Sunday Story...Nice Guys

Don’t always finish last. We live in a world where being tough is held up as the ultimate virtue. After all big boys and girls don’t cry. Keep a stiff upper lip. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. These are platitudes we have all heard all of our lives. The CrossFit community has even more of them…raise the bar or die trying, misery loves company so same time and place tomorrow, the weight isn’t too much, you’re too weak, suck it up buttercup. We seem to think that being tough will get us through just about anything.

And tough will serve you often. Picking yourself after you get knocked down is an important quality. Understanding that failure is not defeat, but just an unexpected outcome is a good lesson to integrate. It is important to attack some things like a dog with a bone, not giving up until you get the outcome you desire.

But do you have to be tough all the time? Aren’t there things you could do with a little more love, a little more “nice”? Can’t you be nice when you are getting your morning latte? Can’t you be even nicer than you were yesterday? Do you really need to go through life with your shields up and your hyper-vigilant game face on? I don’t think so. Not everything is a battle for supremacy. Every errand does not need to be a personal record or a contest to see if you can be more efficient, faster, better than the last time.

Maybe you should relax a little and love more. Maybe if you were nicer people would help you. After all, don’t we all want to help people who give us a reason to help them? And isn’t someone being nice a really good reason to help them? Do you really want to go out of your way for the people you know who are rude, crabby, grouchy, or just generally unhappy? I think not.

Try a little more love and little less effort, a little more yield and less push, a little more water and less stone in your day to day life and dealing with other humans. Give people a reason to help you. Be nicer. And then when it is time to be a badass, be a badass. Because being hard and unyielding all the time is hard hard work. Learn to be a little nicer and it will go a long way and then when it is time to be not nice it will be much more effective and more noticeable.

Be hard when the time is right. Be nice the rest of the time. Yin and Yang, hard and soft, one defines the other. You can’t have one without the other to define and highlight the other.

Be a bad ass but be a nice bad ass!

Namaste

John

“Teaching Focus, Inspiring Transformation”

www.martialartsnevada.com

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Sunday Story…Pity Party

Serves no one. Well, that isn’t really true. If you decide to host a pity party and a bunch of people show up I guess you might feel well met…after all misery does love company. But does it really serve you? Are you going to feel better when everyone goes home and you are left wallowing in your own swampy morass of pity? Do you really want everyone to coo and cluck over your horrible situation and how you have every right to feel the way you do and you have been so wronged and of course you are justified in feeling this way?

When I was teaching a P.E. fun day recently at a local elementary school I saw this in action a number of times. A child would fall down (incurring no real damage) and would proceed to cry and carry on until some energy from fellow classmates or teachers got focused on them. In a couple of instances they sat in their misery (alone) for 20 minutes until the game shifted to something more to their liking. This really served no one at all.

Where is your pity party? Are you constantly grousing about your weight? How it is so hard for you to lose weight? How you have tried every diet known to man and just nothing works? You’ve been to Doctors, looked at surgery, tried the pills, the shakes, the calorie counting, the shots the prescriptions but nothing give you the permanent change you want? Why isn’t there a magic pill that will work for me….blah blah blah, whine, and whine whine until we are all sick of it?
Maybe your thing is getting fit? Or maybe your job or career? Or your relationship. Hell, maybe your pity party is the weather. It’s too hot, it’s too cold, it’s allergy season, it’s too dry, and it’s too humid, blah blah ad infinitum.

Look we all feel sorry for ourselves from time to time. And sometimes the wrongs done to us would have us be justified in feeling that way. But the real question is whether or not curling up into a fetal position is still serving you all these years later? Are you going to lay on the floor and cry about how horrible things were (and maybe they really were and any one with half a brain would agree that you should be curled up in a corner sucking yor thumb) until when? Is that fetal position still serving you? How, exactly, is your continued pity party serving you?

Maybe you should try happiness? Maybe you should try getting out of bed in the morning with a smile on your face and decide it’s a great day and then set out to make it one? After all you can always crawl back into your pity cave if happiness doesn’t work.

The fact is very simple…the pity party and the happiness train can’t exist at the same time. It’s a one or the other sort of proposition. So get off the pity party circuit and try an express to happiness. Shake it off and get out to building the amazing life you deserve.

Namaste
John
“Teaching Focus, Inspiring Transformation”
www.martialartsnevada.com

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Sunday Story...Time is on my Side

Or is it? Remember when you were little? Christmas or your birthday seemed to take forever to come around and summer vacation never came soon enough. Through the years time seems to shrink. It is June already and the year is half gone.
It seems like it was just yesterday that I turned 50 and now I am closer to 60. When did that happen? Let alone the distance from childhood. There is no avoiding the onslaught, the continuous march of time; it is going to happen no matter what I do.

Every morning each of us is gifted with 24 hours. Our year is going to have 365 and a quarter days unless it gets cut short. I get the same amount of time you get. How I spend that time is up to me. When we are young time seems infinite. There appears to be no end of time, no end of the possibilities. The older I get the closer time seems to be. It feels like there is a limited amount of it to get things done and if I don’t get them started and finished soon there will be no time left.

So do we rush out in a frenzy, trying to pack our bucket list into the next few years? You know the bucket list? The list of 100 things you must do before you die…learn French (or Spanish or Russian), go to Machu Pichu, run with the bulls of Pamplona, travel around the world in 80 days or whatever else may be on your list. After all time is running out!

I find myself paring the list down to the essentials. Living a life by design, simple and full. A life designed intentionally to inspire and be full of the things that matter to me. Do I want to do all of those things on the list? Sure, it would be nice but it is much more important to me to live a life of optimum health and fitness, to inspire others by example and have some fun and connection while I do that.

Get out and do the things that move and inspire you. A young friend of mine is pursuing her dream of being a mid-wife, a doula, and she has been doing it in the villages of Kenya and Latin America. She often says I inspired her to get out of our small town and find a world where she could make a difference. And she is doing just that…making a difference. She is, in her early twenties, already leaving a legacy of lives touched and changed by her presence.

It is never too late to get started. You are not too old or too young, too big or too small to get out and make a difference. But time is working against you. And time is working for you. You get so many minutes in this body, in this lifetime.. The time is now to go do the things you were meant to do, the things you were designed to do, the purpose you were placed here to fulfill. Maybe you already know what that is; maybe you are in the midst of getting it done. Bravo! If not, today is a good day to get started.

Remember:
If you think you are too small to make a difference, try going to sleep with a mosquito in the room.
It is up to you to leave your mark; no one can do it for you. Time is moving on and the world is waiting for you to step into your role.

Namaste
John
“Teaching Focus, Inspiring Transformation”
www.martialartsnevada.com

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Sunday Story...Define Yourself

It seems to me there is a very important choice we all make every day.
Are you defining yourself?
Or
Are you letting the world define you?
Everything you do every day makes a clear delineation of these two choices. You can allow the world to define you by:
Race
Sex
Gender
Education
Geography
Culture
The clothes you wear, the music you listen to, the hobbies you do
Pick something and the world is going to pigeon-hole you in some way. You are profiling yourself according to the standards you allow the world to put upon you.
You don’t have to accept entrance into that pigeon-hole. You can do what you want according to how you see the world. Not the other way around. You don’t have to wear denim because everyone else does. You should wear clothes that reflect who you are, how you see the world and how you want to express yourself.
You don’t have to go to a certain school or get a particular brand of education. You can go out and get the one that speaks to your soul; you can go to the school that you choose not the one that was chosen for you by birth or circumstances. You don’t have to buckle down to whatever pressure may be applied---peer, group, societal, cultural.

We have heard this advice in so many ways over the years…march to the beat of a different drummer; be your own man; stand for something or you will stand for anything are all platitudes I am sure you have heard over the years.
We tell our children to be strong, to be themselves, to be individuals and then we expect them to be sheeple in school bent over a desk, conforming to the pressure we put on them to perform on standardized tests. But as soon as that’s done go out and make your own mark on the world but just don’t rock the boat.

Rock the boat it that’s what you feel you need to do. Make your mark by living your life with integrity…the integrity that says I am right with myself. I am right in doing this my way because it feeds my soul. It feels right to be one with my passion, one with my calling, one with purpose. I was put here to fulfill a destiny, not a place in line. There is no reason for me to live a mediocre uninspired life. The world does not get to dictate my way of being any more than it gets to dictate how and who I will love.

Be fearless. Be your own super hero to yourself. You can only save yourself from the pressure of mediocrity, or average, of terminal normality. Define yourself and live into your definition.
You can’t fail. You can only learn and grow.

Namaste
John
“Teaching Focus, Inspiring Transformation”
www.martialartsnevada.com

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Sunday Story…Reputation vs. Character

Way too often I hear people talk about someone who is talking about them and how mad they are and wondering what they should do about it. The answer is simple…Do Nothing. Except be who you are, live the way you want to live. You get to define yourself; the opinions of others do not define you. Your reputation is only what others think of you. Your character is who you really are. What you do when no one is watching is who you really are.

Keep working; keep going even in the face of destructive comments and actions. Your reactions define your character. If you remain true to your character, if you stay the course your character compass has set for your life all that negativity will wash over you like water off a ducks back. You do not answer to the opinions of others. Your life serves as an example of your character. Nothing can stop you if you remain true to who you really are. Your character goes with you into your next life; your reputation stays here in this world.

To be a person of character is the goal, not to be a character, or worse a caricature. You get to decide, you get to determine the course of action that will define who you really are. If you don’t determine your character you will always be swayed by the wind of other people’s opinions, which will shift like sand.

Character is something you build over time, over a life. Character determines your destiny. The process looks like this:
Your thoughts create your words.
Your words create your actions.
Your actions create you habits.
Your habits create your character.
And lastly…your Character creates your Destiny.

I leave you with this quote:
The circumstances amid which you live determine your reputation;
the truth you believe determines your character.
Reputation is what you are supposed to be;
Character is what you are.
Reputation is the photograph;
Character is the face.
Reputation comes over one from without;
Character grows up from within.
Reputation is what you have when you come to a new community;
Character is what you have when you go away.
Reputation is made in a moment;
Character is built in a lifetime.
Your reputation is learned in an hour;
Your character doesn't come to light for a year.
Reputation grows like a mushroom;
Character grows like the oak.
A single newspaper report gives you your reputation;
A life of toil gives you your character.
Reputation makes you rich or makes you poor;
Character makes you happy or makes you miserable.
Reputation is what men say about you on your tombstone;
Character is what angels say about you before the throne of God.
~ William Hersey Davis

Don’t confuse reputation and character. They are not the same things.
Be who you are at all times, in the face of every adversity.

Namaste
John
“Teaching Focus, Inspiring Transformation”
www.martialartsnevada.com

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Sunday Story...What are you Waiting for?

I mean, really, what are you waiting for? All around you people are in stasis, not moving at all. People are stuck, and they like being stuck. It is easy and requires us to do nothing. All we have to do is nothing, what could be easier. Just sit on the couch, sit back and let things happen around you. You really can do nothing if you choose it.

On the other hand, once you do something isn’t it almost always easier than you thought? How many times have you put off doing something because it sounded hard, you were afraid you might fail, or you were just flat out scared and then when you went ahead anyway you were amazed at how simple it was?

I had a couple conversations about this just in the last couple days. In one, my friend told me that she would never have tried CrossFit if she had been told what the workout looked like. She said there was no way she would ever have believed that she could do any of those things. Yet several months later she is doing all of them and more. Is it hard? Yes it is. Is it easy? Never. Is it fun? Absolutely. Yet it took that first step into the unknown, that looking under the bed for the monster only to find the monster didn’t exist. Today she rocked 3 different workouts that would have been unheard of 4 months ago.

You have to stop waiting. There is nothing standing in the way except for the self imposed limits you are putting on yourself. You can choose to climb the mountain, jump from the airplane, learn the language, or get a new career. You do not have to accept the status quo. You just need to decide to get out of your own way and get moving toward whatever it is you want to be moving toward. You are not serving yourself by waiting. You are depriving the rest of us, the rest of the world of your greatness, of your effort.

Action is scary. I get it. The height of the rope is scary. The weight on the bar is scary. The workout is scary. Baring your soul is scary. Opening your heart is scary. Living on the edge is scary. I get all of it. But inaction is death. And that is way scarier, isn’t it? Wouldn’t you hate to wake up in the morning and have inaction forced upon your life? Wouldn’t it be a tragedy for all of us not to revel in your effort and your success and learn from your failure? How old will you be next you if you don’t do it now?

The fact is simple: you gain nothing by waiting. There is no prize for procrastinating.
Stop waiting and get moving. Behold the turtle. He gets no where without sticking his neck out!
Stick your neck out and get somewhere!

Namaste
John
“Teaching Focus, Inspiring Transformation”
www.martialartsnevada.com

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Sunday Story...Be Brave

Every day we have an opportunity to “put it out there”. For some of us putting it out there may mean putting our art, our effort out into the public for open viewing. Writing, drawing, painting, speaking, dancing, performing all require a bravery to get into the arena a let the world have a look at our art. We open ourselves to the slings and arrows of criticism; we allow the world to have at our efforts because we are brave.

But how brave am I, really? Because, at the bottom of it, it hurts much more to keep it inside than it will ever hurt to let it out, no matter what the public outcry may be. Keeping my dance locked up hurts my soul. Keeping my words off the paper drives me insane with ideas bouncing off my brain. The images in my head need to get out or the risk of loss is just too high.

I can be afraid of criticism, I can fear ridicule from my peers, and I can be scared that what I am doing is simply not good enough, or too amateur-ish, but I can’t keep it inside…the cost of doing that is too high. The price of keeping my art inside is one of mediocrity. The cost of a life of quiet desperation is to admit failure, to admit that we never tried to be excellent, never tried to be great.

This applies to your life in every arena. The price of poor nutrition is what? The cost of being unfit is what? The expense of not setting goals, not learning new skills, not being better is what? Too damn high if you ask me. The cost of all those things is a life of quiet desperation, a life of terminal mediocrity. Is that who you are? Is that who you want your children to be? I hope we all want more than that from ourselves, for our children…I want excellence in every area. Why would I accept anything less than increasing fitness, outstanding health, and a life full of goals set and met?

We all have fear. We all have a piece of ourselves that wants to be lazy; the part that wants to just sit around and eat junk and do nothing. The part that denies the art that live inside of us that is aching to escape and fly free. Your art might be on a canvas, a page, a dance floor, or a gym mat but it is there nonetheless. Depriving the world of your art is selfish and small. Depriving the rest of us of the shining example of your excellence is criminal.

Put it out there. Don’t try it, do it. Every chance you get, just do it. Pretty soon it will become a habit and the fear will fade and excellence will be ingrained in your psyche.

And that is never going to be a bad thing.

Namaste
John
“Teaching Focus, Inspiring Transformation”
www.martialartsnevada.com

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