I know a thing or two about winning, equally I know a lot about failing, the importance of failing to learn, and the greater importance of learning to fail. This is about translating every challenge into an opportunity and turning shit to sugar in life no matter what the circumstances.
Ultimately unless the resulting impact is death, everything else is psychological and this today is all about the importance of knowing that, and knowing to never back down in pursuit of your goals or to quit on your own journey of self mastery and life exploration.
Take a moment to consider Matt Fitzgerald's simple question How Bad Do You Want It?
In every race, something within each athlete (something we may now specify as perception of effort) poses a simple question: How bad do you want it?
To realise your potential as an athlete, you must respond with some version of:
I WANT MORE. And then you have to prove it. It’s easy in principle, hard in practice, much harder than figuring out how to train, what to eat, and which shoes to wear.
Here’s my promise to you: After you’ve read this book, your answer to the most important question in endurance sports and life will never be the same.”
Over to Matt Fitzgerald a journalist, coach, sports nutritionist and author of more than 20 books. The book I am referencing today aligns to so much other research and also to everything I have personally been focusing on to develop my own Opportunity Mindset over many years. This great book poses one very simple question. "How bad do you want it?!"
This morning I am sharing notes from his amazing book on THE PSYCHOBIOLOGICAL MODEL and the role this plays in eliminating all the excuses we like to tell ourselves about why we can't do something, anything in fact. While we all need to make incremental progress, the ultimate decision of how far we go is decided by ourselves. It's all in the mind, it's all our decision and that is a hard lesson to learn. Anywhere we are not getting the results we want, we have a made a decision that we do not want it bad enough, and we have stopped pushing for more. We made a choice to stop.
In the book Matt walks us through the different scientific perspectives on how to tap into our latent potential with a deep dive into what’s known as the “Psychobiological Model.” This all about a no excuses scientifically proven approach to Mastering the psychology of Mind over Muscle. The really annoying thing here is that while suffering and enduring the pain of training, we now must accept that it is literally all in the mind, and all in our control. Very provocative yes, and even more so when feeling all that inevitable pain and knowing that this is all just the mind wanting to deny the truth. We are choosing to push on or choosing to stop.
While the book is using the science behind endurance racing and elite athletes, this applies to everything in life that requires effort on our part in overcoming the self developed psychological blueprints we have drawn up through the experiences we have experienced during our own lives. This applies equally to running as it does to losing weight, being a certain way, how we treat others, how we show up in the world, what we do to make the world a better place/or not, how much time we have, how much success we have in our lives, what we want to achieve in all areas of our existence and leaning into to having ABSOLUTE PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY (APR), knowing there are simply no more excuses. It's all in the ability to win over your own mind, finding that Bulldog mentality, starring into yourself using inner engineering to simply refuse to negotiate with weakness. "I am not backing off".
Yes, I didn't like hearing it either when it first came to me and I wanted to scream bullshit. I looked at it like my friend here!
Then I realised I had just proven the theory, so I learned how to stop my own mind sulking about the inconvenient truth and got on with it. I still find myself doing that a lot on a daily basis, the good thing now however is knowing how to spot it, then how to take the action, accept the feeling and welcome the healing!
So let's go to the author and look into the question How Bad Do You Want It?
There are two ways to win a race Matt tells us. You can win by bringing greater physical capacity to the race, or you can win by utilising a greater portion of slightly lesser physical capacity within the race. Rarely do champion endurance athletes credit their physical capacity for their success. More often, they insist that their advantage lies not in having more to give but in being able to give more of what they have. Past generations of exercise scientists dismissed such talk as magical thinking, yet the psychobiological model of endurance performance gives credence to the wisdom of the champions and suggests that the ability to actuate physical capacity is no less important than physical capacity itself.
When you start a race and this can be any race in life, any challenge, anything that you want so bad and yet know it is going to be really hard to achieve. You are now standing before a bed of hot coals and your mind is asking you How Bad Do You Want It?
A race is like a fire walk and all winning is a fire walk in your mind like nothing else imaginable, this is when you really start to test your own limits and your mind will burn with anxiety, self doubt, stresses and suffering that cause so much physical and emotional pain it becomes just to difficult to continue, it feels impossible and this can be all day every day sometimes. It's relentless in telling you it can't be done. Yet now we know it can!
And it is at that this point, the point when you feel there is nothing left, no way you can take another step, this is when we we ask again. How Bad Do You Want It? And you better be prepared to answer boldly, I want it more than my upper limiting beliefs.
All the enlightened researchers and there are many, are all now willing to concede that the great Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi had it right when he said almost a century ago, ‘Mind is everything. Muscles are pieces of rubber. All that I am, I am because of my mind.’”
According to Matt Fitzgerald and all the research now providing overwhelming support for this work, is that the most important discovery of the brain revolution in endurance sports, and the most important truth you can know as an endurance athlete in the greatest of all endurance races, LIFE, is this:
One cannot improve as an endurance athlete except by changing one’s relationship with perception of effort.”
At the the far end of your effort perception stands a wall. The wall represents your ultimate physical limit. You will never reach it. Your goal is merely to get as close to the wall as possible, for the closer you get, the better you perform. As the race progresses, your bare feet press into the searing coals again and again. Each step is more painful than the one before. (Don’t forget: Pain is different from perceived effort. This is a metaphor.) Eventually, you come to the limit of your pain tolerance and you are compelled to leap off the glowing embers. Like running 300 miles in the desert, or anywhere you chose, the distance between the point you stopped and the wall is a measure of how well you performed relative to your full potential.
Physical fitness determines where the wall that represents your physical limit is placed. Mental fitness determines how close you are able to get to that limit in competition. Mental fitness is a collection of coping skills, behaviours, thoughts, and emotions that help athletes master the discomfort and stress of the athletic experience, mainly by increasing tolerance for perceived effort and by reducing the amount of effort that is perceived at any given level of intensity of exercise. What we call the new psychology of endurance sports aims to cultivate mental fitness by helping athletes understand the challenges they face from a psychobiological perspective and by showing them how to emulate the ways in which the most successful athletes cope with these challenges.
THE PSYCHOBIOLOGICAL MODEL is a newer model of endurance performance that integrates the body and the mind through the brain. This alternative theory was dubbed the ‘psychobiological model’ by its primary developer Samuele Marcora.
According to the model, exhaustion occurs during real-world endurance competition not when the body encounters hard physical limits such as total glycogen depletion but rather when the athlete experiences the maximum level of perceived effort he is willing or able to tolerate. Hard physical limits do exist, of course, however no athlete ever reaches them because the purely psychological limit of perceived effort tolerance is always encountered first. The seemingly inexorable slowing that occurs at the approach of exhaustion is not mechanistic, like a car running out of gas, albeit voluntary.
Personally I believe I have always wanted it (life development and self mastery) more badly than most and simply continue on that journey of growth every day. I want to know how far I can go and have no willingness to stop. I fail often, I stop, I moan, I complain and sometimes cry with desperation, misery and frustration. I do not however QUIT. EVER.
After navigating my way out of homelessness at 15 years old I have continually advanced through a wild life of challenging circumstances, many of my own making to test my limits and push my boundaries, and many delivered by others who tried to sabotage me and have simply helped test my limits and push my boundaries. So thank you to anyone who stood in my way and anyone planning on it in future. Cheers to you!
In recent times over the last 7 years I founded Positive Transformation, made some huge life commitments to myself and also took on the steepest, most dynamic section of the Nile, and won. In taking on the Nile I became one of a few rafters to complete Murchison Falls, bringing the total number of people to complete the river up to about 25, roughly .06% of the 4,000+ who have stood atop Mt. Everest.
I have always been a believer in the power of the mind and today I am on a journey to live as a great husband, father, friend, and leader wanting to see a better world through collaboration while becoming the World Super League Kickboxing Champion within 3 years and positively impacting the lives of a billion people within the next decade.
In the last 3 years (at 44 years old) I decided to challenge myself to get a blackbelt in kickboxing from no belt and with no experience at the most well respected club with the highest standards, this is now achieved. I also start competing on the national and international stage winning to sliver medals in both my first competitive fights this year at 47 years old against the young heavy weight fighters in their 20's/30's, and now my plan to beat them all and win a world championship before I am 50.
Improving mindset is big part of my life. All in, all day, every day.
As I move through this journey I am learning more now than ever before about the power of the mind and how that any person has the power to endure through any process and win, it is however ultimately all a mind game and knowing that all limits on what can be achieved are set in our own minds by ourselves, no exceptions and no excuses.
So when you are taking on your next big life challenge mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually, in any form and any area of life, just as you run our of steam and feel you can't take another step know you are at 40% of your potential and ask the question.
How Bad Do You Want It?
Frankly the answer may simply be I do not want this thing bad enough to endure that level of suffering required and that is fine, that is a choice. All I am saying here is that we must know and accept we are making a choice. It isn't the world, the economy, the person in the office, your partner, the trainer, the etc etc etc. It is a simple choice. Your choice. Own it.
In conclusion I refer back to the quote from Matt with my only small adaption based on how I approach my own life with a 240X Opportunity Mindset.
To realise your full human potential over the course of a lifetime, not during an hour, a day, a week, a month or a year, you must respond with some version of:
I WANT MORE.
I want more of everything it takes to achieve my goal no matter what that is, no matter how much it hurts, or what level of suffering is to be endured, it's worth it!
And if it isn't worth making those sacrifices then make a personal choice to quit.
You own your mind, or your mind owns you. It's that simple.
Change one mind. Change one life.
Positive Transformation.
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