I'd like to share some inspiration with you. It's inspiration that breathes life into me when I need to revitalise the patterns of my existence. I hope it can do the same for you.
When you're searching for success...trying to make a positive and noticeable change in any of the important areas of your life, whether it's the emotional side, your relationships, your work, or the physical side, trying to improve your body, your swimming technique, your eating habits, or your health, whatever it is...remember to do this: concentrate on making small improvements every day over a long period of time.
That may seem perfectly simple. What most people do, is they see one area and then they throw a lot of energy into that area for a short time. What happens? You neglect the areas that were going well.
Now, cultivate the habit of consistently improving all the areas of your life, including and especially, the areas you feel really need your attention. But stay alert, and maintain this same approach in other areas. Say for example, you want to lose weight and gain fitness. How you can do that is to train a little more each day, or if not more, with more intensity, or if not with more intensity, with more focus on how - on your technique, and if not your technique, focus on your breathing, on your motion.
You can measure whether you are improving in many ways. First, you can measure how you feel. It may not seem to be the most important measure, but it is. If you don't feel encouraged (because you ought to feel stronger and better each day), it's important to find out why.
People are driven and excited by seeing the progress they make. So if you're exercising, measure yourself. Measure your time spent training, test your speed, enter a race, or check your weight, or your heartbeat, or all of these.
Now don't neglect the other things. If you are in a relationship, and you're exercising, encourage your partner either to exercise with you, or to enjoy a healthier lifestyle - either by drinking more water, or eating more salads during meals together. Have your partner massage you, especially if you've been exercising hard.
At work, or at home, in all of your friendships, see where you can make improvements, small improvements, and go and make them. People are happiest when they have a sense of accomplishment.
Tony Robbins calls this philosophy CANEI: Constant And Never Ending Improvement. It's important to stress that they are small improvements, and they are neverending.
When you rememeber that, you remember an essential ingredient, a secret to living life: always,in every thing that you do, pay attention...and hold that attention, that focus for as long you are alive. That is how you will find success in every day, and in every way.
If you want to know how most people become successful, it is this: they decide to set higher standards for themselves. Not just any standards, and not standards that are very close to the standards they've always had.
If you want to create powerful change in your life, adopt powerful new standards.
If you normally run 1 hour a day, set a bold goal: try for 2 or even 3, even if you only reach it weeks or months later. But set the standards, and with them, your goals.
For me, my standard is that weighing above 80kg is unacceptable. For me, 75kg is a good standard. I won't rest until I am there. In a sense it is a new standard, because being 33 years old is new, and being 75kg and 33 is a higher standard than being 75kg and 23.
Nevertheless, if I merely apply old standards, can I stay successful for any length of time? No. Our standards need to be upgraded and improved. As we get older, so do our excuses.
So while I have weight as one goal, others include cycling further than I have ever cycled before in one day, doing the Ironman faster and so on... These demonstrate a real commitment to making constant high level improvements.
Find some standards for yourself today. Decide to spend more time with your partner, not necessarily eating or drinking or in some kind of escapism. Go for a walk together, or learn something new together. My girlfriend doesn't like to get her hair wet. It will be good for our relationship if that standard changes. Imagine going through summer without wetting your hair? I'll give you feedback on how that turns out.
Find some new standards for your fitness. Or try a new sport. I would like to learn to surf this summer.
The important thing to remember about standards are that although they can be based on previous standards, they should never be the same. They should always be a higher standard, an improvement. Otherwise, we stagnate, because around us things are changing, and we need to change, and set new standards, to meet the realities and challenges and people in the world around us.
Be inspired, set your standards, and then go and inspire others.
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