P90X: "Easter - The Ultimate 'Lead by Example' Moment" Day 63 of 90

What is it about we human beings that, in order to really believe and absorb a message, we need to see an act of extremity?  Easter time, like Christmas, is a time of reflection for me.  As I was going through my P90X routine last night, I thought, “If Jesus could hang on a cross for 6 hours, I can do this for an hour.”  I think a lot about the fact that a person like Jesus, who went around preaching with such a strong and well thought out message of peace, had to ultimately die on a cross for people to listen.  Not ‘hear’ the message…listen to the message.  Before all the non-Christians hit the “close” button on their web browser, this blog post does relate to my exercise as well as to a lot of things in life.

When a message is well thought out and presented in words, what is it about us that stops it from really being absorbed?  Is it skepticism?  Ignorance?  Too much noise in the personal filters of our life?  So often, we hear someone trying to give us a message and all we hear is a bunch of words.  It can make all the sense in the world.  We listen and look at the messenger and say, “Yes, I get it…thanks.”  And we walk away.  The message is often not even committed to your deep memory, no matter what its value.  Like a computer, it sits there in instant memory and is never written to your hard drive memory.  When you go to sleep at night, you reboot and that instant memory is wiped for the next day.  The message is lost.

Words have always had the ability to seriously change a life.  But the fact remains that we human beings don’t really listen well to them.  In the past twenty five years, as the information age has evolved, this devaluing of words has become even more prevalent.  There is so much noise coming at us day to day.  Television with 900 channels, the internet, radio, billboards…it is non-stop.  How does a valuable message even bubble to the surface of such an ocean of noise?  More and more, a good or great message has to be accompanied by an act.  Someone has to take action based on the message.  Words have power.  They contain the basis for the belief.  All the reasoning, all the information you need to know is in the words.  But to truly motivate human beings, that must be accompanied by a demonstration of commitment.

For almost all of us, the action actually says more than the words.  For a great many, they simply follow and pay attention to the action without EVER listening to the message.  The action is what we latch onto.  The message could actually be muddled and a bit troubling…but we will pay attention to the act and the half-baked message.  This, also, is something magnified in the information age.  Those who present the messages to you, those who make money from the amount of attention you pay to a particular message, then wrap the information they give you with the most salacious and attention grabbing actions.  You don’t believe me?  Go to a website for news or grab your newspaper.  Read the headlines and the top articles.  Are the most valuable messages at the top?  Is Kim Kardashian’s divorce really more important than people dying in Darfur?

I often wonder, “If Jesus died on a cross in 2012, what would happen?”  It's troubling to think that he would be a headline today, a follow-up story tomorrow, and then be replaced by the winner of the Masters Golf Tournament on Sunday.

Maybe we just simply don’t have the time to sort through the messages of value.  Maybe we have simply stopped developing the thinking skills required to carefully slice and dice up a message and really understand it’s value.  Maybe though, just maybe, it goes deeper than that.

Anybody can say words.  It takes a really strong person of drive and character to commit to something.  Commitment requires action.  Action gets the attention.  Action is what turns your message into a headline.  It’s one thing to “talk the talk.”  But when you “walk the talk,” you open eyes.  Some of the greatest messages, and some of the most atrocious ones, were accompanied by acts that got people’s attention.  Think about that for a moment.

In 2012, action needs to have one more thing going for it.  It needs to be consistently done, over and over.  It can’t be just a sound bite today because it will be nothing two weeks from now.  It has to be a suit you put on and wear every day.

So whatever it is about the human experience, we need to see someone commit to a belief before we notice.  Sometimes, and we can think about this at Easter, we need to see someone willing to die on a cross before we truly listen.  As Jesus died, so the scripture reads, a man was heard to say, “Truly, this man was the son of God.”  Now, whether you have a Christian belief system or not, you have to react to that and say, “You didn’t notice the words, the preaching, the carrying of the cross over dirt in scorching heat, all done while wearing a crown of thorns…but when he died for his message, the light went on?”  It's a lot to demand before we begin to truly listen.

What does it truly take for us to begin hearing messages and really seeing their value without being assisted by extreme acts?  Good question.

Until something changes, we all are faced with this human behavioral fact.  If you have something to say, you better be willing to put action to it.

Now, before I write the next paragraph and upset people about the analogy I am about to make, please understand that it is not a comparison nor is it something meant to be even close to Jesus.  It is a small, very small, depiction of my point.  It is a statement about the human life we all experience and what it takes for ANY message to be heard.  If Jesus had such a hard time making his point, what chance do the rest of us mere mortals have?

I know one thing about all the words I have spoken about how to be more healthy, lose weight and get fit.  The words are read more when they are wrapped by pictures of me depicting real results.  It’s not enough for me to tell people how they can do it.  They have to see me do it.

And so it goes.  You have to commit to action if your message, any message you have to impart, is going to be heard.  We cannot change human nature so we must demonstrate our belief every day and show everyone that it can be done.

And so, on Easter, you can ask yourself these questions.

“Will I begin to listen for myself to messages given to me, and truly think about their value and meaning?”

“Is the message that I want to pass on so valuable and important to others that I am willing to commit to it fully?”

While you ponder those things, don’t eat too much chocolate.  It’s bad for you.  But you won’t listen to the message, so know that I won’t be eating any.  I hope you are smiling at that.

Happy Easter to all of you who celebrate it, and Commit.

P90X: "Controlling Your Fate" Day 60 of 90

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.