I used to think that mental attitude, PMA was a very metaphysical thing and that when you pursued difficult endeavors it was like mind over matter. In other words simply willing your body to go to that next level.
While there is something to be said for that idea, it is only one piece of the puzzle.
Mental Game Coach John Ellsworth says - train your mind to focus on productive thought
What I do know from my experience is that I can learn to love just about anything at this point in my life by no longer giving in to "being a hater"
I think most of us have probably been at a point in our life
where, we hated work, no matter what it was.
House work, home work, doing the dishes, football practice, reading,
just about anything that does not elicit instant reward with out going through
a lot of effort.
Not like the the things that come easy in life.
Such as Eating ice cream, sleeping, watching TV, playing most games, you
get the idea
I was no different, growing up I wanted to play football,
but hated the practices and the conditioning that was required as a
prerequisite. I loved to have money, but
hated almost every minute of what ever I had to do to earn it, whether it was delivering newspapers, working
in my parents office, putting up hay at the horse barn, or my various food
service jobs. I was a prisoner of not
knowing how to apply the principle of love
conquers all.
Then when I was about 22 a funny thing happened. One day I just woke up and realized, that I
was going to have to work the rest of my life and there was simply no way
around it.
I made up my mind right then, that I was just going to make
the best of my job work hard and try to make the days go by as fast as
possible.
I was working my way through my final year of college and
had just been married, so I had a pretty full schedule. I spent my days working for a tree service
dragging and chipping brush, plus using a chain saw and at night was doing my
final year at Purdue.
A funny thing happened on the way to graduation. I not only started looking forward to going
to work, through rain and sleet and dark of night, but I also started to love
the work that I was putting into studying.
I thought for a long time that this conscious decision to love my job
was a one trick pony that only applied to my employment and did not at the time
realize what had actually happened. All
I knew until recently was that I loved to work no matter what kind of job I
had, I could get up, not dread going and work all day almost without ever
watching a clock. I loved to study loved to learn and was constantly teaching
myself new things and didn’t put the 2 together
A few years later, my wife picked up bodybuilding as a
hobby. I had lifted weights in High
School because I had to if I wanted to be on the football team, but I had never
ever enjoyed it. It was a lot of work
and it hurt.
But I wanted to spend time with my wife and do things that
she enjoyed, so I joined the gym with her.
I started out slow, but went to the gym very consistently and before
long, I was not only getting great results, I was actually looking forward to
going to the gym. In fact, this was the
only thing that would actually make me watch the clock at work, because I could
not wait to get to the gym and put my self into serious pain and muscle
burn. I even learned to enjoy the
muscular soreness that would follow hard workouts. I thought to myself,,, this is weird and I
would not have believed it, had it not
actually happened to me.
For a long time, I
thought this must be like drinking black coffee or beer. It was just something that you had to develop
a taste for.
Then 4 years ago, I started bicycle riding. I was only doing this for a Juvenile
diabetes fundraising ride and I planned to only do it for a year. I had never liked bicycle riding all that
much in the past, but I bought a decent bike, had the fortunate accident of having
my speedometer set to kilometers thought I was riding really far and fast and
was having a ball.
Once again, I made a love connection. I sort of realized what had happened but
still was not quite understanding the process of what was causing me to love
things that I had previously hated and all of the pain or discomfort that is
associated with them
That was when the skies opened up and I had my epiphany at
Indiana Urology but I was sitting in the
waiting room and I saw this Runners World magazine and on the cover I noticed
an article called “Learn to love Running”
I was intrigued. I had always passionately hated running.
So I read the article and the upshot was that the trick to
learning to love running was to look forward to your runs, don’t work to hard
at first and your body will start a hormonal surge of chemicals called
endorphins.
Our bodies use these chemicals to help us to adapt to
stressfull and painful situations for the purpose of survival, and as a side
effect can cause you to look forward to and actually enjoy those situation. - WOW!!
A light bulb lit above my head and all of a sudden the
mystery was revealed. It’s the endorphins and they are triggered by love. I
thought what the heck, I’ve always hated running, but I really need to give this
a try. If it was possible to trick myself into liking something that I had
previously disliked, in order to improve my health, I might not only be on to
something, but what a great thing to be able to share with others if I could
teach them to do the same.
Guess what? It worked
and now I feel like I can’t live without running. I have applied the same principle to swimming
with the same result. I believe that I
can do this with anything.
My next step is to share this with others, who for one
reason or another hate their job, want to get in shape. Want to learn how to
play musical instrument, want an education
But hate the work involved to get what they want. The list goes on. It literally can work for anything that you currently hate. Ask anyone who I coach or who rides with me. Don't say I hate hills or you will get corrected! You love hills and you need to tell your body that so that it can get with the program.
This principle can be applied to just about any process that
is required to reach an objective. In fact the best way to reach any objective no matter how large is to learn to love the process that will get you there!
This is not nano tech
people the Beatles really got this one right , “ All you need is love”
Learn to love and you can do the impossible, Through Love, I
can now conquer all things, at least the mundane ones.
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If you have a cycling subject you would like me to write about or if you have cycling questions feel free to post here or contact me.
I live to help you learn to love all things cycling!
Michael