Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Humility and Accomplishment

This is my article inspiration for today: Olympian to CrossFit

My take away was something I had been thinking about during training sessions recently, how humility paves the way for accomplishment. And you can make some real predictions about a person's success at any given task by they way they handle each.

I'm going to take a particular example from one of my clients. When we first started working together, she was terrified of jumping on the 8 inch box we had, and claimed to possessed no explosive power or athletic ability. I took her through some progressive workouts, and she attacked them all, not caring if she failed or not. A couple months later, she jumps on 18 inch boxes and can back squat 155 lbs. And while she might glare at me during a metcon, she beams at what she did when it's over.

Some other people take a task given to them, try a few times, feel awful and say "let's move on." There are people terrified of failure, they beat themselves up, and whether they know it or not, sell themselves short because trying 100% might mean failing 100%.

First, you have to have the humility to attempt a task at 100% effort and fail. If you want to eventually get somewhere you haven't gone yet, you have to admit that you're not there and you want to be. That takes humility and courage.

So get back to the gym, put your ego in your gym bag for later, and start working.

2 comments:

  1. Holy shit I made your blog!

    -eb

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  2. Sometimes I come back and re-read this one for motivation. Maybe it's silly, maybe it's vain, but it's really good at reminding me why I'm doing this, and to keep going. So what if I freaked out at a 16" box (when apparently I've done 18" in the past)? It's still about 14 more inches than I ever jumped before I started training.

    And also, I'm going to squat 155 again. Soon. But with real squat technique. And it's going to be awesome.

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