BELIEF, GOD and FITNESS

I don’t think that love is a “feeling.” You can feel emotions, but, love is not an emotion. There is no difference between being truly in love and a belief in love. It’s not like I’m saying, “I believe that I love my kids…” no. When we intellectualize it like that, it mutes the reality of it. If you believe in something, you know it to be true. You don’t have to convince yourself of its existence. You don’t have to reinforce it. I don’t have to remind myself that I love my kids, I know that I do and it wouldn’t matter if my entire friend base contacted me to tell me that my love for them isn’t real. I would dismiss them without a second thought.

If I believe that I love someone, it would take more than a couple of dear John letters demonstrating that my love is displaced to convince me to change that belief. I don’t agree with the phrase “falling in and out of love” because it is not applicable to me. If I can fall in and out of love, I was never in love in the first place.  Love is enduring because you know it to be true, you believe it. This is why divorce is so devastating. That belief is uprooted like a sturdy oak demolishing much of what who you are is founded on. If you believe in God, it’s not a matter of if or how or what is. I understand that.

My point in this is to heighten the importance of “belief.” I think we use that word far to routinely and it minimizes its importance and might actually damage our ability to think critically on many subjects. Belief can be a powerful positive thing or an equally powerfully negative thing. It is more difficult to change one’s belief than it is to change someone’s understanding. If you, for example, understand the world to be flat because your perspective dictates that understanding, a simple photo of a round earth can change that perspective and understanding to a new one. However, if you believe that it’s flat, changing that perspective is much more difficult because you have no desire to change your belief, and, like love, you know it to be true. A picture of a round earth only pisses you off and you’d make conspiracy arguments to invalidate the data.

This is why saying things like, “I believe that global warming is or is not real” is absurd. Climate science is just that, science, and science by its structure, must leave room for doubt. If it cannot be disproven, it is not scientific. Science is not “believable,” it is not a faith based ideology. It can only be validated or disproven by data. Again, the misuse of the word “belief.”This doesn’t mean that an understanding of climate change isn’t important. I can understand the data, but, I don’t “believe in it.” There’s a huge difference in that, believe it or not 🙂

The power of belief can be a strong motivator, good or bad. Nations have clashed over belief. Millions had died to preserve belief. Belief is not to be taken lightly.

Many coaches use belief to try and motivate their clients. “All you need to do is believe that you can!” Or, “believe in yourself”. As a spectator, you watch the athletes compete and win and are victorious and they give their victory speech, “Thank you mom for always believing in me. Praise God because I believed in him and believed that I could succeed. I never stopped believing in myself and here I am!” Again, belief is a powerful motivator, and can elicit powerful positive change. We reward ourselves and reward our belief structure with the positive reinforcement. If I believe in something and it comes true, my belief in it MUST be real. But, what happens when we fail?

If belief is rewarded by success, what happens with failure? Belief is then questioned. “I believed in myself, I knew that I would succeed, but, I didn’t. What happened? Did the stars align in the wrong hemisphere? Did God forget about me?” So, we sit and think and think and question our belief structure and become more and more disheartened.

It is very important in health and fitness NOT TO MIX THE PHYSICAL WORLD WITH THE METAPHYSICAL. Not to when it comes to physical performance, body weight, strength, metabolic rate, heart rate, etcetera. I have heard that prayer has very positive effects on the sick. Prayer can also have very positive effects on your physical performance as well. Prayer helps to focus what you need to do. Prayer gives strength and a feeling of well being. Prayer allows you to know that you don’t have to do this alone. However, don’t fall into the trap that your belief in yourself is infallible. You must maintain a way to think critically about your limitations.

Failure is a wonderful thing! Many of you may be reading this because you have tried time and time again to succeed with a workout program. Perhaps you are trying to lose weight. Maybe your doctor has told you over and over that you need to exercise. Or, maybe you want to compete on a race circuit or ride a double century or push yourself to have the conditioning and courage to ride, “The Death Ride.” If you don’t allow yourself to fail, you will never succeed. Failure is a wonderful metric that allows us to define our limits and try to push past them. But, this is nearly an insurmountable task if we are operating on the idea that belief will do it for us. Instead we should understand ourselves, understand where and why we do best, what motivates us, what demotivates us. Understand our physical limitations so that we can constantly seek it. The true path to success is to seek failure. Understanding why you failed is the best means possible to move beyond it and towards success.

Let’s say that our goal is to lose 50 lbs in 6 months. You’ve been convinced that all you have to do is “believe in yourself.” So, you believed in yourself while binge watching reruns of Oprah. You believed in yourself while munching on tortilla chips and drinking a super sized coke. You believed in yourself when you finished your walk early because you have other things to do. Then, 6 months go by and you gained 20lbs. What happened? Why is the world out to ruin my life? Why have I been failed? Nothing works!

Abandoning critical thought is destructive. “I’m sitting here watching Oprah. Why am I choosing failure? Damn it, Paul, get up and do something!” Now I’m thinking to myself, “why am I just sitting there? What’s motivating me to do nothing? Did I get enough sleep? Am I happy? Is life rewarding? What do I need to do to move beyond this?” So, I’m snacking on tortilla chips. I’m failing at maintaining my diet. Why? Am I bored? Get up and do something. Am I depressed? Do something that makes me happy. Am I starving? Eat breakfast and snack throughout the day. If I’m ending my workout early, why? Am I too tired to complete it? Yes? Great! I can shoot higher next time. Am I too busy? Develop a strategy to finish your work on time. Did I lose 50lbs? No? I only lost 30. I’ll try harder and do better next round.

The difference between these two scenarios should be self evident, but, it’s amazing how many coaches and how many athletes continue to use the first model. The ability to critically evaluate your performance and make adjustments is about the most important thing that you can do in order to successfully set and accomplish goals. Regulate your beliefs to those things you know to be true like love, God or the goodness of people. Don’t manipulate belief to convince yourself of something that you want to be true. Let the results do this. Us athletes know this reality, but, many of us still pander to the marketable ideology of “belief.” It just sounds good and it draws on our inherent desire to make the intangible, tangible. It makes the extremely difficult seem easy. Buy this magic pill and believe in its effectiveness. The shake weight works if you only believe in yourself. These are gross misrepresentations of the reality. Hard work, self discipline, self realization, and an ability to be vulnerable and admit to failure are your keys to success.