Injuries impact your habits and decisions
Just over 2 weeks ago I had a small incident at the end of a fantastic skateboarding session.
I’ll bear you the finer details but let’s just say I pulled something in a rather sensitive spot. Enough said.
Learning to bounce back from injury (or any other kind of physical, mental or emotional event) has it’s challenges for every single person.
World class athletes, corporate executives and business leaders aren’t immune.
Every challenge we face tests our mindset and our resilience.
The trick to mastering our mindset is to simply notice what’s happening inside of us.
When we choose to tune in to what we are thinking and how are we feeling, in the moment, we’ll be better able to let go of unhelpful thoughts, emotions and behaviours.
This simple step of tuning in throughout the day really helps us to bounce back quickly and effectively.
From there we can choose to focus on more positive and useful things we can control.
Injuries impact your habits and decisions:
The other challenge that injuries or unexpected events present is that they immediately impact our daily habits and decisions.
Let me give you an example of how this injury has impacted me.
I’ve set myself 3 personal challenges that are running over the course of 2023.
A 200 press ups every day challenge
A 365 sit up challenge (Day 1=1 sit up…. Day 365 = 365 sit ups, you get the picture); and
A show up yoga challenge – where my only measure is to show up on the mat every day
This recent injury had an immediate impact on my daily decisions and habits.
I’ve had to dig deep to consciously show up on the yoga mat every day, and not over work. Focusing more on breathing and less on getting postures ‘right’ has been key.
The sit up challenge has shifted temporarily to smaller, less intense stomach crunches; and
I’ve pulled back from the daily press up challenge.
I decided that ‘pushing through the pain’ introduced a very real possibility of making the injury worse.
Sometimes rest and recovery is the most prudent approach.
But do we really give ourselves the permission?
What I’ve noticed:
The interesting thing I’ve really noticed, as well as an obvious drop in my physical energy, is the mental effort it is taking to re-commit to the press ups.
Prior to this injury doing the press ups was easy, having not broken the chain for 435 days straight. After just a 2 week break it has become much harder to re-commit.
It’s taking an intentional mindset shift and a conscious decision daily to do the press ups.
It’s not the physical effort that’s hard. It’s the mental game.
Not breaking the chain, or equally as important, intentionally giving ourselves permission to break the chain on purpose, it appears, is very important when we’re working towards long term goals.
Keeping our goals at the forefront of our minds, whilst ‘tuning in' to ourselves helps us to make wise decisions that keep us aligned, physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.
This recent injury has shown me that Mastering our mindset, finding our flow and owning our journey really is key to leading our best lives and doing our best work.
Until next time
