“Patience, persistence and perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success.” -Napoleon Hill
Fitness trainers, I’d like to ask a simple question…
Have you ever seen one of your clients achieve the perfect body overnight?
If you have, then chances are that you were training Steve Rogers on Thursday, who became Captain America on Friday. In any other scenario, which doesn’t involve superheroes, you most certainly have not. No, my fellow trainers and coaches, we all know that achieving the perfect body takes grit, determination, focus, commitment, and most importantly …patience.
But taking another look at this, imagine if people did have the ability to fall asleep on Thursday with flab, and wake up looking fab on Friday. What would that do to the value of ‘the perfect body’? It wouldn’t mean much anymore, since everyone would be in top shape.
I believe that patience is one of the most invaluable virtues for really any part of our lives from fitness to business. The reason for this is because patience ties together our determination, our guts, and our charisma, since it requires patience in order to sustain those qualities to accomplish anything of real value -and that’s called perseverance.
#3: Fitness Trainers Know: Rest Is Just as Important as the Workout
I’ve found that one of the hardest parts about being an entrepreneur is knowing when to call it a day. Success is not only rooted in your ability to persevere in the face of huge tasks and tough goals; but it’s also rooted in your ability to sustain a healthy life balance. Typically, entrepreneurs have a tendency to ignore this, especially when it comes to a good night’s sleep. But this is a problem, according to Gladys Edmunds of USA Today…
“Studies show that when you don’t get enough sleep you’re putting your ability to concentrate, your mood and overall health at risk. Which means you are also putting your family as well as your customers at risk.”
You’ve got to know when to call it a night, take a vacation, and give yourself the afternoon off, because you and your clients depend on your ability to keep all of your pistons firing properly. In the same way that your clients would seriously hurt themselves if they spent all day pumping iron -you also CANNOT spend 16 hours of your day, and 7 days of your week, at the office. (And I am the poster child of learning this lesson the hard way, so trust me on this one.)
Those who have attempted this, usually either evolve before their inevitable failure; or they end up sick, their mind gives up, or their own willpower defeats them. You can’t succeed at anything if you’re body and mind aren’t in proper working order. In fact, you’d only be doing more harm than good towards your goals. That’s why getting good rest is essential to success; and that requires patience, rooted in the understanding that you’re not Captain America.
#2: Patience Helps You Think Clearly
If I have done the public any service, it is due to my patient thought.
-Isaac Newton
At its most basic form, what exactly is meditation? If you were to ever see someone meditating at first glance, basically, it doesn’t look like much, because they’re doing a whole lot of nothing. They’re just sitting there, breathing deeply with their eyes closed.
But that’s the interesting part about meditation -it looks like that person’s doing absolutely nothing, but in reality, they’re doing the most important act of their day. According to Isaac Newton, meditation (ie. ‘patient thought’) was the very thing that made him the father of the same kind of math that put a man on the moon. Of course, the old-school way of thinking would chalk up this conclusion as a wayward assumption; but let’s see what researchers have found. According to a post from The Atlantic, meditation helps students think more clearly:
“Taking time to think about your thoughts, breathing, posture, and the like can be valuable to overall cognitive functioning. This is the opposite of staying in a library for 86 hours fueled by Adderrall and anxiety.”
The trickiest part is seeing through the illusion that just because you’re not active, doesn’t mean that you’re being unproductive. This not only takes common sense, but it takes patience in order to see through the appearance of doing nothing -in order to understand the value in sitting still with your eyes closed and breathing deeply.
A patient person naturally thinks clearly, takes calculated steps, and uses energy efficiently. Their costs are lower and their gains are higher, because they understand that energy and time are finite resources -resources that shouldn’t be wasted on sloppy work and ill-conceived decisions from a brain that’s burnt.
#1: You Can Harness Your Energy Effectively
Harvard Business Review discussed an interesting anecdote, which discovered something intriguing about the finite substance of energy, in terms of how a rested brain is a focused one.
Michael Henke, a senior manager at E&Y, decided on a radical move, encouraging his people to take more frequent breaks for resting and eating. Henke also decided to shut off his in-house instant messenger program during certain scheduled blocks in the day. The results were counter-intuitive (if we’re operating from the ‘old-school’ mode of thought):
“They finished the busy season under budget and more profitable than other teams that hadn’t followed the energy renewal program. ‘We got the same amount of work done in less time,’ says Henke. ‘It made for a win-win.’” [Harvard Business Review’s Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy]
What happened in this anecdote actually makes sense, because they were able to harness their focus more efficiently. Though McCarthy and Schwartz don’t mention any statistics or numbers in this paragraph, I can tell you what appears to be the case: their costs decreased, their gains increased, and it took them less time in the process …and that’s called efficiency. Especially since Henke outwardly states that this happened because of their radical change of pace, I’d have to believe him.
When you allow yourself to rest, then not only can the body rejuvenate itself, but so too can the mind.
Save the Work For When You Work Best
Patience is the ability to sustain your best qualities, while waiting on life’s timing in order to reap their rewards.
That’s why it’s never the client’s body that changes first. This success required a change in the mind: learning to sustain their best qualities, before their dream body became a reality. The same goes with entrepreneurs: you have goals and dreams, but it takes perseverance and the patience to sustain it in order to reap the rewards of your efforts. That’s what sets the successful apart from the unsuccessful: the patience to persevere.
Also, when you have enough patience to operate from a healthy life/work balance from the understanding that focus and energy is finite, then you’re working when you’re at your best -and not wasting time on trying to work when you’re focus, energy, and willpower is all used up.
Ultimately, having a mindset of patience allows your determination to build inside you. Good things come to those who wait, because they’ve got more energy to go after those good things. The rest quit, because they were too tired and too frustrated to carry on.
So don’t be afraid to take the rest of the night off.
Tomorrow morning, you’ll wake up well rested, 5 minutes before the alarm starts ringing; because you’ll just be too darn eager to get going after all those good things, and you won’t want to lay there a minute longer.
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