This is a true story. At a recent martial arts class run by a friend of mine, a 70+ year old women hit a pad wrong and broke her thumb. My friend took her to the emergency room where they spent several hours getting taken care of. I don’t think they got out of there until 1am or so. Do you know what the woman said as they parted ways for the evening?
“See you at class on Saturday.”
Wow! Let’s not even get into how tough a 70+ year old woman must be to take a pretty intense martial arts class. How about the attitude it takes to suffer a broken thumb and then just plan on getting right back to it. Here’s the thing, though. She probably didn’t even think twice about it. She just goes to class every Saturday so why would this Saturday be any different?
Now while I do want to call attention to a super-tough woman busting her tail, the real reason I want to talk about this is to bring up something that I am more and more convinced of every day. It’s simply this:
You make the decision every day how you feel.
We all know some version of the person who gets a little sniffle and, in a panic, dashes to Walgreens for Airborne tablets and Vitamin C. When that doesn’t stem the tide they are left to wonder, “Why oh why am I always getting sick!” I think they’re always getting sick because the second they feel anything, they forget about living their life and focus solely on bemoaning their fate. What would happen if when they got a sniffle they simply grabbed a kleenex, blew their nose and went about their day? It reminds me of what they tell you when you learn to ride a motorcycle: when making a turn, look where you want to go. If you look where you don’t want to go, like at a tree or another car, you will inevitably wind up right in the middle of it. If you keep looking at yourself being sick, that is what you will convince yourself you are.
Now of course I’m not talking about serious illness and I certainly don’t intend to belittle people with serious legitimate health problems, but we all know people that give you an enthusiastic “Great! How are you?” when you ask how they are, and we also know people who you don’t even want to ask. Is it a concidence that the “Great!” people usually are great and the others aren’t? Are they just lucky enough to hit the “feeling great” lottery every single day or have they just made a decision that they’re going to feel great?
This is where the simple exercise that I referred to in the title comes in. Some of you may already be doing it and if you aren’t, you really should (like squats). Here it is:
When someone asks you how you’re doing, respond with, “I’m great!” and really mean it. Not meaning it would be pointless, like if you were supposed to run sprints but you slowly walked them instead. If you do this simple exercise I guarantee that you will start to really be great and won’t have to force it much longer. After all, we spend so much time, energy and money trying to feel better, isn’t doing this at least worth a shot?
Let me know how it goes.
Mitch Rothbardt, CPT, PN Lean Eating Coach I help people discover their strength 510-754-7113 MitchRFitness@gmail.com MitchRFitness.com
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