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Positive Habits of Mind
You see, Mindset is one of those concepts that has become very popular and because of that, it has lost specificity. It is often vague. On top of that, our ideas around it come from academia, especially from the Psychology departments -although not exclusively. This means that we often look at it from one of two points of view 1) a very superficial one; or 2) a pathological one. The first case is represented in the average daily use. When a person says mindset most of the time they just mean attitude. When Henrick tells me: “Juan I went to that meeting with the right mindset, I was ready to crush it.” That’s not a mindset, it is an attitude. The second case means that we have become very good at identifying mindsets that are unproductive. We have identified general trends and their negative consequences. In other words, we are better at understanding the commonalities among the mindsets of people with poor ones, than among those who have good ones. All together, this means that when it comes to Mindset we need a little bit of a Francine attitude in the world. We need to be positive and specific. Just tell people what to do! This post is for you Francine. Let’s do this.
Can I have your attention, please?
If there is no product the product is you, they say. Nowadays, anyone priding themselves on being critical throws this phrase around when talking about "free" digital services --think Facebook, Gmail, or Twitter. I beg to differ. There is some truth to the idea behind it, but it is primarily a simplistic vilification. Fortunately, you...
Learning New Skills
When I start working with a new client , I ask them, how do you think I can help you? The answer is never what a coach would like to hear. I would like to hear some romantic, grandiose version of how awesome coaching can be and how it can change your life for good in ALL the aspects. But of course it’s never this. The standard answer is structure and accountability. Which usually translates to: tell me what to do and make me do it. My very first task is to reframe that idea for my athlete, more than providing structure and accountability what I do is create contexts in which they can find what works best for them, and what they want. I create contexts in which they thrive.
Functional Fixedness
However, because we humans clearly cannot have nice things, the term has been bastardized, oversimplified, and not problematized enough. When Henrick laughs at my suggestion of doing curls, he is just repeating a learned behavior. It is common in the functional world to look at other forms of training and think they are poor, vain, or irrelevant. On the one side, this is how every culture is created, by creating an other to separate from. That’s how we define our existence as a thing. On the other hand, this attitude is the representation of a very bad case of functional fixedness (FF). Think of this as a bad habit of the mind, a way of thinking that hinders more than helps, and that in the case of Henrick will limit his performance and his movement capacity. The purpose of this post is to explain to you what FF is so that you can catch yourself in this trap, and do something about it.
Don't be lazy, have higher standards
I bet you are thinking I mean you should go out workout more and workout harder. Memories of all those times you said you would wake up and work out and you didn’t will run through your head. You might remember those workouts during which you were tired and you did not push as hard as you feel you should have, But nope, that is not what I mean. That is just your guilt. Your consistency on a given program is often not a laziness problem as much as an organizational problem. How hard you can push on a given workout is very seldom a willpower problem, as it is a self-regulation problem. I am not here to guilt trip you. Let me tell you what I DO mean.
Close the gap!
What matters is that staying true to your own self is hard. It takes work, and it does not come easy. Quite the opposite, what comes naturally is often not who you want to be. Recording all those videos is easy. Polishing and sharing them is hard. Yet who I want to be is not a video-journaler, I want to be a guide who helps others to be more faithful to themselves by sharing what I have learned in as many mediums (it should be media, but that's confusing) as I can.
