EXERCISES
Better a life of discipline than one of regret.
Can you begin to imagine how important the exercises are to accomplishing your transformation? Imagine you read a book on flying, but took no lessons, how would that work for you? Most who play golf, tennis, or ski, take lessons that involve drills and practice.
Most likely there has been something in your life that you practiced. Even if it was just a game of baseball or basketball you played in the park when young, your skill improved over time with the number of times you played. This is no different.
No matter what you think of the narrative material in this book, it is worthless until you begin to exercise.
Your heroes didn’t get that way overnight, except in the movies, and neither did the actors who play those parts.
Often times comic book super heroes have a life changing event, and suddenly they go from 0 to 60. Captain America is injected, enters a machine a nerd and comes out a hero just like microwave popcorn. Peter Parker is bitten by a spider, and so it goes. Real heroes get the way they are by training everyday. The same is true for the actors who play those parts. They have worked very hard to get that way, unlike the character they play who just happens to pull the Sword out of the stone.
The idea is to make a small improvement everyday. The Japanese word for this is kaizen. This begins each morning when you do the mnemonic exercise. And during the day when you do something better, and note it, and give yourself credit for it. This isn’t like going from a couch potato one day to doing pushups to exhaustion the next. It can be as small as just being more focused when you brush your teeth.
Small improvements everyday.
You want to find one thing each day, and once that day, do it better. The training program inherent in this book is built around this concept. There is no one thing that is difficult, except the commitment to the program. The commitment and vision of being the hero of your life. Right now there are a number of activities that you hopefully do each day. Waking and sleeping, showering, driving somewhere on a regular basis and then walking about. You can make slight changes in these day to day activities and they will, over time transform you.
Each position has a very simple exercise. I know that doing “simple” exercises daily is not easy. I struggle the same as you. After you do an exercise, tell yourself, “That is me,” doing it better. And then visualize the change and direction of improvement.
The point is that learning and change take time. These habits you are working for are metaphorically, if not literally, groves in your brain that you must wear in with day after day practice.
All the beautiful people standing on the podiums of the world, smiling and getting their awards or medals, have thousands of hours of practice leading up to that point. This is why there are so few of them. You already knew this. What we are discussing here is that you can make your way to your own personal podium by using the time you normally spend in a trance.
Consider that the average driver will spend up to 30,000 hours of their life behind the wheel. What might you become if you could harvest 10,000 of those hours? How can you harvest the hours of your day-to-day life that normally you spend in a trance or meaningless self-talk?
The exercises that follow will do that for you. Go ahead and take a look now if you want, but they are somewhat Position specific. So as you study one of the positions of the mnemonic, I will link that section to one of these exercises.