How to be unstoppable

It's about 8am on a crisp, fresh Copenhagen morning in September, I've got my headphones in and I'm jogging to the beach through the forest. 

Running in the forest always reminds me of the times I spent running with a former marine buddy in my twenties. 

The song 'Harder than you think' by Public Enemy is playing. I feel like I'm compact and strong but also agile and powerful, running rhythmically, overcoming each obstacle as it comes never worrying about the next. 

I notice in this moment that I'm not thinking anything, I'm feeling... unstoppable. 

Then Bill Withers "ain't no sunshine" comes on. 

Who the hell created this play list? 

For however short a period we all have the capacity to be fully ON and we all have the capacity to be fully OFF I know this because you sleep, perhaps not as much as you'd like but you do sleep. 

We all have times that we want to be fully on and times that we would like to be fully off. Our ability to do this wilfully is both our ability to perform at our highest level but also do it consistently and maintain good physical and mental health. 

There are of course many health factors involved in this but I think before we arrive at these, other things need to be put into place, this is assuming the perfect energy balance hasn’t already been achieved.  

Priorities 

This might seem like a pretty obvious one but it’s so easy to get overwhelmed when we haven’t taken the time a define them.  We spend our time racing around from one thing to the next constantly trying to put out fires.  Life gets really simple when we write down what is important to us and make that a priority.  Saying no gets easier, productivity gets easier, life becomes less stressful.  Without a clear definition here we end up granting this undue importance due to proximity,  we adopt someone else's list.  

Rituals 

A simple extension of the last point.  What simple rituals performed daily help you to achieve those things you say are important to you.  When we ritualise and habitualise our priorities everything starts to become straight forward, we start to automatically feel less stressed because we are winning at what is important to us.  This leads to more focus and more energy going in the direction you want it to. 

Energy 

Guard it with your life.  Back pain, physical pain, colds, hang overs, stomach upset, brain fog, stress, anxiety, lack of fitness, feeling run down, head aches. 

Clarity, direction, achievements, exercise, good nutrition, good sleep, meditation, high energy people, comfort, nice cloths, good posture, music. 

We all have things that give us energy, we are have things that rob us of energy.  One of the first things I do with my health coaching clients is help them to isolate what these things are and then decide -  How to implement energy growers then how to eliminate, reduce, or re-evaluate energy robbers.  What good is time without the energy you require to use it how you choose? 

Perspective 

You need it.  We all do.  When you stand close to something it appears huge, when you take a step backwards, slightly smaller, when you fly to another country, smaller still.  We are always stood pretty close to our own lives. 

We mis-judge, mis-calculate, grant things undue importance, make unverifiable claims of the shape of the world based on our experience. We buy a car and suddenly believe that half the population bought exactly the same car. 

It is how our brains are wired and if we do not allow for this and take steps to counter it then we get sucked in to our own stories.  There are many ways to create perspective, you only need choose one.  Ask yourself daily if this will be important in 10 years time, meditate on the fact that you will die one day and so will everyone you love.  Reflect on how happy you were when you had significantly less than you have today, even create a practise of living with less. 

Keep it really or face unnecessary stress. 

Trigger relaxation

You wake up, you’re running late - you race to get out the door and race breakfast, you race to work and yell at the traffic because it feels like its going to make you late, you have a to do list as long as your arm and people keep stopping you to talk, you skip or race lunch.  You struggle to stay awake during the afternoon. You have commitments to your kids so you race home, the traffic makes you think you might be late.  Once you get to them there are a million things that need doing, your mind is still on work and they’re tired and struggling to focus too. 

By the time they have done there activities dinner is late, you race dinner and rush them to bed but they are over tired - you are stressed about work-  they eventually fall asleep, late.  You head downstairs grab a glass of wine to help you relax, you stay up too late because you haven’t fully unwound from the stressful day.  

There is every chance that you can tell a story not to dis-similar to this one that has you racing from dawn til dusk - we did not evolve living like this.  I’m not saying you need to change it, just that the human nervous system was not designed to be dominated by the sympathetic (flight or fight) branch for such a long period of time that this will have negative health consequences. Chronic disease, digestive issue, injuries, stress, illness, excess fat storage - they are all a byproduct of this.  

Stress hormones shoot up rapidly to prepare us for action when needed, but they don’t shoot down, they drift down slowly because shooting down hasn’t ever been an evolutionary imperative like it is today.  We each need to create systems that help us to place the para-sympathetic nervous system (rest and digest) back into dominance when ever possible.  This means reducing mobile phone contact - with a system, getting outside, getting out of work clothes, getting out of work mode, creating rules to live by rather than merely having good intentions. 

Get these in place and start the process of becoming unstoppable, if you want some help with this then get in touch 

Ed Ley