10 PRINCIPLES FOR PERSONAL GROWTH
Over the past 5 years during my health journey, I have been constantly refining a set of principles that I consider essential for personal growth in and outside of the studio.
Rather than set goals for what I want to achieve in terms of objectives and possessions, I have started to put a greater priority on who is it I want to become and what attributes does this future version of myself consider strengths.
As of January 2021, this is where they are at:
Choose Your Own Path
Instead of following in the paths of others, or reaching for someone else's expectations, create your own path and definition of what success means to you.
Growing up I believe the expectations of those around us including our parents can be set upon us as to what is acceptable, and how we will gain recognition, validation and love, if we are able to meet them. Fortunately for me, growing up I was given a great amount of freedom as to what I wanted to do going through school, and even after I had dropped out in Grade 11. However, this didn’t mean that I wasn’t seeking the validation for my parents, particularly my Dad where I saw career success as my opportunity to prove to him that I was worthy of his attention. This wasn’t necessarily the case, but it’s what I believed was the case. I was able to achieve some career progression in a short amount of time, although none of it ever brought me any real satisfaction, and all I ended up doing was immediately looking for the next step, the next pay rise to strive for.
It wasn’t until I made the decision to go into something I was truly passionate about, something that sparked not just my interested, but ignited purposefulness inside of me. That was to help people to improve their quality of life by prioritising their health. Success for me can be defined in the influence I am able to have in achieving this, and the amount of people I am able to reach with this message.
2. Growth and Comfort Do Not Coexist
Everything you want is at the end of your comfort zone. If you want to achieve it be prepared and willing to step out of it. Yes growth hurts, so too does staying in the same situation and complaining often.
Think of it from one of the very first outcomes we were all after in life - to be able to walk. This meant getting up from all fours, standing on two feet, attempting to find our balance, and countless falls. If we had given up then we would still be crawling today, or even worse, if we hadn’t of tried at all, we would still be sitting in diapers under the care of our mum.
Whatever if is you want to achieve in life, being committed to doing whatever it takes is going to be necessary to get you there. It will be a matter of overcoming obstacles, pushing boundaries, doing shit you don’t know how to do to learn, and then more shit you don’t want to do because you know it needs to be done.
If life and being successful was easy, everyone around you would be doing it. To get you to where you want to be going, become willing to be uncomfortable, to be challenged, to be under stress, because all of this struggling is what ultimately shapes us.
3. Take Ownership
One person got you to where you are, and there is only one person who can get you to where you want to be. Be radically honest with yourself, because until this happens you’re going no where. Playing the victim, won’t make you victorious.
I can stretch my arm up to the sky and with it raised say that until the age of 28 my levels of self awareness were so low that I did not comprehend what taking ownership or responsibility for my actions meant. After I had lost my brother to suicide when I was 23, I well and truly went off the rails drinking, having late nights out, and everything else that came with it. At the time that’s how I was dealing with it, by trying to forget or ignore what I was going through. This lasted for years until eventually my drinking and behaviour led to me resigning from my job/career which I had invested the majority of my time building. For months after resigning and struggling to find a job I was blaming the then CEO who got involved in my resignation for forcing me to resign. I was blaming the recruitment system for not being able to find a new job. I was blaming not having a job or an income for needing to sell my first house. Any problem I was faced with, I was able to quickly and without thinking shift the blame from myself. That was until my professional, financial, personal, and spiritual world came crashing down on me and I considered ending it all. Fortunately because of the guilt I was riddled with at the thought of leaving my parents to mourn the second suicide of their remaining son, I came to the conclusion that the only way out of the shit situation I found myself in was to take full responsibility for it, and to start building a physically and mentally stronger version of myself by prioritising my health and the way I looked after myself.
4. Be Ok With Failing
The fear of failing, being embarrassed, making a mistake, or getting criticised is what stops most - be ok with failing because it’s necessary to learn and if people don’t support you, you don’t want them in your corner.
Once you are willing to drag yourself out of your comfort zone, then comes preparing yourself for the mistakes and failures. What tends to stop people in their tracks is just the thought of this mainly because in a social media world we have all become so afraid of being embarrassed, not looking or sounding perfect, and being judged for trying. I have seen it paralyse people to the point where they are unable to take a step forward.
When I think of failing I think of first learning to Back Squat. No one is born knowing how to Squat with a barbell on their back. Everyone has had to start from scratch at some point on their training journey. The first step is learning the movement, the second is practicing the movement, and over time people including you, will become better at it.
When I was going through this process myself, my ego was about five steps ahead of my capability and I kept blowing my back out. After about the third crippling injury which I continued to train through I sought out help from a professional who just so happened to be a physio who was also a powerlifter. I was in his consult room which also doubled as a home gym for no more than 60 secs when he poked me in the abs and then in the glutes and said “Your problem isn’t your back, it’s your weak abs and weak glutes”. Prior to going to see the physio I could have just given up and said fuck this, I’ve failed, squatting isn’t for me. But I didn’t because there was a burning desire inside of me telling me I need to know what is breaking down, to fix it and to get better, because I need to be able to master Squatting so that I can coach it.
The moral of the story here is, just because you haven’t done it before, don’t allow that to stop you because you’re never going to get any better if you’re not practicing. And when you do fail, which ultimately is going to happen at some stage, rather than give up on it, work your way through it by using the failure as a lesson and allowing it to improve you.
If you want to find some inspiration about bouncing back from failure, give ‘Shoe Dog’ by Phil Knight - Nike CEO a read.
5. Discipline
The bridge between your goal and success is discipline. It’s the ability to do something when you don’t like it, don’t want to, but know it has to get done for you to move forward.
A person can have all the big goals and plans in the world, but if they don’t have the discipline to execute on it daily, they are never going to get anywhere. Discipline is like a muscle in our mind, each time we flex it, it gets stronger. When the alarm goes off in the morning and we think about hitting snooze, but we don’t and we get up instead and go to the gym, that’s flexing our discipline muscle. When we’re at the supermarket and we walk past the confectionary aisle and the thought enters our mind about grabbing a block of chocolate that we know we don’t need, but we walk right past the aisle, that’s flexing our discipline muscle. What allows our discipline muscle to be highly engaged and strong, not just from flexing it, is having a very clear understanding why we need to do whatever it is we’re meant to be doing in the first place - this is our motivation. I will at this point highlight motivation is good, but discipline is better. I say that because motivation can come and go like the seasons. Coming in to summer, people’s motivation sky rockets towards their health and looking good, then as Summer ends and autumn enters, people’s motivation plummets. The reason this is, is because the people who this happens to motivation is external, typically wanting to look good at the beach to impress others (mainly the opposite sex). When the opportunity to strut down the beach is no longer there, people’s motivation disappears with it. Where for those people (I like to consider myself in this group) who’s motivation is internal and along the lines of, I look after myself because I want to feel better, perform better, and work towards becoming the best version of myself all year around.
My goals are not determined by the weather and the seasons.
For a quality read on discipline, try ‘Discipline equals freedom’ by Jocko Willink.
6. Build A Routine That Works
Your future is found in your current daily habits. Commit to and be consistent with what is going to get you to where you want to go on a daily and weekly basis. No routine, no results.
My routine is built around my training. When that is in place and doesn’t move, I train better because I am better prepared, it becomes more consistent, and I feel like I find rhythm and momentum which then flows into everything else that I do. Around my training then comes, preparing my meals, scheduling in a recovery day, weekly massage, weekly infrared sauna, daily walk and listening to an audiobook or podcast, going to bed and waking up at the same time. All of these activities towards improving my health have taken time and fit around my schedule, which everyone’s is going to be different, but the point is forming one that reflects your goals and where you want to be going.
A routine then needs to be placed into a schedule which will lead to it becoming more likely to be completed, and less likely to become distracted from leading to it now being completed.
On the flip side of this, no routine, no schedule, no rhythm, no momentum, just a shit load of excuses why things aren’t happen when they should be - ie; I didn’t have time, I forgot, I was too busy, etc.. All I hear when the words are spoken to me is ‘I have not prioritised my time’ and I know this to be true because not so long ago I used to bullshit myself and others with the same excuses.
One of the best reads I have had towards building habits and routine is ‘Atomic Habits’ by James Clear.
7. Resilience
When everyone else is giving up and quitting, you’re just getting started. When the struggle begins you know that is the time that will shape you the most. Embrace it with open arms.
Discipline and resilience really work hand in hand with one another. Discipline is forcing yourself to do the works that must be done, resilience is when that work isn’t going to plan, either digging deeper and going harder, or taking a step back analysing the situation and coming up with another approach.
I don’t like to generalise, in this instance I am going to. For the majority of people, when things don’t go to plan they will do one of two things - the first is throw their hands up in the air crying '‘Why is this happening to me?1” hoping that other people’s sympathy will somehow sort the situation out. The second is they will go missing, disappearing off the face of the earth hoping that running away from the problem will work. In this case I can say I have disappeared at times over my 30 something years, but I definitely cannot related to throwing my hands in the air and seeking sympathy.
Elon Musk’s story to put a rocket up into orbit with everything he owned on the line is one of the greatest stories of resilience I have read.
8. Comparisons & Competition
Comparisons are the thief of your joy. All the time, energy and effort spent focusing on someone else and what they are doing is time, energy and effort taken away from your path. The social media era is absolutely destroying people’s sense of self worth, based on the constant flood of comparisons our mind puts us through every second spent on different platforms. The way someone else’s body looks, the success they are achieving, the holiday they are on, the car they are driving, the new home they bought, and the relationship they are in.
Let me highlight a couple of things here - what people put on display on their social media is their highlight reel, and a lot of the time it is exaggerated to the point of putting an actual filter not just on their face to make their skin look smoother, or to augment the shape of their body, they are filtering out the parts of their lives they don’t want people to see. Secondly, stop giving a fuck about other people’s shit and starting caring and investing more into your own shit and making it happen.
People are not your competition, they are also not your enemy. They’ve got their own shit to worry about let alone focus on yours too. I come from a sporting background, I also had an older brother, and father and the three of us are super competitive. I am still super competitive. But competition can be used positively to get the best out of ourselves off the sporting field, and negatively to distract and find the worst in ourselves. The positive way of using it is to compete with who you were last week, last month, last year, last decade - how far have you come with the work that you’ve been putting in. By focusing on what you can control and improving it, that is how you can use competition to your benefit. The negative way is to look at others and what they are doing, whether at work, in the same industry or even in social circles and then treat them like the enemy, This mindset stems from our ego, it’s envy of others, jealousy, and when intertwined with someone who may be finding some success it makes a toxic cocktail inside anyone’s head that is only going to flow negativity into what they are doing, and potentially put them even further behind than where they were to begin with.
A great read I finished recently was ‘The Courage To Be Disliked’ between a student and a philosopher about the battle to let go of making comparisons and competition.
9. Surround Yourself With People Who Fit Your Future, Not Your Past
Ask yourself this right now - are the people I surround myself with and the environment I base myself in going to support me to become who I want to become, and where I want to be going?
This is pretty simple. Do the people who you spend most of your time with elevate you, or drag you down? If it is elevate you, fantastic. My next question would be do they allow you to be who you are, share your thoughts, value your opinion, respect you, and challenge you to grow? If yes, stay in that circle.
If the answer to the first question was drag you down, I would be telling you to get out. If you are concerned or afraid of leaving because you will be alone, I would still be telling you the same thing. Time spent alone investing into yourself will be time better spent than with those who only want to bring you down to their level.
10. Treat Your Body Like A Temple
Treat your mind and body with care, and it will take care of you on your journey. Train hard, eat well, and recover smart.
I touched on it earlier, external motivation where people are driven by impressing others, feeling validated or recognised, which all can disappear fairly quickly. When the motivation comes from within because you are doing it for you, because you want to create a healthier, happier, and better life for yourself, motivation almost becomes not a factor, because the life you are choosing to lead becomes who you are, rather than what you are doing. The commitment to this path becomes a connection with yourself, and without getting too deep into the spirituality side of things, I believe it is this connectedness to ourselves we are searching for, that deep sense of self where we are self aware of who we are, what we believe in, and where we are going.
Some people go to church and look for it in the pages of a book, others look to the sky and search for it in the stars. I work on it each day in the gym, building the belief I need from within.
Drew