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Emotional Fitness
Your emotions are the language of your body and drive your every decision. It is therefore an incredibly wise move to make sure this powerful force is fit, flexible and healthy if you plan on any form of success in your life including wellness, family and career.
Below are 5 teaching points with corresponding videos to start your journey to emotional fitness. Work with one every day, completing the worksheets over the next 5 days. By the end of this series you will have a noticeably clear understanding on what your stumbling blocks are and how to overcome them.
Please let me know how you manage and if you need any further assistance. Please mail me on mandy@basefit.co.za, I would love to hear from you.
Mandy
Typically when people just start on their fitness journey they hit a speed bump. How they handle this speed bump very much depends on their emotional fitness.
Most though, are not emotionally fit so use this speed bump as their excuse for quitting, by making it out to be much worse than what it actually is.
Why do they do this? Because it is a very convenient way to let themselves off the hook, to prevent potential failure, to avoid disappointment ….. so they don’t have to even try.
• But the truth is basically coming down to lack of conviction in their goals and belief in their ability to succeed.
• Emotional fitness is not taught.
• Mastering your emotions over all is not taught.
• Understanding root causes of emotions is not taught.
We are just told to be disciplined and to stay positive. But discipline alone does not always work long term because it can overshadow the truth.
Your homework for today: Take 15 minutes and answer the below questions honestly.
1. Why have I set the goals for myself that I have in place? What is the deep emotional driving factor?
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2. Am I using this goal as a distraction, am I hiding or using it as an excuse to avoid a shadow part of myself or my life?
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3. Can I become positively addicted to the outcome of my goal/s?
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Becoming positively addicted to the outcome is a sure way to stay on track as it can be used to trade one addiction for another. There will then be a shift from having to do something to wanting to do something.
Ensure your goals are compelling for the right reasons, much more so than any struggle, the juicer the more energy you will have. Hold on to your vision, as if you don’t, you will fall off the wagon. No vision means you are going down.
At anytime you hit a speed bump, see things as they are, not worse than what they are. In fact, try find a way to see things better than what they are. Nothing is impossible to change so don’t make it so in your mind.
Remember to watch the video here
of you. You may give up, making out that the situation is worse than what it actually is. Then you start with your excuses (see video 1) to let yourself off the hook.
Edison failed 3000 times before he got the light bulb right. But he didn’t see is a failure. He said it took 3000 steps to get to his goal.
So in reality every time you fail, you actually get closer to the goal, because if you knew how to do it you would just be moving laterally, not growing. Because you are going after a new goal or new level of success, you will make mistakes as you don’t know it all.
Understand that mistakes are just steps taking you to where you are going.
A trick here is to change your immediate objective, not to worry too much about the end goal (for example lose 5kgs or get fit to ride), but to get to the gym 3 times a week. Once you have done that you are successful, you would have accomplished what you wanted to do just by getting your sessions in. Win!!
The more ‘reps’ you complete of going to the gym you will eventually master the way you train to get the results you want.
You just have to keep going and keep going. And every time you feel like quitting think of a time where you felt sorry for yourself – that is not a good feeling. You want to feel good about yourself and feel that you are giving it your best.
So the paradox of success is negotiating your way through a lot of failures to get there. If you think you are going to enjoy great success, one win after the other you are kidding yourself. That is just not going to happen.
Your homework for today: Take 15 minutes and answer the below questions honestly.
1: What setbacks have you experienced in the past which have actually turned out to be blessings in disguise?
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2: What repetitive sets backs do you find you come up against when you are forging forward on your goals?
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Remember to watch the video here
Emotional Fitness Lesson 3:
3
Breathing Life into Your Goals
Please see corresponding video link: click here
So you set the intention to be fitter, healthier, thinner, more disciplined, more active… but then you get so wrapped up in your current state or worse, memories of the past that get in the way of you achieving your goals. What you need to realise is there is a massive gap between the goal you set and how you feel about yourself right now.
There are three steps here that you need to follow:
Step 1: Set the vision of yourself achieving the outcome you want. Get as much detail as you can. Create a motion picture in your mind of what it looks like. The more specific you can be with this vision the more moving parts you can have the more you can rehearse that movie, the more your set up your map to the future. This is your intention
Step 2: Once you have that intention you must combine it with emotion. Most people miss out on this second step. You MUST get emotionally involved with that motion picture of your future vision by feeling the emotion of it as if it was your reality in the present now.
So imagine yourself fit now, finishing that race, being pain free, being thinner…whatever your vision for the future is. The trick it’s to switch things around: Don’t wait for something outside of you to feel better, feel better form the inside first. Takes a lot of emotional fitness to do this.
Step 3: Be aware not to slip back to your old habits or old self. That means not acting out emotionally or blame others and expect your future to change.
Your homework for today: Take 15 minutes and answer the below questions honestly.
1: What are your unconscious habits and emotions that you have anchored into you form the past that do not serve you? What emotions can you replace them with?
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2: You can’t change your future without changing your emotional state. This means there may be aspects of your personality you need to ‘upgrade’. What personality changes do you feel you can make?
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When you start losing track of your vison it is normally because you are emotional. You can’t see your future because you are looking at it through the lens of the past.
Emotions are only a record of the past. We are a work in progress so we must prime ourselves for the future.
Remember to watch the video here
Emotional Fitness Lesson 4:
3
Treat Your Brain Like an Athlete
Please see corresponding video link: click here
Common sense is not common practice! You actually know what to do but you don’t do it.
But everyone wants to know what the magic pill is – there is no magic pill, only magic processes. Or what is the one silver bullet – well you have to do all of them actually. Nothing works in isolation – hence why Base Fit has developed our Bridging the Gap initiative. We believe in following the 80/20 rule, where doing the 20% of what counts to give your 80% of the results. Below is the 20% you can start doing now:
1: GOOD BRAIN DIET – Eat for performance and/or recovery. You are what you eat, so what you eat matters to your brain. Eat plenty of avocados, blueberries, broccoli, coconut oil, eggs, salmon, turmeric, walnuts, spinach, and kale.
2: KILLING A.N.T.S. (Jim Kwik) – Eliminating automatic negative thoughts. So no more complaining, as it is so easy to get addicted to moaning. Remember you wire your brain to whatever you are rehearsing in your mind because all behaviours are belief driven.
3: POSITIVE PEER GROUP / ANALYSE YOUR SOCIAL NETWORKS – Who you spend time with is who you become. (See my video on mirror neurons ). We are always imitating people: their habits, their thought patterns, their behaviours. So that is why who you spend time with is who you become. If you hang around 4 unhealthy miserable people, guess what, you will become the 5th
4: CLEAN ENVIRONMENT: You know when you clean your desk or your laptop how you have clarity of thought, right? Well the same goes for getting fresh air, drinking clean pollutant free water as this is good for your brain.
5: SLEEP: Consolidates long term and short-term memory. Helps clean out the plaque that can cause dementia or other age related issue (latest research). So many great inventions and ideas were first delivered though a dream. Your brain does not shut off at night – it is actually more active. It’s coming up with creative solutions. Also, don’t sleep with the phone on nears you. There is an electromagnetic field around your brain which electronic devices interfere with.
Your homework for today: Take 10 minutes and answer the below questions honestly.
1: What can you improve upon looking at the above list? What must you add an what must you stop doing?
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To have true emotional fitness is looking after your brain, treating like you would an athlete. Keep learning to maintain novelty, feed it well and protect it.
Remember to watch the video here
People spend 70% of their time in a stress mode. Which means you are going nowhere fast, and feeling exhausted while getting there.
We have an electromagnetic field around us. When it is strong it can be up to 3m in front of us, but the size of this field is determined by our state of mind.
When you are in a negative headspace (angry, depressed or frustrated) this field shrinks. This because mentally your focus becomes more narrow so it closes the field, and physically your heart beats out of rhythm and you breath shorter and faster (stress, anxiety). Therefore you start using all up all your vital energy from the field to survive. This is the same energy you need to create, to grow and be healthy.
So if you consciously breath slower and deeper, you will slow your heat rate down, your focus will open, your electromagnetic field grows. Like a wave back to it’s 3m capacity. Now that wave is energy, and energy carries frequency and frequency carries information.
• So what is the information it is carrying? It’s your thoughts of fitness, happiness, health, wellness, success.
• Thoughts of anger, depression, frustration etc are not going to carry the thought of your wellness, as it is a different frequency.
So how do you elevate your emotions? You consciously rest your intention, start calling up preferred emotions along with the outcome you wish then you keep practising it, holding it for longer and longer. This can be done in meditation, or if you find yourself in a negative mood.
When you activate your electromagnetic field you get an increase in energy. Now why would you sacrifice that for a negative emotion which will sap that energy?
Keep doing this to reset your base line. Especially if you are an anxious of depressed person. There for the more you practice moving into an elevated state the more familiar it will become
Think about this: Thoughts produce an energetical charge. Feelings produce a magnetic charge. So collectively they produce an electromagnetic field. Thoughts send out the intention – feeling bring it back. Therefore you must not wait for whatever you want to materialise before you feel great as that way you are not attracting it back to you.
Then lastly, don’t blame other people and things for your situation. That means you have no control over your thoughts or feeling, meaning you are a victim to your environment. But when you do it the other way around and change your thoughts and feeling first, your situation will change. Be the creator of your life.
Remember to watch the video here
“Thank you for joining me on the Five Thirty Club Emotional Fitness Journey. I hope it helped you, if so, please let me know, I’d love to hear from you. Drop me a mail at mandy@basefit.co.za”
Before I go, remember this: A successful wellness lifestyle is a path encompassing a sound mind with continuous growth, the maintenance of a strong and stable core, full range of joint mobility and all the time having fun doing it. Base Fit has programs encompassing all tailored to suit your needs, ability and goals. If you are not already on one of our programs and would like more details please add EMOTIONAL FITNESS to your mail to me 😊”
Chat soon, Mandy