“Look to the left and look to the right. Say to yourself, “I don’t care what they do today, I’m doing this for myself, not anyone else.”
You know what’s awesome about group training? The shared experience of going through something tough together that bonds the group, and creates a strong community that you can count on. The extra motivation you get when you’re getting tired but you see someone else working hard and you decide to keep working hard too.
You know what sucks about group training? The competition. There, I said it. And I don’t mean a structured competition where you are entering into it looking to see where you stack up with a group of your superfit peers. I mean the competition that makes people look at the daily Wodify leaderboard and wonder if someone cheated. I mean that competition that actually does make some people cheat. In either case, this competitive attitude is driving people to seek validation through other people. They want to ensure that they can say at the end of the workout, “Look, I beat all these hard-working athletes in this workout, they must think I’m awesome at life,” rather than the negative, “I’m pretty low on the leaderboard, my mom must be right, I’m a bad person.”
“Look to the left and look to the right. Say to yourself, “I don’t care what they do today, I’m doing this for myself, not anyone else.”
We can all get better at not falling into one of these other-obsessed camps, even if it’s just once in a while in a weak emotional moment. What we should bring our focus to is our EFFORT, rather than the daily OUTCOME. If you consistently bring the right amount of effort and positive attitude into your workouts, you will get results. But if you are so focused on the immediate daily outcome and specifically how you compare to others, you will be disappointed more often than not.
It’s much better to not be so attached to outcomes, but instead to realize that just doing the work that we can proud of is sufficient. We can be proud of fulfilling our own standards. In Ryan Holiday’s must-read book Ego is the Enemy, he quotes legendary basketball coach John Wooden, who wanted to change the definition of success for his players. “Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do your best to become the best you are capable of becoming.”
Just do the work. Do it to the best of your abilities. It doesn’t matter what anyone else does, or what they think about what you did. Your self-respect at the end of a tough workout, that’s all the outcome that you need.
“Look to the left and look to the right. Say to yourself, “I don’t care what they do today, I’m doing this for myself, not anyone else.”
Ryan
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