Weekly Wednesday Inspiration #2

- Jaime Willis

Happy Hump Day! Can I just tell you I am pretty excited about our Weekly Wednesday Inspiration feature? It means I get to spend all week scouring the internet for really cool things to read, look at, and watch. And it's my job! Awesome! So, here we go....

Quote of the Week:

"It is not the critic who counts;

not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles,

or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena,

whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood;

who strives valiantly;

who errs, who comes short again and again,

because there is no effort without error and shortcoming;

but who does actually strive to do the deeds;

who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions;

who spends himself in a worthy cause;

who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement,

and who at the worst, if he fails,

at least fails while daring greatly,

so that his place shall never be with

those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

-Theodore Roosevelt.

Picture of the Week:

Read all about Cody McCasland, who was born without a working set of legs, here. As you can tell from his smile, his disability isn't stopping him!

Video of the Week:

These ducklings have mission commitment!

Have a happy Wednesday, y'all!

Mental Renegotiation

-Matt Leedham

Yesterday, Jaime wrote her second post on mission commitment – the importance of relentlessly pursuing your goal. There have been times in my life when my mission commitment was high (e.g. marathon training last year during a tough winter), but admittedly there have been times when my mission commitment has not been as strong. What can happen when your mission commitment isn’t strong?

Mental Renegotiation

Have you ever set your alarm clock early? Perhaps you wanted to get up early to exercise, or study, or write. You had all sorts of good intentions when you set the alarm before going to bed. But what happens at 5:30am when the alarm goes off?

snooze…

We’re all familiar with this. When the alarm goes off, we immediately engage in mental renegotiation. We start thinking about how warm it is under the covers, or how tired we feel and that more sleep must be good for us. We do all sorts of bartering and trading in our minds, and before you know it, you wake up at 7:30am and not only missed out on going to the gym, but might actually be late for work!

Check out this great post by Steve Pavlina on how to wake up early. If your mission commitment is high and you’re willing to practice, you can wake up early every morning without question. Also, there’s a whole website/blog dedicated to waking up early, if that’s your goal.

Waking up early is a great example of mental renegotiation, but it’s not the only time it occurs. Think of these examples and possible solutions:

Eating
You go out to a restaurant with your friends with every intention of eating something healthy, but once the waiter tells you the chef’s special, you cave.

• Solution: a friend of mine told me last week that she always tries to look up a restaurant’s menu online prior to showing up. She already knows what she is going to order, so that she’s not sitting there in the restaurant being tempted by all the delicious descriptions on the menu and intoxicating aromas wafting throughout the dining room.

Drinking
You commit to drinking less alcohol, but still want to be social. Before heading to a party, you tell yourself you are just going to sip on water. You walk into the party to find your friend celebrating a new promotion and someone puts a beer or glass of wine in your hand.

• Solution: Come up with a quick sound bite that can be relayed to anyone offering you a drink. Usually, “I’m driving” works good enough these days as most people aren’t rude enough to push you on that. You could try, “I’m hitting the gym in the morning – thanks anyway.” If you’re really getting pushed, go with the old, “I’m on medication – the doc says no drinks.”

Working Out
You go to work with your gym bag, but come 6pm you’re hungry and it’s raining. You start thinking about cooking dinner, and about the dog not being fed, and all of a sudden you give in and drive home instead of the gym.

• Solution: Eat a snack around 4:30pm to tide you over until dinner. At 5pm, post on Facebook that you are going to the gym. Commit to it publically before the urge hits you to bail out.

If mental renegotiation happens to you, read up on our posts about priming and mission commitment.

You can do it, we can help…err…that’s the Home Depot slogan, isn’t it? Well, it applies here too!

Mission Commitment Part II

-By Jaime Willis

"Do or do not. There is no try." - Yoda

As many of you know, I am currently working on a goal to complete fifty 10Ks in 2011.  Today is the last day of January, and I have finished six 10Ks!  I am really happy with my progress and am (not so) secretly hoping to finish this goal much earlier than in December, as I'd originally thought.  But, when people find out I'm running multiple 10Ks a week, they are usually incredulous.  The number one comment I've heard so far from folks is "I couldn't do that." 

WHY NOT?

A 10K is 6.2 miles, and I consider one 'run' if I complete that distance walking, jogging, or running indoors or outdoors on a treadmill, elliptical, crosstrainer, or road all at one time.  To me, the only really challenging part is the "all at one time" rule.  If I got to aggregate my time on cardio machines throughout the week, it would be a lot easier.  But there is no "race" deadline.  I could literally take a three hour stroll and that would count.  So when folks say, "I couldn't do that," I think to myself, "someone needs a lesson on mission commitment." 

Terol Pursell, Sean Feehan, Ryan Darling and Jared Walker lead the pack as they run through pouring rain during a cross country practice Sept. 23, 2010, on north Icon Road, bordering the campus of Northwest Missouri State University. (Darren Whitley/Northwest Missouri State University)

Mission Commitment can be loosely defined as "Relentless pursuit of your goal." I think the real key to mission commitment is being relentless. No matter who or what gets in your way, you will work around or through each challenge to make your goal happen.  If you are not relentless by nature, don't worry.  You can learn it! 

Build your Mission Commitment muscles by:

1) Priming yourself to succeed.  You have to believe achieving your goal is possible to be able to pursue it relentlessly.  Your inner dialogue needs to match what you are trying to do.  As I am going to bed, I talk to myself about what I am going to accomplish the next day.  "I am going to run a 10K tomorrow." When I wake up, I continue priming myself by preparing to run -- getting a gym bag together and taking it with me to work, planning out my schedule so I know when I have to leave work to have enough time to run 10K, etc.  

Pro Tip: You may not actually believe what you are priming yourself to do when you start your goal.  That's ok.  Just keep repeating the 'unbelievable' and eventually, you'll 'fool' yourself into believing!

2) Make it easy to begin.  With my goal, I didn't have to ramp up to the 10K distance because I was already in the gym doing cardio for about that long to begin with.  For me, the 'easy' win was the fact that I wasn't racing.  I am a s-l-o-w runner, and I knew the 10K was going to take me 1 - 1.5 hours each time I did it, more if I was walking.  Since the only rule is that I finish the race, I don't have to worry about how slow I am, any finish is a win! (Of course, now that I am doing this multiple times a week, I'm racing myself, but that just makes it fun for me.) 

Whatever your goal is, you need to make the first few steps stupid-easy to complete so you rack up the wins.  If you are having trouble getting to the gym at all, your first win should literally be to show up to the gym.  No workout requirement, no crazy lifting goals, just show up.  The next time, your goal could be to get at least 10 minutes of exercise in.  Stupid-easy.  Once you start racking up the wins, you WANT to keep winning, and *bam* you have mission commitment.

3) Build in accountability.  There are two easy ways to do this: tell folks what your goal is and partner up with someone who is like-minded.  I posted my goal on this blog and on my personal facebook page. So about 750 of my closest friends know that I am running 10Ks this year.  In itself, that is pretty motivating -- I don't want to be a liar to that many people!  I haven't found anyone who wants to run 10Ks with me a few times a week, but I have found other ways to partner up.  In my first race, I got to 4 miles and felt like quitting.  I knew that I could push through, but needed some motivation.  While I was still running, I texted Matt, and he texted back a couple of cheers that kept me on the elliptical for the entire time.  I also plan on running a few 10K road races with friends, another way to stay accountable.

4) Have a Mantra.  When times are tough, when you feel disheartened and ready to quit, when your accountability partner is nowhere to be found, you have to have something at the ready to keep you limping forward.  In Matt's most recent marathon in Austin, Texas, he hit a wall at mile 17 or so.  He could have quit - plenty of people do.  But he just kept repeating to himself "Don't stop, just keep moving."  Especially in physically challenging circumstances, it is rarely our bodies that will give out first--it's our minds!  Get your mind on 'auto-pilot success' by having a mantra you can repeat over and over again until you get through it.  On a challenging section of one of my runs, I literally repeated "mission commitment" with every step to remind myself of why I was doing this.  On another run, I played Destiny Child's Survivor on repeat for the last 20 minutes of my run.  

"I'm a survivor, I'm not gonna give up, I'm not gon' stop, I'm gonna work harder,

I'm a survivor, I'm gonna make it, I will survive, Keep on survivin'" - Destiny's Child

Whatever your goal, I KNOW you can do it.  Build up your mission commitment muscles and you'll see success in sight! 

Mission Commitment

-by Jaime Willis

"Pike had focused on a goal and would drive forward like a relentless machine. Back in Cole's Ranger days, they had called this mission commitment, and Pike's mission commitment was off the charts."

"The Sentry" by Robert Crais

First things first -- I read. I read a lot. I've been a prototypical nerd pretty much since the pampers stage. What may surprise you, however, is that I read a lot of pop fiction. I'm ok with my 'pop' fiction addiction, and it was reading one of the latest from a favorite author, Robert Crais, that I was inspired to write this post.

Joe Pike is one of the main characters in Crais' book series. His talents as a Marine, an L.A. Police Officer, and former mercenary aid him as he runs a gun shop in LA and co-owns a private investigation firm with his best friend Elvis Cole. Pike is literally a silent partner--he rarely talks and when he does, it's as if he's being charged by the letter. Pike is recognizable as the tall, well-built, brush-cut blond in aviator sunglasses, a sleeveless sweatshirt, and jeans driving a pristine Jeep Cherokee. And, if you didn't notice before now, you'll likely also remember him for the two bright red arrow tattoos on the outside of each arm that point forward. Forward is the only direction Joe Pike knows. (Since I can't post a picture of a fictional character, here's a pic of WWE superstar John Cena, also a former Marine. Imagine him with sunglasses and red tattoos, and without the WWE trashtalk and the "jazz hands" bit, and you've got Joe Pike.)

Even though he's fictional, Joe Pike's relentless pursuit of his goals is inspiring to me. When I read the quote I excerpted at the top of the page in Crais's latest book, I actually stopped reading to digest that a bit.

"Pike's mission commitment was off the charts."

I thought to myself, I wonder where my mission commitment is on the charts? When I am pursuing a goal, am I doing so relentlessly or haphazardly and half-heartedly? Am I, like Joe Pike, constantly moving forward?

For those of you who would rather be inspired by a real life hero, look no further than Carl Brashear, the first African American master diver in the Navy, and the inspiration for the movie Men of Honor starring Cuba Gooding, Jr. When Brashear was injured on the job, his injury should have permanently derailed his goal of becoming a master diver. But Brashear's mission commitment was so high, he chose to get his leg amputated and begin vigorously training to get reinstated to full active duty. In addition to being the first African American master diver, Brashear was the first amputee to return to full active duty as a Navy Diver.

Folks who are successful are frequently so at the cost of a lot of other things. Olympic gymnasts forgo 'normal childhood' activities to spend hours a day training in their sports. Bestselling authors got through hundreds of manuscript rejections before becoming an 'overnight success.' Actor Will Smith talks about his mission commitment when he says he is not afraid to "die on the treadmill." Brashear chose his goal to become an Navy diver over keeping his leg--that's mission commitment in the extreme!

The relentless pursuit of your goal in spite of any and every obstacle is mission commitment. Take a look at what you are trying to accomplish and ask yourself how committed you are to your mission. My guess is there is a one-to-one correlation between your level of commitment and your odds of success.