FIT FOR LIFE: Structure and Routine for Creating What Matters

"Fit For Life" — Structure and Routine for Creating What Matters
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"We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence then is not an art, but a habit."
—Aristotle


I got a new bike a month or so back. A red and white Rocky Mountain "urban/trail hybrid." I love it. I'm easing my way into riding regularly, and slowly upping my mileage.

It's fun. It's healthy. It reduces stress, generates energy, and produces positive emotions. Cycling makes me mentally and physically stronger. I feel in touch with the spirit that dwells within me, as me.

Cycling is part of my personal program to get "fit for life." It's part of my "practice" for creating what truly matters to me in as many areas of my life as I can.

"Practice" can be used as a verb or as a noun. Both uses are important if you want to create what matters most to you.

First, if you want to make changes in your life, work, relationships or whatever, you have to practice. I'm sorry, but it's true! You have to do things, and do them over and over — learning from your experience — until you get them right; until you excel at them.

Excellence, as Aristotle said, is a habit. Or, as the Dalai Lama said more recently, "There
isn't anything that isn't made easier through constant familiarity and training. Through training we can change: we can transform ourselves."

So practice is habitual action — repeated exercise of an activity in the development of a skill. When I cycle, I practice "specific" skills such as stroke, cadence, steering, and smooth shifting on uphill bits. I also practice "generic" skills such as "persistence, perseverance, patience and commitment."

My cycling practice is also part of my integrated "creating" practice.

Here I'm using the term as you might if you talked about a meditation or yoga practice, i.e. about the work or business of something. I don't have a yoga practice, yet, but I do have a creating practice, and cycling is part of it. Yoga might soon become part, too.


Structure and Routine
All effective practices are powered by habitual structure and routine. To achieve progress, and, eventually, excellence in something, you need to do it regularly, even habitually. As Woody Allen said, "80% of success is just showing up each day."

But, it can be hard to show up each day. You have a lot to do, already. Some of you feel "overwhelmed."

That's where structure and routine come in. It's easier to get fit if you structure a trip to the gym into your daily schedule. And at the gym, you'll make progress faster if you follow set routines.

In exercise, or parenting, or writing, or running a business, or creating what matters most, you can "rewire" you brain through habit and routine. It's not enough to just "know" stuff. "Knowledge," an old African proverb cautions, "is just a rumour until it gets into your muscles."

Through structure and routine, through repetitive practice, you can get what you know into your muscles. And getting what you know into your muscles is what learning and growth are really all about. Then you can do what you know.

It's fine and dandy to have great ideas and lots of knowledge from books and tapes and seminars, but if you can't get it into your muscles, you can't do it. And doing it is the point! Do it over and over and over again, until it becomes easy, habitual, and second nature to you. Out of quantity, quality (excellence) emerges. Practice may not make perfect, but it does make progress, and continuous progress leads to excellence.

Structure and routine can help you practice when the dark clouds of changing moods obscure your bright sun of motivation. You will do better at anything if you rely on structure more than motivation. I hear the excuse, "But I'm not motivated," way too often. Or the whinier version, "I don't feel like it."

So what? Get off your butt and practice what you don't feel like doing for 15 minutes, and chances are you WILL feel like it. Your mood will shift. Energy will flow. Positive feelings will return. You will make progress toward your goal.

That's why structure and routine are so important. Once you have a structured practice routine, you just do it. You show up and do your practice. And if you do it well enough and long enough, you'll get very good at it. You'll change. You'll create results that matter to you. You'll feel great!

So, how about you? Do you want to get fit for life? Do you want to create what matters?
If so, look at your life and work. In what areas do you want to create what matters? In what areas do you want to excel? Fitness? Health? Nutrition? Finances? Work? Relationships? Parenting? Skiing? Needlepoint?

Think about the results you want to create, and visualize them as fully complete.

Then check out where you are now; assess what you have in relation to your result, and what you lack.

Embrace the gap between vision and reality, and use the creative tension that emerges from that gap to contain and energize your choices and decisions.

Take action. Learn from your experience. Follow through to completion.

Celebrate your success, and use the energy of completion to start your next creation.

Easy, eh? Yes -- if you do it every day (or 5/6 days out 7). If you show up, and do your practice, it is easier by far than if you don't show up, and don't practice. That's why you want to create a structure and routine — a practice — that enables you to do it regularly.

Then creating -- getting fit for life -- will become a habit, part of what you repeatedly do. That's where excellence in anything comes from. Repeatedly doing what you want to do. So, enough talking! Get doing; get creating. Start small and build. You'll be glad you did.

If you need help, get a coach. That's what the pros do. And it seems to help them. ☺
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Article: "Ten Thousand Hours To Mastery:
The Awesome Power of Passion, Persistence and Practice"
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• Want to learn more about how passion-fueled practice and persistence can lead to success in life, work, relationships and whatever you most want to create?
If so, check out this article @ http://tinyurl.com/ten-thousand

• If you set goals, and then let your practice peter out, or just plain quit, you might want to check out this article, too:
Top Seven Reasons Why Most Personal and Business Goal Setting Does NOT Work, And What To Do About It! @ http://tinyurl.com/Why-goals-fail
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Self-Talk, Perception and How You Feel Each Day
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Often, we talk ourselves out doing what we really want to do by reacting to daily occurrences with negative self-talk and skewed perceptions. This short video shows how easy it is to talk yourself into a bad mood and negative perceptions of reality.
Watch it and see if you can recognize yourself and your own negative self-talk. Awareness is the first step toward change!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfeXxkbgCVE
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Free And Excited About Your Life, Work, And Future?
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> My 7-page Coaching Info Package has details, and can help you see if this is for you. Email me with "coaching info" in the subject line.

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>This Weeks Quotes:
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"A day will never be anymore than what you make of it. Practice being a 'doer'!"
-- Josh S. Hinds

“One must be pitiless about this matter of ‘mood.’ In a sense the writing will create the mood. … (I)t should not matter very much what states of mind or emotion we are in. Generally I have found this to be true: I have forced myself to begin writing when I’ve been utterly exhausted, when I’ve felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes… and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.”
-- Joyce Carol Oates

"Love is not automatic. It takes conscious practice and awareness, just like playing the piano or golf. However, you have ample opportunities to practice. Everyone you meet can be your practice session.
-- Doc Childre and Sara Paddison

"One way to create momentum is by creating a series of small successes. So pick small goals, goals that are easy to create and then create them. Think of each success you create as a warm up exercise for bigger creations. Just like musicians practice and athletes practice, practice creating. All of the things you create will give you even more skill and more momentum."
-- Robert Fritz

"Aim at a high mark and you will hit it. No, not the first time, nor the second and maybe not the third. But keep on aiming and keep on shooting, for only practice will make you perfect. Finally you'll hit the Bull's Eye of Success."
-- Annie Oakley
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What truly matters to you? Are you practicing it? Do you have a practice -- a structure and routine -- that helps you do it regularly? Want some help?

I hope you have a great week!
Bruce