Our performance in life, sport, relationships – anything – mirrors our attitude towards those things.
If your attitude is one of success, then you will put all the little things into place to make them successful. If your attitude is one where you constantly reinforce the internal dialogue that says you won’t be successful, then subconsciously, and even consciously at times you will put the little things into place that stop you achieving what you would really like to do.
Over the years I have probably trained more women than men and one of the issues that stops women from being able to train the frequency they would like is their role in bringing up their children. No doubt bringing up children is exhausting. I recall surviving on 4 hours sleep a night for months at a time with 2 children, changing nappies, doing the feeds, comforting crying babies and still trying to work 14 hours a day, as well as keeping up with housework and bills, so I know what it is like to not feel like you have enough time for anything, let alone exercise or doing things for yourself. (Yes, I was one of those dads that made an effort to be involved in bringing up his children, crazy huh?)
Over time we develop a series of thought processes, and we reinforce them daily, that we don’t have time to exercise and that becomes our reality. So many women I have trained could have had fantastic success with their training and eating and everything else they wanted to do in life, however they listened to that internal dialogue, repeated over and over, that they wouldn’t be successful.
They never gave themselves permission to be successful. Without even going to deeply into why we tell ourselves we won’t be successful at any given endeavour, we all need to stop for a moment and tell ourselves that it is ok to be successful at them.
This is something that we as Australians don’t do very well. We’ve never been the sort of people that stand up and yell out publicly how good we are. We tend to leave that to our cousins across the Pacific Ocean, who leave us well behind. But think about this for a moment: You don’t need to make it public. The dialogue you have with yourself is internal. Some people like to make public announcements of their goals and achievements. Some people are more reserved and keep it very private. However, regardless of how public you make it, one of the keys to succeeding is to give yourself permission to succeed. Allow yourself to achieve your goals.
In my own life, I’ve been most successful when I have accepted that what I want is so important to me that I will put the practices into place that will allow that to happen, even when they were confronting and made me uncomfortable at times. When I haven’t given myself permission to succeed, I’ve subconsciously done the things that would prevent me from achieving those goals.
Such a simple mission today – develop your own mantra around being successful. If you have ever heard any of Anthony Robbins work, you’ll know that this is one of the keys to instilling behaviour change within ourselves. So try it. Tell yourself you will be successful at one task today. Don’t put expectations that you’ll have a massive transformation of your mindset in one day. But it takes just one change today to build for tomorrow.
Try it. With anything. Give yourself permission to be successful today and see what it does for you. Can’t wait to get some feedback from you guys on how good that feels!!