You don’t shift your mind.

Give me a young innocent, nutrition-ignorant person and I’ll get them in fit shape!

The problem with you who are unfit is that you are stuck in your habits and ideas. Then, you are stuck with your bodyweight and body composition. It’s a catch-22 situation.

You must be very willing to learn and very willing to change. The two things must be multiplied together – If one of them is zero, the result is zero.

Now there are a few people willing to learn but very few willing to change. Our prospect customers are really scarce, but remember that we don’t like to be changed while we are willing to change if that’s what we really want. Again, willing to change must be coupled to willing to learn and the final result of both is to be willing to make a mind shift – learn to change.

The problem is that —- even if starting a diet or subscribing the gym, people get stuck like reindeer in front of headlights. It is called Einstellung Effect, a German word for attitude or mindset. This effect suggests that once we have a thought or a habit, the more likely we are to fall trap to its influence and fail to evaluate each change even if it is for better.

Our brains – even before than our bodies – go on mechanized state of autopilot where bias, prejudices, paradigms, and errors prosper. It is like installing a roadblock in your mind.

It’s not a lack of knowledge that leads to this situation, but initial ideas formed from previous experience that freeze us and don’t let us see the opportunity to change habits. An idea, a habit you already have in mind, already ingrained, and strengthened, may prevent a better idea or habit from being adopted. Sometimes your initial intuition about how you are and what you need to be doing is misleading. You must unlearn your erroneous older ideas or approaches while learning new ones. They are bad because they don’t let you improve – it’s like a mental shortcut that suggests you – whispering in an ear – not to change anything, that is what you have and will always have. Wrong.

Bruce Lee goes like this…

Bruce Lee was a great teacher and he said it properly:

Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless – like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup, you put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle, you put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.

Bruce Lee

With a more educated mind, you will find it easier to obtain the things you want in life, by wasting less time, energy, and emotion. What does it mean to educate? Getting somebody to do something different. You can do and have something different only if you ARE different. It is a mind shift. Since it is a mind shift, the how-to is a consequence while most people start by wanting to know/buy the how to.

Fitness is a mind shift, I truly believe in that.

We need a mind shift in fitness. We need it both in the global fitness industry – as I wrote in a book of mine – and in each person. If you do not change how you think, you cannot get results – at least long-lasting results.

I tell you, before a Fitness Mindset you need a Fitness Mindshift.

If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

Wayne Dwyer

IMPORTANT – A mind shift is not a mindset, it is something dynamic and powerful as a sudden U-turn or a punch. A mind shift helps you to break through obstacles. It is dynamics.

What are obstacles? Most of the time, especially in Fitness, they are not real obstacles. They are just things you perceive as a problem or others have you perceive like impossible just because they do not have your dream or drive.

The problem may not be that you get distracted but that you are focused on the wrong thoughts, like the reindeer of the Einstellung effect. You are in the wicked suggestion of the power of the habits and your mental bias. We really are what we think about most of the time. You can get fit just sitting on a couch and thinking into your new image!

Let’s see how to do that in 3 easy points.

3 things to do now

1 – Learn more about yourself – hidden capabilities, assets. There’s a self-image buried in your subconscious mind that dictates your results. You need to know it and change it according to what you really want. Also learn to access your higher self and how you can do and be much more than you ever think.

2 – Learn to imagine your result feeling it like it is now. Learn the law of gender – if something isn’t evident, it doesn’t mean it isn’t growing inside and manifesting soon. This is especially true for muscle growth and losing weight. Internal feelings are a reflect of your habits, of what you are good at now, they don’t tell you your whole infinite potential and capacity of shifting. The latter can be accessed only through imagination and visualization. Use them!

3 – Learn to change in focus. Learn to reframe. Change your mental filters. Learn to see yourself in a different light. Do your own mind shift.

Conclusion

Last week you did 10 pushups. This week 12. Those 2 more reps are the profit of your training – you shifted your mind, you believed and behaved differently – you trained -and as a result you changed yourself both in your body and in re-wiring your mind.

Mind shifts help you to see anything – yourself included – in a different manner, potentially to discover your hidden potential and move forward. Exactly like it happens in training and fitness.

Mind shifts reveal us how we can overcome stereotypes and preconceived ideas about what is possible for us to learn and become.