Momentum is a Magic Elixir
When do you know you know that you have been successful? Is it a result of external circumstances? or is it the result of internal conditions? I’ve already written about this in another article, but I feel the concept is worth revisiting. How doo the concepts of right and wrong tie together? I’m glad you asked.. Our s. Self Judgement of right and wrong is the tone of the things that kills motivation. A little boy walking through a field with a flower. Pulling off the petals. One a t a time. She loves me she loves me not… Indecision. I do this in my internal world often and it is a motivation destroyer. Why are we living in this world of constant self criticism. It’s truly demotivating. But enough about the downside of motivation. I just thought it was worth a mention.
Motivation is directly connected to our why. Why are you doing this thing? It is what connects us to each other. Our stories connect us, and most often our why is in our story. When the why becomes clear it becomes much easier to enroll yourself and the people around you in the projects you are undertaking. A why tells a story, it also focuses the story. It helps us understand ourselves.
Why is adventure a central part of what I do? This is a core question for me to explore. It would be so easy for me to write about intimacy and relationships. Or spirituality. Or vision. I could talk about meditation and spiritual growth for hours. For a long time I felt torn. I had a hard time getting started. Sharing my message, finding my voice. I felt like I am interested in too many things. There didn’t seem to be a thread that connected it all. Fitness, nutrition, entrepreneurship, and innovation. Creativity, family, ancestral trauma, quantum physics. The list goes on. I have absorbed myself in all of these things and more. Adventure is where I play. That is where I let loose and experience my uninhibited self. Sometimes.
Sometimes I get into my head and I experience the fear and the tension of being somewhere that isn’t suburban. I am after all human. Adventure has been the thread that brings it all together. In my experience of reality, everything overlaps. It’s all tied together by a thread. Adventure is that thread. The greatest adventure of all is the inner adventure. The inner adventure is what has me contemplating the concepts of right and wrong. The internal nature of self judgment. There is a little boy inside me. Holding his flower and playing with my heart. Judging every action that I take. Pulling the petal off of the flower. You did good, feel great. You did lousy, now you should feel lousy. This sensation is subtle. Other times, it is blaring, loud and unmistakable. I was training a friend of mine last night. We are working with the kettlebells. Aiming for a perfect swing. I’ve often trained to a level that made me fantastic, only to get injured shortly after “arriving” at a peak fitness level. For this reason, training has been an on again, off again relationship. So I enlisted the aid of a personal trainer and a movement specialist. It is my mission to find out why I keep getting injured.
Recently, I got injured again. I kept training, but I stopped swinging the kettlebells. I did release working, joint mobility, flexibility and movement drills. And I worked with my trainers. I learned a lot about my internal dialogue. I paid attention to where my thoughts were travelling. There was a lot of rightness and wrongness in my thinking. Judgement. I am highly kinesthetic. Being immobilized is challenging for me. Perhaps it would be valuable for me to learn how to be kinesthetic while being injured. I am back to moving the weight again. It feels so good in my body. My body comes alive, it fees electric. Moving heavy objects, being faced with a physical challenge. Energizes every aspect of my life. Fills me with joy. My beingingness comes out, my essence sings. I feel like life is a celebration when I am able to face physical challenges with grace and ease. Which brings me back to the subject of right and wrong. The conditional nature of existing in this reality. What if I could experience what it feels like to be in peak physical condition, without actually being in peak physical condition? What are the feelings? Joy, ecstasy, pleasure, satisfaction, accomplishment and playfulness. To name a few. Are those feelings dependent on accomplishment? As long as we maintain a conditional relationship to reality, they surely are.
Now we arrive at the meat of it all. The juicy centre. When I am injured, I have often felt like a failure. Like life has come to an end. The joy and pleasure that I derive from training is sucked out. Drained. Exhausted. This time, that wasn’t entirely my experience. My energy did drop, but not in the routinely melodramatic way that is my normal when injured. So what happened? What changed?
I realized that injury does not equate to regression. I maintained my focus, because of this, it was a period of massive learning. Injury equaled up leveling. Both of my trainers hinted (or outright stated) that I should quit the kettlebells in favor of some other exercise. I refused. I shared my commitment to resolve the issue. Get to the root of it. My personal trainer and movement specialist each came up with a solution. I implemented and paid attention. Now I am integrating the learnings of being injured. Creating a new training routine. Adjusting my mindset and moving forward. It was powerful. I was more tapped into my why than ever before. That is part of what pulled me through. Helped me find ways to keep training, even though I couldn’t directly apply what I was learning. Most importantly, I learned maintaining focus turns everything into momentum. Even when it feels like things are going backwards.
When the why emerges, motivation is much easier to access. Which generates momentum. Momentum is the amount of energy already existing around any particular task. Momentum is the reason why sitting down to plan a profitable venture or business often leads to creating lots of interesting projects that don’t take you out of your day job. There are often areas where momentum is already really strong. Which means that creating new projects using that momentum is now easy. That groove is greased, as my personal trainer would say. My personal trainer tells me that in order to perfect my kettlebell swing, I need to “grease the groove”. A new pattern, whether it is a movement for an exercise, or strategies to create income, require the construction of brand new neural networks. Those new networks, or grooves need to be greased or lubricated with regular repetition.
Creating a business, especially if you have never done so before is much like acquiring a new physical skill ie. deadlift or kettlebell swing. It’s really easy to avoid it at first. Do something that is comfortable and fun. Creating where momentum already exists is an amazing sensation. Creating something new is a bit tricky. Especially if we don’t want to force it. Momentum is fun. Creating momentum can feel daunting, especially at the beginning. :
- find your why
- imagining a future where your business and your soul are merged
- raising the energy in another part of life to support the new energy
- making the deliberate choice to block off time for ONLY business
- creating a talk that can be shared at events
- figuring out what has changed for you as a result of your personal journey
- determine how you can share that transformation with others
- approaching a potential investor/mentor
As you create more and more momentum towards your dream, naturally the items on the list will begin to unfold. Momentum changes your experience. In powerful and unexpected ways. What happens if you become deliberate about creating momentum? Remember, there is no right or wrong decision. If you work furiously on this, you create momentum. If life has other plans, and you are not able to dig into it for a few months, you create momentum. Momentum is your reality. Each of you have expressed the knowing that once you collectively decide to commit, the thing is inevitable. What happens if you allow yourselves to be in a sorting out process? You just completed a major adventure not to long ago. You have been busy creating new opportunities. Now you have an entire buffet of choices that never existed before. You are living your unique experience of being human. It is unlike anyone else’s experience of being human. Well done, you are stepping into your genuine experience of being human. You have begun to define the world on your terms. Relax, enjoy the ride. Know that you’ve got this. You are diving a layer deeper into the process of creating your genuine human experience. Trust me, you are doing so good.
Which brings me to fear. It is therefore only natural for you to experience fear, uncertainty and doubt. These are the feeling that arise every time I do something new. Something that is unknown. These feelings remind us that we are close to something important. Something big. What happens when we breathe into that fear? Does it become excitement, clarity, direction, focus? What happens to it? I have heard it said that fear is excitement without the breath. People often say lean in to your fear. I encourage you to breathe into it instead. Breathe into your fear, give it wings and see what it becomes when you liberate it. It has a message for you and the message is that you are very, very close.
