***Think Beyond Boundaries!***
Consult not your fears but your hopes and dreams.
Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential.
Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what is still possible for you to do.
The more goals you set, the more goals you get!
The proper way to change people is through genuine kindness and concern.
Desire is the key to motivation, but it’s the determination and commitment to an unrelenting pursuit of your goal—commitment to excellence—that will enable you to attain the success you seek.
It doesn’t matter how many say it cannot be done or how many people have tried it before; it’s important to realize that whatever you’re doing, it is your first attempt at it.
Remember, your attitude determines your altitude!
Go beyond your typical training session. If you give a bit more…it will be noted and return ten fold!
A Great Read for Fit-Pros
What makes Tiger Woods great? What made Warren Buffet the world’s premier investor? We think we know: Each was a natural who came into the world with a gift for doing exactly what he ended up doing. As Buffet told Fortune magazine not long ago, he was “wired at birth to allocate capital.” It’s a one-in-a-million thing. You’ve either got it—or you don’t.
Well, folks, it’s not so simple. For one thing, you do not possess a natural gift for a certain job, because targeted natural gifts don’t exist. (Sorry, Warren.) You are not a born CEO or investor or chess grandmaster. You will achieve greatness only through an enormous amount of smart work over many years. And not just any hard work, but work of a particular type that’s demanding and painful. Buffet, for instance, is famed for his discipline and the hours he spends studying financial statements of potential investment targets.
Talent has little or nothing to do with greatness. You can make yourself into any number of things, and you can even make yourself great. Understand that talent doesn’t mean intelligence, motivation or personality traits. It’s an innate ability to do some specific activity especially well.
No Substitute for Smart Work
The first major conclusion is that nobody is great without work. It’s nice to believe that if you find the field where you’re naturally gifted, you’ll be great from day one, but it doesn’t happen.
There’s no evidence of high-level performance without experience or practice. Reinforcing that no-free-lunch finding is vast evidence that even the most accomplished people need about ten years of hard work before becoming world-class, a pattern so well established that researchers call it the ten-year rule. What about Bobby Fischer, who became a chess grandmaster at 16? Turns out the rule holds: He’d had nine years of intensive study. The ten-year rule represents a very rough estimate, and most researchers regard it as a minimum, not an average. In many fields (music, literature) elite performers need 10 or 20 years’ experience before hitting their zenith. So greatness isn’t handed to anyone; it requires a lot of hard work. Yet that isn’t enough, since many people work hard for decades without approaching greatness or even getting significantly better. What’s missing?
Practice Makes Perfect
The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call “deliberate practice.” It’s activity that’s explicitly intended to improve performance, which reaches for objectives just beyond one’s level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition. For example: Simply hitting a bucket of balls is not deliberate practice, which is why most golfers don’t get better. Hitting an eight-iron 300 times with a goal of leaving the ball within 20 feet of the pin 80 percent of the time, continually observing results and making appropriate adjustments, and doing that for hours every day—now that’s deliberate practice.
Consistency is crucial. Elite performers in many diverse domains have been found to practice, on the average, roughly the same amount every day, including weekends.
The Skeptics
Not all researchers are totally on board with the myth-of-talent hypothesis, though their objections go to its edges rather than its center. For one thing, there are the intangibles. Two athletes might work equally hard, but what explains the ability of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady to perform at a higher level in the last two minutes of a game?
Certainly some important traits are partly inherited, such as physical size and particular measures of intelligence, but those influence what a person doesn’t do more than what he does; a five-footer will never be an NFL lineman, and a seven-footer will never be an Olympic gymnast. Even those restrictions are less severe than you’d expect: Some international chess masters have IQs in the 90s. The more research that’s done, the more solid the deliberate practice model becomes.
Real-World Examples
All this scholarly research is simply evidence for what great performers have been showing us for years. To take a handful of examples: Winston Churchill, one of the 20th century’s greatest orators, practiced his speeches compulsively. Vladimir Horowitz supposedly said, “If I don’t practice for a day, I know it. If I don’t practice for two days, my wife knows it. If I don’t practice for three days, the world knows it.” He was certainly a demon “practicer,” but the same quote has been attributed to world-class musicians like Luciano Pavarotti.
Many great athletes are legendary for the brutal discipline of their practice routines. In basketball, Michael Jordan practiced intensely beyond the already punishing team practices. (Had Jordan possessed some mammoth natural gift specifically for basketball, it seems unlikely he’d have been cut from his high school team.)
In football, all-time-great receiver Jerry Rice—passed up by 15 teams because they considered him too slow—practiced so hard that other players would get sick trying to keep up.
Tiger Woods is a textbook example of what the research shows. Because his father introduced him to golf at an extremely early age—18 months—and encouraged him to practice intensively, Woods had racked up at least 15 years of practice by the time he became the youngest-ever winner of the U.S. Amateur Championship at age 18. Also in line with the findings, he has never stopped trying to improve, devoting many hours a day to conditioning and practice, even remaking his swing twice because that’s what it took to get even better.
What It Takes to Be Great…
This Side of Business
Dave Parise had the idea of becoming an uncommon personal trainer. His passion was over and above the idea of making money. He developed uncommon exercises, he ridiculed most “body builders’ gym science,” he laughed at “Muscle & Fiction” magazine. He built his dream with customer service, continuing his education, and thinking instead of following. Today he has earned a dollar for every ounce of passion and desire he possesses. He deliberately practiced relationships, nurturing, pampering, and giving people more than they expected to get. It worked! The evidence, scientific as well as anecdotal, seems overwhelmingly in favor of deliberate practice as the source of great performance. Just one problem: How do you practice business? Many elements of business, in fact, are directly practicable. Presenting, negotiating, and delivering evaluations… you can practice them all. Still, they aren’t the essence of great managerial performance. That requires making judgments and decisions with imperfect information in an uncertain environment, interacting with people, seeking information—can you practice those things too? It’s all about how you do what you’re already doing… you create the practice in your work, which requires a few critical changes. The first is going at any task with a new goal: Instead of merely trying to get it done, you aim to get better at it. Being a Fit-Pro involves finding information, analyzing it, presenting it, teaching it, and observing it… and observing it… and observing it! (Did I say to observe it?) Anything that you do at work, from the most basic task to the most exalted, is an improvable skill. When you take service beyond the workplace and follow-up with your client, you take your reputation to a whole new level.
Adopting a New Mindset
Arm yourself with a new mindset; go at your job in a new way. You aren’t just doing the job; you’re explicitly trying to get better at it in the larger sense. Research shows you will process information more deeply and retain it longer. You will want more information on what you’re doing and seek other perspectives. You will adopt a longer-term point of view. A positive mindset persists and remains creative and clear. Again, research shows that this difference in mental approach is vital. For example, when amateur singers take a singing lesson, they experience it as fun, a release of tension. But for professional singers, it’s the opposite: They increase their concentration and focus on improving their performance during the lesson. Same activity, different mindset. Feedback is crucial, and getting it should be no problem in business. Yet most people don’t seek it; they just wait for it, half hoping it won’t come. Without it, as Goldman Sachs leadership-development chief Steve Kerr says, “it’s as if you’re bowling through a curtain that comes down to knee level. If you don’t know how successful you are, two things happen: One, you don’t get any better, and two, you stop caring.” In some companies, like General Electric, frequent feedback is part of the culture. If you aren’t lucky enough to get that, seek it out.
Be the Ball
Through the whole process, one of your goals is to build what the researchers call “mental models of your business,” mental pictures of how the elements fit together. I call it “a preview of coming attractions” and how they influence one another. The more you work on it, the larger your mental models will become and the better your “performance attitude” will grow. (Positive self talk…)
Are You Creating a Blue Ocean?
Concept of the Blue Ocean
The “ocean” refers to the market or industry. “Blue oceans” are untapped and uncontested markets, which provide little or no competition for anyone who would dive in, since the markets are not crowded. A “red ocean,” on the other hand, refers to a saturated market where there is fierce competition, already crowded with people (companies) providing the same type of services or producing the same kind of goods. The idea is to do something different from everyone else… produce something that no one has yet seen, thereby creating a “blue ocean.” An essential concept is that the innovation (in product, service, or delivery) must raise and create value for the market, while simultaneously reducing or eliminating features or services that are less valued by the current or future market.
BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY
How to Create Uncontested Market Space
Make the Competition Irrelevant
Since the dawn of the industrial age, companies have engaged in head-to-head
competition. They have fought for competitive advantage, battled over market share,
and struggled for differentiation. Now imagine instead the prospects for growth if
companies could operate with no competitors at all. In BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant (Harvard Business School Press; February 3, 2005), W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne challenge everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success, and instead argue that the way to win is to
stop competing.
Examples:
1. Curves, the Texas-based women’s fitness company, entered the oversaturated
fitness market to acquire more than two million members in more than six thousand
locations with total revenues exceeding the $1 billion mark.
2. In less than twenty years, Cirque du Soleil grew to levels of revenue that took
Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey over a hundred years to achieve.
3. The [yellow tail] brand of Australian winery Casella Wines took only two years
to skyrocket to #1 in the fiercely competitive U.S. market for imported wine.
Each of these companies created blue oceans that made the competition irrelevant.
The strategies they used can be replicated in any industry and in every company—
start-ups and established Fortune 100 companies alike—with the tools and principles
presented in BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY.
Most companies make the mistake of battling for success in a bloody “red ocean” of
rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. In the red ocean, industry boundaries are
defined and accepted, prices are driven lower, and the competitive rules of the game
become known. As the market space gets increasingly crowded, prospects for profits
and growth decline. To create blue oceans, Kim and Mauborgne argue that companies
need to use an opposite approach. Instead of benchmarking the competition, they set
their own rules and create “blue oceans” of uncontested market space ripe for growth.
By changing their strategic thinking and using a systematic approach, the authors
show how companies can reach beyond existing demand to find a blue ocean of new
market space with the potential for huge profits and growth. In the red ocean,
companies limit their own growth by only seeking customers from the current market.
Instead, they should look to non-customers outside of the market so they can create
a new market space as vast and limitless as a blue ocean.
While all blue oceans eventually inspire imitators, the unconventional logic
of true blue oceans renders competitors obsolete for decades. BLUE OCEAN
STRATEGY offers an inspiring message: that success is not dependent on
fierce competition, expensive marketing or R&D budgets, but on smart,
strategic moves that can be used systematically by established companies and
start-ups alike. The tools they describe level the playing field for success.
At a time when global competition is intensifying and supply exceeds demand, this
landmark work will chart a bold new path to winning the future.
I personally recommend the book, BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY, as one of the top reads
for anyone who wants to make mega $$$$.
GREAT READS FOR ALL PERSONAL TRAINERS.
1.Joint Structure And Function: A Comprehensive Analysis (Joint Structure and Function) by Pamela K. Levangie and Cynthia C. Norkin (Hardcover – Jun 30, 2005)
2. Measurement of Joint Motion: A Guide to Goniometry 3rd Edition by Cynthia C. Norkin and D. Joyce White (Spiral-bound – May 2003)
3. Anatomy Coloring Book, The (3rd Edition) by Wynn Kapit and Lawrence M. Elson (Paperback – Jul 5, 2001)
4. NASM Essentials of Personal Fitness Training by National Academy of Sports Medicine (Hardcover April 1, 2007)
5. The Clinical Orthopedic Assessment Guide by Human Kinetics
6. The Endless Web: Fascial Anatomy and Physical Reality by R. Louis Schultz, Rosemary Feitis, Diana Salles, and Ronald Thompson (Paperback – Nov 11, 1996)
7. Movement That Matters by Paul Chek (Paperback – May 15, 2001)
8. The Complete Book of Personal Training by Douglas S. Brooks (Hardcover – Dec 2003)
9. Muscles: Testing and Function, with Posture and Pain (Kendall, Muscles) (Hardcover)
10. Cholewicki J, Panjabi MM, Khachatryan A. Stabilizing function of trunk flexor-extensor muscles around a neutral spine posture. Spine 1997
11. McGill SM, Sharratt MT, Sequin JP. Loads on spinal tissues during simultaneous lifting and ventilatory challenge. Ergonomics 1995
12. Legal and Risk Management Concerns for Personal Fitness Trainers
by David L. Herbert, J.D. and William G. Herbert, Ph.D., FACSM
