Who are you when you exercise?

When I’m teaching I love to use the question ‘who are you when you exercise?’. It’s a great reflective question that helps create better self-awareness. It makes us look at ourselves and identify where we are at and where we can improve. I find it interesting how much this simple question seems to motivate people to the next level.

In the group fitness environment this is a great motivation tool however there is a bigger lesson that can be learnt from this question. We all have different areas of our lives; we have our work, family, hobbies and interests, communities and so on. For most people we have different strengths and weaknesses in all of these different areas. An example of this that I remember well is when a lady came to my class for the first time and told me how she struggled with exercise and she felt she was really unhealthy. This was interesting because she was one of the city’s top real estate agents. You don’t become the top agent in this very competitive industry without learning several lessons in how to be successful. But for some reason she was unable to transfer this success into the area of health and fitness. 

When I think about this I often think of sports people. We’ve all heard of the sports person whose life seems to have crumbled once their career has finished. When that one area of success has ended they seem to lose it all. On the other side of the coin you have guys like Peter Snell who in his time was the world’s fastest runner over the 800 and 1500 meters, winning three Olympic gold medals. Once Peter’s runner career ended he went on to become a world leader in Human Performance and has worked at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre. 

What people like Peter Snell are continuously doing is learning how they are successful. They are learning the formula that works for them. While this is an ongoing process they are able to take the lessons they have learnt from one area of their life and put them in place in the other areas of their lives. 

When you think about the different areas of your life, which ones do you consider yourself to be most successful in and what are some of the habits or behaviors that you use to create this success? Once you have identified these you can transfer them into the other areas of your life that are important to you. This will be an ongoing process because you will evolve but the more you learn about your ‘magic success formula’ the more success you will achieve in the areas of your life that matter to you.