Affirmations are phrases or statements of intent which you can repeat to help you stick to your journey or ‘way of the warrior

An affirmation can become a written statement of intent too. These are really powerful as they set up an unconscious process which can then lead to better decision making across many areas of your life.

Can a written statement of intent make you 10 x richer than 97% of people who don’t’ write them?

The Harvard MBA study, supposedly done in 1979 was thought to assess how written and planned for goals affected outcomes later in life. While some believe the study was real, others have intermingled the research with a supposed study done at Yale.

In the study, the students were asked, “Have you set clear, written goals for your future and made plans to accomplish them?

Of those who were asked, only 3% of the graduates had written goals and plans. 13% of the students had goals, but those goals were not in writing.

84% of students polled had no specific goals at all.

Ten years later the students were supposedly interviewed once again. The findings were astonishing. The 13% of those who had goals, but not written them down, were actually earning twice as much when compared to the 84% who had no goals at all.

The 3% who had written down goals were earning ten times the other 97% put together.

If these results are indeed true, they are astonishing in the fact they clearly show that setting goals, even goals you don’t write down, make a big difference when it comes to success in life.

If we start to apply these phrases and written statements of intent coming out of lockdown, we can go back through a process of goal setting to narrow down our main focus. Today I’m focussing on affirmations in the main, later this week I’ll send through a post on the goal setting process which is really worth repeating a frequent intervals. Daily affirmations, monthly targets and goals as well as longer term life goals which might stretch forwards, 5, 10, 15 years and beyond.

Lean people don’t skip workouts. Or lean people workout even when they don’t want to is likely true, turning this into an affirmation would be “I never skip workouts” or “I workout even when I (and everyone else) doesn’t want to”.

“Lean mean fighting machine, make the cover of a magazine”….. to be fair I’m still working on this one. Progress not perfection.

A fighter might have something they adhere to like “each time my opponent attacks, I reply with an equally veracious and disruptive technique” “I never fail to reply”.

Fairness and equality in every human exchange. Except in war and sport. There’s only one winner.

Another quote from Einstein I like is the make things simple but no simpler than that one. I guess for me this means being able to answer things on the back of a postcard. If you can’t explain something in simple terms it’s normally because you don’t understand it fully.

Maintaining motivation in the face of adversity; maintaining endurance in the face of fatigue. Indeed endurance in a fatigued state is the corner stone of maximal sporting and life performance. Fatigue resistance or hardiness, resilience these all require a well functioning adrenal system.

Keep this positive nature and approach requires an abundance mindset. Rather than a scarcity mindset. This can be hard to maintain sometimes as if it’s not reciprocated the abundant mindset needs replenishment from somewhere. This can be from the ability to self-regulate and self-replenish energy stores. Sound nutrition is essential to allow this to happen.

I’ve spoken about fatigue before – you can read in more detail here. You can run out of muscle energy, you can run out of oxygen in sufficient amounts, you can accumulate too much lactate to even move sometimes. Also, you can run out of central drive, motivation and the signals from the brain to the muscles can become depleted.

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If you have the right intent, the right team, the right affirmations, rituals and support system both nutritional, emotional and spiritual.

I mentioned before being first to say hello and be nice…. You can spread wonderful energy through being positive and enthusiastic….you can be a leader on the pitch and drive your soldiers to dig deeper.

It’s harder to do this under a state of fatigue.

Fatigue can present itself in terms of worries or things which contribute to your stress cup getting full, or empty if these areas are lacking;

Not in any order of priority but here’s some important areas which we can take for granted but should also help keep the replenishing, growth and abundant mindset focussed with energy giving intent…

• Sleep
• Roof over head
• Balancing training with recovery
• Good nutrition
• Sense of purpose
• Financial stability
• Partner
• Family
• Bedroom action
• Kid support
• Cooking
• Holidays (Financial)
• Friends
• Tactile (bedroom) cuddles
• Complements - on visual appearance
• Nice things and nice times
• Consuming enough antioxidant rich foods

Physically the areas which can be supported through nutrition are varied;

• Brain CNS
• Muscles lactate buffering
• B-vitamins for nervous system and energy production
• Inflammation regulators
• Injury and recovery enhancers

Making the choices to make your body look different, planning them is the easy bit, sticking to them is the challenge.

Self-regulate through goal setting and daily affirmations, develop some intrinsic motivation techniques; go back to your affirmations, your value structure, your goals.

Stone - gathering moss…. We all know the person who thrives off a pep talk. Off they go full of motivation, only to run out of steam shortly afterwards – you can keep pep talking them up, but ultimately if they are not sufficiently motivated this person will be a constant source of struggle for you to maintain;

Like Einstein said these people will often come back with a reason why you can’t do something, what you need is a team around you who come up with solution-based approaches – surprise you with new ideas. To do this they need to be involved in the processes and motivated on the level which is important to them, recognition, financial and so on.

A team who can adapt to a new attack strategy in real time requires the very best powerful leaders. Younger teams who lack leadership fall apart when presented with unusual changes in energy or attacking capabilities. Also fighters can disrupt their opponents by breaking the rhythm of attack which fighter can fall into.

Intrinsic motivation

Extrinsic motivation……

Intrinsically motivated exercise programmes result is much greater levels of body composition change.

Final thoughts

The glue that holds the body together is collagen. The structures in the body are made up of amino acids and minerals. The bone needs minerals for hardness and collagen for flexibility.

The glue that keeps you bouncing back and motivated to continue is called ‘true grit’

Understanding yourself…. Your opponent….

The sword of “no sword” Master Tessu said some words to this effect, if you don’t understand yourself – it’s going to be difficult to win. If you understand yourself but don’t understand your opponent, you may win you may lose. 

Understand yourself and understand your opponent then victory is almost certain. He also spoke really well about projecting your energy into your opponent this encourages a flow state where you can read and anticipate their next move, easier in one on one battles. An area Arnold Oborotov excelled in when he took apart the current World Champion last year who was 26kg heavier.

Looking at elite sports, team sports you can see why this works. Analysis of opponent’s traits, strengths and weaknesses is a core element of performance and winning.

Taking care of your own stuff first is the base where from you can build into next levels of elite performance.

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https://positivepsychology.com/benefits-goal-setting/