We all need a push every now and again if we are going to achieve our best.
As a personal coach, it is my job to push my clients into achieving the best they can in many aspects of their lives, and like them, I too need a good push every now an again.
I’ve been a long time advocate of early morning exercise as a great way to kick-start your day.
In my recent article, Breaking your own glass ceiling I mentioned pushing myself on my morning run last week and achieving my fastest 5km run in over 18 months.
This led me to wonder at why I was able to achieve this and why had I become so slow anyway!
We all know that as we get older, we get slower. So, at 50 years of age, it is easy for me to tell myself that I have reached my limit.
What really happened is that over time I had found a comfortable jogging pace that had become my own glass ceiling. I had convinced myself that when I was running fast, I was going as fast as I could and so I didn’t push past this.
I was held back by my own self-limiting beliefs… something I’m often helping my clients overcome.
So how did I finally push through my glass ceiling? I used the same technique that Roger Bannister used to break the impossible four-minute mile glass ceiling. I ran with friends who were faster than me, they were my pace men.
For many years, the scientific and athletic communities thought that it was impossible to run a four-minute mile. Yet, in 1954 Roger Bannister finally broke this barrier in a time 3:59.4 and he did it by setting up a team of athletes to set the pace for him.
Once the 4-minute mile barrier had been broken, suddenly the world knew that it wasn’t impossible and within weeks athletes around the world began breaking the four-minute mile glass ceiling.
Today, the four-minute mile barrier is a distant memory and the best times these great athletes achieved would place them a long way back in the field behind current record holder Hicham El Guerrouj who ran 3:43.13 in 1999.
No matter what field of endeavour you are competing in, you will have a glass ceiling – a barrier that you think you can’t break through.
What do you think your glass ceiling is and how much do you want to break through it?
See also:
Breaking your glass ceiling at the gym
Breaking your own glass ceiling
Tags: glass ceiling
One of the things I often advise clients to do is find a buddy who shares a similar goal, and work toward them together.
If you have a fitness goal, this can be an easy thing to do. The world is full of people who want to get fit, but for one reason or another, can’t stick to a regular fitness routine.
Regularly going to the gym is one of those activities I’ve struggled with over the years until, about five or six years ago, when I teamed up with a friend and together we’ve kept each other on track by setting gym appointments with each.
It is a lot harder to miss an exercise session when you know your training partner got out of bed at 5am and is standing there waiting for you.
The hidden downside of regular exercise
Making an appointment with your workout buddy really helps to keep you motivated. But simply turning up and doing your workout together is not the final solution.
If you aren’t constantly vigilant, complacency can easily sneak up on you. Sure, you are regularly doing some exercise, but the benefit you get from it can easily diminish.
When you first start doing regular exercise, it is hard. Then, over time it becomes easier and easier as your body adjusts to the routine, until it reaches a point where your body hardly notices the exercise at all.
What happened?
Your body reaches a point where lifting a certain weight becomes comfortable. You find yourself doing ten reps and you stop, because 10 reps is what you’ve told yourself you need to do. You have just created your very own glass ceiling and complacency sets in when you don’t push yourself much past it.
It is funny, but it sneaks up on you. This happened to Don and I a few weeks ago. I suddenly realised the exercise wasn’t really having much effect on us – it had become too easy and we had stopped improving.
We decided to change to drop sets, starting our workout with a weight that we could hardly lift and dropping down a bit in weight until we had achieved our goal for the set.
Continued… Breaking the glass ceiling when running
See also:
Breaking your glass ceiling at the gym
Breaking the glass on my morning run
Tags: glass ceiling
It is so easy to fool ourselves into thinking that we are doing our best, but are we really?
It is just too easy to be mediocre. In fact, the world seems to conspire to make us fit somewhere in the middle… to be average. I’ve fallen into this trap many times myself, and what it means is that we create our own glass ceiling in each aspect of our lives.
A week ago, I decided to really push myself at the gym. Working with my personal trainer, I managed to lift much heavier weights in almost every exercise I’ve tried. Spotting me, my training partner Don, has been having similarly dramatic improvements.
Only 4 weeks ago (Jan 21) I tore my right calf muscle and was out of action for a few weeks.
Then yesterday, I went for my morning run and pushed myself, managing to achieve my fastest run over 5km for the year – even faster than I did the same distance last year…
This surprised me because I’m 50 years old, (so any improvement is a good one) plus I’m a bit heavier than I was for most of last year.
The glass ceiling
It is human nature, that when faced with a challenge so much greater than we have ever faced before, our first response is; ‘I can’t do that!’ And so we set ourselves a more achievable goal.
Whether it is a work challenge, a fitness challenge or a financial or lifestyle challenge, unconsciously we create our own glass ceiling for everything we do. Commonly, we set our expectations too low. This way, it becomes easier for us to achieve what we set out to do – and unfortunately, we rarely rise above the goals we set ourselves.
So how did I break my fitness ceiling this time?
In my experience, breaking your glass ceiling requires three steps; in this order:
- Change your mindset about how you set your goals.
- Set yourself up for change by doing something different.
- Put it into action
Continued… Breaking your Glass Ceiling at the Gym
See also:
Breaking the glass ceiling on my morning run
Tags: glass ceiling
My kids will tell you that I have a history of forgetfulness, and like most people, my memory started to get worse as I got older. I believe the main reason for this was mental laziness, so I decided to do something about it.
Off an on over the years, I’ve done a lot of things to try and improve my memory, such as keeping a diary and trying to pay more attention.
But, there you have it … did you notice what I said? The problem was the word ‘try’. I was ‘trying’ to do something about it, but not doing something about it.
According to Yoda (of Star Wars fame):
‘Do or do not, there is no try.’
Recently, I made a conscious decision not to try but rather to do, and I think it’s paying off.
Top 7 ways I’ve improved my memory:
- Regular exercise. This is my big one. Regular exercise such as going for a daily walk, a regular swim, bike ride or even session at the gym helps the flow of oxygen and nutrients to the brain.
- Pay attention. Usually when we forget something it is because we never locked it away in the memory in the first place. The guys in white coats tell us that eight seconds is the time it takes to put something from short-term memory to long-term memory. Concentrate on the thing you want to remember for at least 8 seconds before moving on to the next thing. Think about why you need to keep this information and why its value to you.
- Remembering names. I’ve been particularly bad at this one. When you meet a person for the first time, always repeat their name back to them within the first few minutes of the conversation. This helps lock it in.
- Chunking. It is easier to remember small chunks of information than a lot of information. For example if a phone number is 0424145363 it is easier to learn three smaller numbers 0424, 145 and 363.
- Use a mnemonic device, such as relating things in a sequence. It may be a sequence of words, such as a rhyme, or it may be an order of items, eg., I have five things to do – first do this, second, do that etc. Use your fingers! – this brings me to no. 7…
- Use an anchor. This is the process of using an object to remind you, such as tying a piece of string around you finger to remind you to get milk or putting your jogging shoes in front of the door to remind you to remember your gym gear etc.
- Visualisation and association. Visualise what you have to do before you do it. Imagine all the things linked by a silly story.
All those things aside, the other thing you have to do is learn to control stress and anger. I learnt this one some years ago. (In fact, I wouldn’t be much of a coach if I couldn’t deal with these biggies.)
When you are stressed or angry, you are unable to concentrate.
Also, slow down on the alcohol (it damages the ends of your neurons [dendrites]), and lastly, don’t forget to practice some or all of these techniques as often as possible.
Do these memory exercises often enough and they will become habit.
