One of the biggest tragedies in life today is the number of
people who fail to realise just what they are capable of.
It is constantly frustrating to me to see people set their
personal bars so low, not imagining they are able to do any better, be any greater. They
are all, almost certainly, wrong.
No-one, not one of us, not even the likes of
Mo Farah, Chris Froome or the Brownlee Brothers, have any idea of what our limits are. These elite athletes have no clue as to how much further they can
go, how much faster, how much higher. That’s what still drives them on.
And that’s the difference between them and us. They refuse
to stop dreaming while so many of the rest of us sell ourselves short and
settle for where we are now.
It doesn’t matter where you start from either. Here is my
experience – a lot of it will be familiar to many people and I apologise in
advance if I’m repeating myself too much but if one person reads this for the
first time and then decides to see just how far they can go – like I am doing –
then it will be worthwhile.
When I started at the gym just over two years ago I couldn’t
get up a flight of stairs without a struggle. On the induction session with one
of the gym’s personal trainers, I was introduced to the treadmill and could
only walk on it for a minute before having to switch it off and catch my
breath. At 24 stone, I was clearly in a bad way.
I looked enormous in the gym mirror. It didn’t lie. Around
me on the various exercise machines were fellow gym members of varying
abilities. But even the ones struggling were nowhere near as bad as me. And the
good ones were just too good to even concern myself with. The guy on the
treadmill next to me was one of the fitter ones and was clearly an accomplished
runner. He was belting along at a blistering rate and showing no signs of
letting up.
Many people might have been intimidated by him but I wasn’t
and you mustn’t let yourself be either. My head was still filled with grief
over Diane and my own situation – improving my health wasn’t a fad, a phase I
was going through, a whim that would be blown off course the minute I saw
someone far better than me in the gym. I needed to get fit or… well, at best, I
would end up with mobility problems and in a wheelchair in a few years’ time;
at worst, I’d be dead because of my weight mushrooming out of control.
So the guy next to me on the treadmill could pound away for
all he was worth, I didn’t care. He was not my problem. I was. And that’s the
attitude everyone must start with. You are not competing with anyone except
yourself. Only you can stop yourself improving yourself. No-one else has the
power to stop you getting better, fitter, healthier. Only you.
So it follows that only you can stop you realising your
dreams and goals. Those dreams and goals will be modest at first. But as you
start to take small steps to improvement your goals will grow and grow. You
will want to push yourself to your next target.
And be warned. It will never stop. Once you see yourself
making progress and realise how good it makes you feel, it becomes impossible
not to want to get even better, to feel even more alive. Every goal reached is
replaced with a new one. That’s not to be feared, though, that’s what is so
great about improving your life. You never tire of that feeling of
accomplishment.
So when I stood next to this man with the machine legs
pounding away on the treadmill next to me while I could only walk on mine for a
minute before stopping, my goal was not to be like him. My goal was to do a
minute and a half on my machine. That was all I was planning.
I wasn’t expecting to feel any great elation when I did that
minute and a half. But when I did manage it, I was surprised by how thrilled I
was. It sounds silly, but if you’ve ever been in the position of being
massively overweight and desperate to turn your life around, you’ll know what I
mean. Just by doing more that day than I had been able to the time before made
me realise how rewarding it can be when you push yourself harder than you have
been able to push yourself before.
So when one and a half minutes became two and then three, I
was hooked. I had begun to lose weight already – it’s true that you lose more
at a quicker rate in the early stages which helps to inspire you further – so
the combination of these modest achievements and the early weight loss made me
immediately feel tons better.
Within a few weeks, the length of time I could walk on the treadmill had increased. I had upped the walking speed as much as I could, but then came
the day when I walked for three minutes and lightly jogged for a minute, then
walked for another three minutes. Jogging! Who’d have imagined that just a few
weeks earlier.
The even better news was that all areas of my life were
improving. For starters, I was able to get up the stairs a lot more easily now
and I was sleeping better. I could see the difference in my general shape with
the early weight loss in the mirror and I started to like what I was looking at
for a change.
Running was still not on my radar, though. Initially all
this was about was losing weight, getting more in shape and feeling better.
That was already starting to happen and I was delighted with the small
improvements I was making. Luckily, I had no aspirations at that stage to run a
marathon. That could easily have deflected me and derailed my efforts. Thinking
too far ahead and too big could risk you thinking it could never happen and it
could risk de-motivating you. Keep those targets modest and attainable at
first. Don’t look too far ahead. Just aim to be better today than you were
yesterday and after a few weeks you can assess how far you’ve come – and you’ll
astonish yourself.
Having said that, you’re allowed to have dreams. Just keep
them to yourself as much as possible. If you let a dream become public, you
will feel you HAVE to achieve it so as not to lose face with the people you
told.
Dreams are private. Goals and targets can be talked about.
When you are starting from scratch, your goals and targets will be small,
modest steps. But your dreams can be as wild as you like. When you reach a
certain level through your hard work and training where a series of goals have
been met, you will find that a dream you’ve been harbouring will now become a
goal. You will have progressed enough for that particular first dream to cease
to be a flight of fancy and it will become an achievable aim. Gradually, one by
one, your dreams, through a succession of smaller targets met, will enter the
realms of possibility.
A lack of dreams, of seemingly unattainable ambitions, means
you have set a ceiling on what you can achieve. And you must never do that. Not
even you have any idea of what you are capable of. Never give up discovering
more about yourself and you will live life not only to the full but also
crossing boundaries you never thought you would.
The greatest challenge we face is to understand we are
capable of far more than we imagined possible.
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