The People Who Stick With Their Exercise Plans Always Have A Mission
You know what it’s like: you get home after a busy day, and all you want to do is make a hot drink and put your feet up. It’s a natural human inclination, and something we all need to do from time to time.
The problem, though, comes when the demands on your energy are so high that the only thing you feel like you can do in your spare time is flop. You don’t have anything in reserve to invest in your health and fitness.
Over time, this dynamic creates a kind of false economy. At first, you feel okay, just resting and relaxing. But when you go weeks and months without physical activity, it begins to take its toll on your body. Eventually, you start feeling even worse physically and much more in need of a holiday.
The Importance Of A Mission
Having a mission is very different from just vaguely wanting something. A mission is high-stakes – there are real consequences if you don’t achieve it.
Many people who would like to do more exercise, though, don’t create a mission that motivates them to succeed. They continue to put other aspects of their life ahead of their health and wellbeing, and this inevitably holds them back.
Mixing mission with physical activity is actually way more straightforward than you might think. Here are some examples:
- Going to the gym to prevent frailty in old age
- Spending more time getting fit so that you can enjoy outdoor pursuits with the kids
- Going to kung fu classes so that you can defend yourself in the event of an attack
- Spending time on the treadmill to lower your blood pressure and come off meds
- Using resistance training to build your body so that you can win in sport
As you can see from the above examples, mission involves doing something so that you can win in a high-stakes encounter. It is something that transcends the usual emotional reasons you might have for hitting the gym and really gives you a sense of passion.
People Who Succeed Have Mission
We live in a world in which people make profound improvements in their health and wellbeing every year. Some committed individuals can go from being 300 pounds overweight to healthy, lean, and active in the space of just twelve months, completely reversing decades of harm done to their bodies.
Rarely do these transformations occur because of vanity. Almost always, the person finds something that is important outside of themselves – like their kids or their safety – and then uses that as motivation to keep going, even when things get tough.
The mission can even be an existential one. A lot of people go into body transformations with the idea that they have just one life, and they’ll be damned if they’re not going to try their best to make the most of it. Training hard and getting a great body is all part of living life to the full. It is something that everyone should be striving to achieve.