Fear, Faith, Gratitude
We begin with mindset because experience has taught me that your success in any endeavour be it education, business, career or fitness, depends less on talent, luck or intelligence than on the attitude you bring to the endeavour. And while I have heard people argue otherwise, I know from personal experience that like everything else, mindset is malleable for anyone willing to put in the effort.
A few business lifetimes ago, before CrossFit, one of my early business mentors taught me that fear is the opposite of faith. As simple and pithy as it sounds, he was an accomplished man whose words warranted careful examination. Reflecting upon his statement I began to appreciate the profundity to the extent that I have made it one of my basic operating principles. Try it. You cannot hold both attitudes in your mind simultaneously. You either have fear, or you have faith, the presence of one, negates the other.
Neither a religious nor a spiritual man, my father lamented that he could not have faith. He just didn’t believe. In what? Our whole existence is layered in mystery. Ask any scientist who has studied deeply into the realm of neurology or physics, and you will discover there are no certainties underlying our reality which we understand except on a superficial level. Our very senses lie to us about the nature of the world that we live in, how much more is there that we don’t even see? Every time you leave home with the expectation you will return is a vote in favour of faith. When you close your eyes to sleep believing you will wake it is again an act of faith. Every action we take is an act of faith, so I argue that we are all capable of faith we are merely selective in where we apply it. But this is a matter of choice.
The same mentor, though he was not a religious man, gave me another nugget of wisdom: God never gives us more than we can handle. His words came back to me at 4am the morning I heard news of my father’s unexpected and sudden passing. After collapsing under the weight of my grief I took stock of my circumstances. As eldest son, I was responsible for arranging his funeral services, helping relocate my widowed mother from her isolated home in Port Hardy and finding her affordable accommodations in the city where we could care for her. I also had to support my wife and young son while learning to navigate the world absent the wisdom and experience of my father. Yes, there was fear and the sense of overwhelm.
And then, it was replaced with faith and the assurance that God never gives us more than we can handle. In that moment I thought to myself: I’ve got this. God gave me this trial today because I am capable of it. I have graduated to a point in my life when I am capable of successfully facing and overcoming hardships.
Don’t worry if you are not religious. I am not. Even atheists have faith in something even if they have failed to define what that “thing” is. Faith cuts through fear like a red-hot knife through butter but I have discovered another weapon that destroys fear just as effectively: gratitude.
Once again, fear cannot exist in the presence of gratitude. This I discovered much later in 2014 when Empower was struggling to survive on Dunbar Street. At this time, I walked to work from 41st Avenue to 16th Avenue every morning to teach the 6am class and all the classes that followed. Every day. Sometimes I had to walk all that way home as well though more often, a kindly member like Yeti would give me a lift after I locked up following the finish of the 8pm class. We had no car at this time, so walking was necessary. And as I walked, I scanned the pavement for dropped change particularly outside the pub and movie theatre. You see, in our second year operating on Vancouver’s West Side the business still did not earn enough to pay me, so we often rolled up the coins I found and used them to buy groceries. It was a tenuous existence, and I lived in a constant state of fear that the business would not succeed, or my family would go hungry. Until I discovered the secret of the gratitude journal.
I cannot even tell you where I first heard of this. It sounded silly but in a state of desperation I was willing to try anything. So, I began the practice of starting each day, before my early walk to work, by filling a page with a list of things I was grateful for. And as stupid as it seemed, it made my morning walk feel buoyant instead of burdened with fear. And if that’s all it accomplished, it was worth the effort because I had grown to dread those long, lonely, walks. But it didn’t stop there. It isn’t easy to fill a whole page with a list of things you are grateful for every single day. The discipline forces you to pay attention through the day to all the small kindnesses and random strokes of luck. You begin making mental lists in preparation for tomorrow’s journal so that long walk home was often filled with thoughts of all the good things that had transpired that day which I wished to remember for the next day’s journal.
And can you guess what happens when you spend that much time thinking about things you are grateful for? Well, it certainly crowds out the negative thoughts. And it puts you in a good mood. And when you’re in a good mood, you perform better in your daily interactions.
I cannot tell you that the gratitude journal caused Empower’s success only that the adoption of the practice coincided temporally with a dramatic rise in business as our small Dunbar gym began to overfill so that by 2015, we were a profitable business and by 2018 we needed to expand into our larger Alma Street location to accommodate our membership.
To this day I maintain the practice of starting each day with my gratitude journal. Mostly because it makes me happy. There is no other 5-minute practice that has yielded such wonderful dividends in my life. Gratitude eradicates fear.
Don’t worry that faith and gratitude do not come naturally to you. It is not a character flaw. It is how our brains are wired. For survival reasons we are wired to identify the gap between where we are and where we want to be instead of being aware of the gains we have made from where we were to where we are. Entrepreneurs in particular are guilty of this. For all the success Empower has enjoyed, as far as we have come from those challenging early days, most of it is in my rearview mirror and my eyes are fixed steadily ahead at how much we can yet improve. This is why the gratitude journal continues to be relevant to me today.
Fear, faith, gratitude, how do these things relate to fitness which is our mission at Empower? In fitness as in every facet of life, mindset is the controllable independent variable with the greatest impact on your results. And like any muscle in your body, mindset can be trained with discipline and consistency to help you produce the results that you desire. Next time fear raises its ugly head, slay it with a dose of faith or smother it with gratitude. Strengthen those two attitudes and fear will find little purchase on your heart.
Monday
Today is benchmark workout Karen. The intended stimulus should see you finishing in less than 15 minutes. To accomplish this you must pick a weight that allows you to maintain a pace of 10 wall balls per minute.
Warm Up
Partner Med Ball Passes
2 rounds (1 min each):
Reverse Lunge Overhead Pass
Squat Chest Pass
Alt. Step in Shot Put Pass
Alt. Step-in Rugby Pass
Overhead Pass
Sit Up Overhead Pass
Sprawl Balls
Tech
Wall Ball
WOD
Karen
150 Wall Balls
