“Attention this flight has been canceled”, an immediate wave of anger and frustration moves over me. I immediately hop on the phone to find a way home, trying to manage the damage and the time we will be sitting in an airport. This was the scenario that I was encountered with when coming back from my honeymoon with my beautiful wife Katy!
I will admit I was feeling bad for myself, I was annoyed, short-tempered, and snippy. I started thinking of all the things I needed to do when I got home and it was just building in my head and I was getting madder by the minute. Then Katy looked at me and said “what’s your problem, we get to sit here together a little bit longer just you and I”, then she flashed me a smirking smile.
This got me thinking of an awesome blog post that I read a while back by Comp train and Ben Bergeron check it out Control vs. Concern.
The title was “The only 5 things you should focus on”. Looking at how this idea was happening before me and what can I do to help take that advice and use it. This article discusses mostly the correlation between competition and people going to the CrossFit Games. Let’s be honest most of us will not be doing that. But how can we take this and utilize it in our lives and our daily activities?
The 5 things you will see are inside the center circle below are what you can control and the outside part of the circle is all the random things that can happen that we can’t control or otherwise known as concerns. These are things like traffic, flights, the attitude of others, weather, and a million other things. Why do we let it affect us negatively? Rather than looking at what it is doing to us, maybe we think about how we can respond. We can find the most success in everything that we do when we learn to manage what we can control and let go of our concerns.
We should look to focus on things we can control and how it is going to help us build towards being a better human. Your time in the gym is up to you. Are you pushing yourself, are you shaving reps, are you moving in a full range of motion, are you smiling at others, are you eating what is best for you? These are all smaller details that make up the larger part of your days, but the idea here is to focus and control what you can, not what you can’t. If I get upset because someone on the other side of the gym is giving themselves RX when they weren’t completing the reps as prescribed. Does this actually affect you? Perhaps it is a nice reminder to you to move better, to do mobility, or to go to bed earlier so you can play with your kids tomorrow. How this plays out is totally up to you and paying attention to details is important, just be sure they are the right details for you.
Our challenge to you is to find what are concerns in your life and how are they controlling you and rather focusing on what you can control and let that empower you to help you move forward. Take 5 minutes and write down 5 concerns and 5 things that are in your focus circle. Remember at the end of the day the only person that can affect you is you.
