The Most Important Mindset Training for Achieving Your Goals
I had a mind bending “Aha!” moment today. It was in my car on the way to the office as I was listening to an audio version of the book, “Go For No!”, by Richard Fenton and Andrea Waltz. The concept itself wasn’t really new, and it’s something that I’ve been learning and putting into practice for some time now. But the UNDERSTANDING of the concept was the “Aha!” moment because I realized that the training of the mind is IDENTICAL to the training of your body when it comes to FAILURE.
Training Your Body to Reach New Goals
How do you train your body to get stronger? Faster? Go farther? You train and push to FAILURE!
If you are trying to reach new goals on the bench press, you create training sessions in which you do sets of bench press (and ancillary exercises) at a weight and number of repetitions at which you will FAIL. And better yet, if you have a spotter, you actually go BEYOND FAILURE. You use the spotter to help you push through that failure limit. Then, with proper recovery, your next training session you do it again, and your strength has increased and your failure point is just a bit higher. You are stronger than you were before because the pushing to the failure point of your muscles caused them to break down and the recovery period causes them to rebuild themselves. When that rebuild occurs, they rebuild stronger!
The same is true for endurance. When you are trying to increase your distance, you create training sessions that push you to and past your present endurance limit. A training plan for a beginner marathoner takes place over many weeks and months, and it has you increasing your distance week over week. You push yourself to your failure distance this week, and then next week, that failure distance is just a bit further.
Your body already knows and understands that the magic is in overcoming the FAILURE.
Training Your Mind to Reach New Goals
Achievement and success, especially if your goals are above your “current self”, is an exercise in overcoming your mind. Sure, there are likely new skills you must develop and investments you must make and other procedural kinds of things to do, but ultimately its about your own mindset.
Successful people have been talking about the importance of your mindset and the need to embrace failure since the dawn of time. Abraham Lincoln was by all accounts a huge failure before becoming one of the most influential men our country has ever seen. Business icons, innovators, and leaders such as Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, Bill Gates, and John C Maxwell are all on record discussing the critical role that failure had in their lives and projects. In my opinion, one of the main tenets of Christianity is failure. Christ’s purpose is to redeem us from our failure.
So its perfectly clear that failure is the pathway to success. HOWEVER, its one thing to intellectually understand it from other’s points of view, and its quite another to get the concept on the basic, guttural and emotional level that it takes for you to BELIEVE IT. Well, that moment happened for me today when I put together the analogy that training your body is just like training your mind when it comes to failure.
This resonates with me because I’ve been an “athlete” my entire life. I’ve always been physically training, and I understand and believe from my own experience that training to your failure point is how progress is made. So it makes PERFECT SENSE that your mind would work the same way.
If you start training your mind by pushing to your failure point, the following occurs:
- You get mentally tougher: The more you fail, the better you get at handling it, the less you are afraid of it, and the more wisdom you can pull from it.
- You set yourself up to push farther next time: Your mind gets stronger, and when it gets stronger, your failure point is beyond what it was.
A New Paradigm for Measuring Yourself
For whatever reason, we seem to have been conditioned or trained to avoid failure at all costs. Certainly this is my problem. I don’t know if that’s due to external influence and training, or whether its inherently part of me, but its there. Fear of failure is one of my deep inhibiting mindset issues because it feeds my fear of what others think of me.
So the new paradigm will be to seek out the failures…Fail fast, and fail often…Embrace the failure.
Embrace the Suck!
Success awaits on the other side!
I hope this helped you in some way, and if so, please comment below, share it with others, and please connect with me. I would love to hear your thoughts and the experiences you’ve had as well.
Have a great day!
