Hockey legend Wayne Gretzky is credited for saying “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” There are other versions of the saying: You can’t hit ‘em if you don’t swing at ‘em, You can’t reap what you don’t sow, and simply, Nothing ventured, nothing gained. It’s a pretty simple idea. You’ll never know what’s possible until you put yourself out there and give it a shot. But for a lot of people, putting yourself out there and taking a shot is not as straightforward as it sounds. In fact, I would venture to say that most people go their entire lives never realizing all they’re capable of doing and being simply because they don’t know how to take that big shot in the first place.
Making change or trying something new is hard to do. If it was easy, there wouldn’t be a 50 billion dollar self-help industry. But why is it so hard? We know we’re carrying around an extra twenty pounds and we know exactly what we need to do about it: manage the calorie intake, get to the gym. Something so simple and seemingly easy to do yet, as we speak, millions of people are completely incapable of executing. What goes on between the thinking of a thing and actually doing the thing? If you ask a million different people, you’ll get ten million different reasons, but when we pull back to the 40,000 foot view, we can see it all starts in the same place. If you’ve been around awhile, say it along with me: The nervous system!
At the end of the day, human beings simply are not hardwired for change. In fact, just the opposite. The software in our operating system is designed to do one thing: stay alive. And the easiest way to do that? Maintain status quo. Status quo is familiar. Status quo is predictable. Status quo is safe. Bottom line. Even if your status quo looks like the seventh level of hell to someone else, it’s what your nervous system knows and it will do whatever it takes to hang onto it. See, for hundreds of thousands of years, what constituted a good day for a human was still being alive at the end of it. Living a good long life meant seeing your 40th birthday. In fact, until about five minutes ago, evolutionarily speaking, the world was an incredibly hostile environment to live in. The surest way to stay alive was to keep your head down, stick to the middle of the tribe, and don’t rock the boat. There were certainly outliers, daredevils, risk takers. I mean, someone had to be the first to open an oyster and say, “Yeah it looks like a pile of snot, but I’m going to eat it anyway.” And we’re all the better for it.
The same holds true today. There are the people out there who just seem naturally inclined, even programmed, to be risk takers, while most people are content (or convince themselves they’re content) with keeping their heads down, sticking to the middle of the tribe, and not rocking the boat. So when someone decides to, say, lose 20 pounds because they want to be around to play with their grandkids, what seems like a simple proposition on the surface becomes an insurmountable impossibility. Because the nervous system doesn’t engage in long-term planning. It’s not interested in quality of life ten, twenty, or thirty years from now. Its entire focus is on keeping us alive from one minute to the next. That’s it.
So if you’ve spent the last twenty years eating a less than optimal diet, and exercise is a vague concept that your doctor keeps recommending, then getting your body into tip-top shape is going to present a challenge. The front part of your brain might be raring to go, but that prehistoric nugget, deep in the brain, is going to put up a hell of a fight. That part of the brain doesn’t know a carrot from a grilled cheese sandwich. All it knows is, Are we alive right now? Check. Ergo, keep doing what we’ve been doing. Try to change things up and we’ve got a problem.
Going to the gym a few times a week isn’t a preposterous proposition. You even feel excited to get in there and start pushing some weights. But when it comes time to actually make it happen, you start feeling uncomfortable, even a little anxious. You find reasons to put it off, no biggie, you’ll get started tomorrow. Then days, then weeks go by. The problem has nothing to do with the gym. We could be talking about starting a new career or going on a first date. What’s happening is the nervous system saying, “Hey! I don’t know what’s going on here, but it’s not what we usually do and it’s making me feel queasy.”
The good news is, you don’t have to live under the thumb of your nervous system. You can never fully control your nervous system, nor would you want to. To a certain extent, we’ve got to let it do its thing. But we can certainly learn to manage the nervous system. To understand how it functions, why it does what it does, and how to shift its state to take on the challenges in front of us. Like getting to the gym for an hour a day. This is what I do everyday. I’ve dedicated my life to teaching people how to get in the driver’s seat and create lives they had only dreamed of before. But wherever you are now, or wherever you want to go, it all starts with one question: What’s Possible?
What's possible when…you start something new? When you dare to dream? When you dare to name something new for yourself? In naming something, declaring something, planting a flag, we enlist the universe to partner with us in creating it. And sometimes just naming that thing, claiming it for yourself, can be the hardest part. Not to say that doing the doing isn't challenging, or withstanding the knocks that come along with every journey of creation, but it's the sticking your neck out there and starting something new for yourself that we're hard-wired against doing, and it's the very thing that sets the ball into motion.
Every quarter at our Power Series Weekend Intensives, I see brand new folks who are embarking on a journey they know little to nothing about. There was just something in them that knew there was more to life than what they were currently living, and they took a chance. It takes an enormous amount of courage to step out and claim something for yourself, want something more out of your experience of being alive, and believing (even if that belief has a small and timid voice) that you deserve it. So here’s a salute to all those who step into the murky waters of growth and self-development. You have no idea what's in store for you, but I can tell you it's probably better than you could have imagined. And I am truly honored to meet you there.
Join us for one of our Power Series programs and we’ll provide you with the tools, techniques, and strategies for not only naming the thing you want to create, but also for training the nervous system to align with those results. You’ll learn how to successfully make that transition from getting winded just looking at a staircase to a regular gym rat, if that’s what you’re looking to do. And guess what? Once you’ve trained “Go to the gym” as part of your daily way of being, just try stopping. Miss a day and the same nervous system that got spooked just driving by the gym will send up all the same alarm bells, “Hey! I don’t know what’s going on here, but we’re not pumping iron and it’s making me feel anxious.”
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