Motivation

 

In bodybuilding, and any fitness program, it is absolutely imperative that you find that one thing in your life that gives you the willpower to do the things you need to do day in and day out. You need that thing that burns you to your very core and makes you want to power through your daily tasks of grinding in the gym.....and in the kitchen. It's easy to get hyped up for a fitness program for the first day, the first week, or even the first month. But what will motivate you to stay focused for the next couple of months, or even the next couple of years? What will put a fire inside you on the days you have absolutely no motivation or energy to go to the gym? How are you going to deal with the impossible tasks of refusing instant gratifcation when you're no longer riding the excitement you felt when you first started your program? What will you do when your friends / boyfriends / girlfriends start trying to take up the time you should be spending working towards achieving success and try to get you to do things that contradict that success? These are things that you need to think about VERY seriously.

You need to see the bigger picture of things. You need to want to achieve your goal more than anything else in life. When your body starts sensing that you are trying to make it change, and put it out of its comfort zone, it will do everything it possibly can to put you back into a state of laziness and make you think that everything is a much dire situation than it really is unless you stop working out or bettering yourself. A lot of people don't like to look at their mind as their own worst enemy, but in a lot of ways......it totally is.

That's why you need to find the thing that elicits a greater emotional state than your desire to eat, sleep, breathe, or do other essential life functions and pleasurable feelings. It's the only way that you're going to stay committed, and you need to find out what that is for you. I can't decide what that is for you, and everyone's is different. For me, the pain I felt not having any friends growing up, being rejected, not being taken seriously, not fitting in, and having no dominant skills lives inside me even to this day. Some will say that I need to let go and that trying to get "revenge" or feeding on negative energy is a bad thing.....but to me, that's not important. What's important in my opinion is finding the thing in life that produces the strongest emotions within you, and turning that energy into assertiveness and positive action.

I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes of all time, by my favorite bodybuilder, Kai Greene:

"I think that the people in life that are.....successful.......are the people that have, searched within themselves and found....the reason...to get up....the reason to go to bed at night.......the reason to work hard.......and the reason to deny, immediate self gratifcation when the time comes.

The people that succeed and achieve at accomplishing any one of their goals, I believe, are the people that are able to tap into other levels of their personal concentration and belief in self that, otherwise, we could take for granted."