The great thing about P90X is the level of control you get
over your physical condition.
Life comes at you.
'Life' is simply a series of events and interactions that you have to deal
with on a daily basis. How you handle
those things, and how well you prepare for them, will ultimately determine your
state of mind (from happiness to fear) and the outcome (success or
failure). The best way to ensure that
you are happy and successful is to have a game plan on how you are going to control
the situations you are faced with, or how to avoid them successfully.
No one likes to avoid all the confrontations we will face in
life. It feels a bit cowardly. If you go through life never learning how to
control certain situations, you are at the mercy of those situations. Every situation has the ability to get out of
hand and go bad. Some things can go very
bad. Depending on the situation, and the
possibility/severity of the bad outcome, you could run the gamut of emotions
from nervous, to depressed, to outright fear.
This is the result of feeling like you cannot control the outcome.
On the other end of the scale, if you feel like you can
control a situation, depending on the possibility/severity of a bad outcome,
you could experience emotions from happy, to strong, If you are going to experience a bad
situation, a physical confrontation for
example, and you are strong physically, maybe you are a big person, or maybe
you have a skill at fighting or self defense, then you do not feel much fear
about the situation. Depending on the
possible severity of the outcome, you could feel very strong about facing the
situation. If you think your outcome
will be victorious because your skill to control is that well developed, then
you feel very strong. Your skills allow
you to control the outcome to such a degree that it offsets a lot of the fear
tied to it.
All situations in life, be they expected or unexpected, will
cause you stress and duress if you are not capable of handling/controlling
them.
There are three primary types of control.
There is physical control.
As mentioned previously, it is the ability to take care of oneself
through either peak physical condition or defense. It could be anything from being physically
fit enough that you can handle physically stressful events to being able to
defend yourself with brute force.
There is social or behavioral control. Maybe you have the ability to control social
situations because you have learned how to influence people in positive and
negative ways. Being able to take the
temperature of a room emotionally and navigate those situations is a
skill. It is learned over time. Those who appear to have it naturally were
not born with it. It was simply learned
at a younger age than it was for most.
There is intellectual control. Many outcomes will be determined by how well
you prepare intellectually to meet a certain situation. Think about a crucial test or exam that carries
the weight of 50% of your overall grade.
That one exam will determine whether you pass or fail, regardless of the
body of work you have done up to that point.
That can be very stressful to think about. But, if you prepare for that by studying and working,
the more confident you feel that it will all be fine.
The times in your life when you feel the most successful
will be those times that a difficult event was expected and you came out of it
victorious. Those times will be preceded
by a level of preparation that allowed you to control the outcome. It is in those moments that you realize that
your success and the resulting happiness was all due to you and your hard work.
When you fail to do the work and prepare for situations, you
feel like you ‘dodged a bullet.’ We’ve
all had those situations too. Something
happens we either expected and didn’t prepare for or, worse, something happens
unexpectedly and we were not prepared.
If it comes out okay, we were lucky.
When we think about the possibility of that happening again, we are
nervous and fearful.
I believe that our happiness and success in life comes from
our preparation and readiness for the situations we will face.
As I begin to turn the corner to ‘being old’, the
possibility of debilitating illnesses, be they permanent injury, cancer, or
simple ‘rust’, can rob me of the Quality of Life that I would ideally like to
experience. P90X has helped me handle
the physical events that I feel could be out there facing me. Physical condition is probably the biggest
issue humans face as they get older. As
you age, you begin to realize that you may be as smart as you are ever going to
be. You may continue to learn, but you
pretty much ‘are what you are.’ You also
have developed social skills that are either working or not. You can change them late in the game, but it
isn’t easy because many have already been exposed to you and expect you to
behave in certain ways.
The one thing you can change with effectiveness and result
is your physical condition. That one
thing is completely in your hands and is pretty much resistant to what others may think or feel about it. When
you improve that one area of your life, you feel measurably more strong and
confident because you are not worried about physically debilitating
events. You also are much better playing
the intellectual and behavioral game because the physical worries are an
afterthought.
P90X has given me strength in many ways physically, but has
also been a tremendous benefit to my ability to focus on and control other
areas of my life.
It will do the same for you.
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