice so much because you are busy chatting about all the things that you both have in common. You end up getting along so well, that by the time you become aware of the differences, it doesn’t bother you anymore. I frequently help people going through breakups and preparing to break up from their partners looking for relationship advice. I see this one particular pattern occur over and over and over again, that is either that “my partner has changed” or more commonly “after x amount of time, I have now realised that we like so many different things”. This is because when we meet a potential partner, we are attracted physically to this person and we naturally start talking about all the things we have in common. We will talk about our shared love for a particular movie or type of music, food, ideas and views, we bury the differences early on because we don’t want to see those just yet, we are building a relationship and then one day, we stop and start noticing all those differences piling up.
What’s the lesson that we can take from this moving forward? The lesson here is to pay very fine attention to all the different variables involved in how you do a pattern. Whether its an exercise pattern, a dietary pattern or any other kind of behavioural pattern you want to change. Different patterns can have overlapping similarities. And once you decide to be strategic about it, those overlapping can help you cross contaminate feelings to transfer them from one thing to another. I you have not already downloaded the FREE eBook above i highly recommend it as it is packed full of stuff and the full version has even more! but before you leave i just wanted to let you know that you can also download an audio version below if you would prefer listening to reading. Cant wait to hear from you and find out how you went! Good luck.
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HEALTHY HABITS
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