In looking to improve my personal athletic performance, I have always kept the cause and effect model in mind. I like to think about how my current activity, can give me the results that I seek in the time I have allocated. Post University, I began my journey of testing varied workout programs and philosophies, in an effort to find what worked best. Never had I imagined, that through this process, I would come to find out that working on myself, is what I needed most.
I read a lot of books written by coaches and personal development experts. Human achievement in general, inspires and motivates me. At some point, I came across a quote from Jim Rhon–“When you improve, everything else improves.” In application to fitness, I initially felt that simply improving certain areas of my strength and speed, would in turn cause everything else to improve. That didn’t turn out to be true. Beyond athletic ability, I found a slew of other areas could benefit from improvement–communication, marketing, and parenting, were just a few areas that could stand to see a change. It’s now my opinion, that Jim Rhon intended for his comment to target areas where people struggle the most. Once you improve in each individual area, you can then move forward to work on the next area. The process of self-improvement is never ending, when you seek to be the best person you can be for your family, friends, career and community. And of course, for yourself.
What is preventing us from performing at our best? Often times we glance at the surface level, and pay most of our attention to the effect. Instead, we ought to be looking at the cause of the problem. This may mean uprooting a bit of history, and searching pretty far back in each of our lives–we can’t pretend that our past does not affect our future. In my culture, there is a famous saying that says “you cannot truly know where you are going unless you know where you have come from”. When I recognized it and started to work through it, then everything else for some reason improved as well.
This is simply the human story. If one part of your life is struggling, it will prohibit the other areas from performing at it’s best. Through athletics, we have seen this play out over and over again. Regardless of how hard we push someone, and regardless of how great our programming is, if someone has issues that they haven’t worked through, the results will not be the best. It will go beyond the gym, and perhaps travel into work and family life as well. There are avenues for help–some of our athletes have sought help via sports psychologists. Others have worked utilized personal or spiritual means. They are seeing that when the mind and the body are functioning at their highest level, there is no limit to the results they can achieve. Contact us now and let us help you take your game to the next level!
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