Maybe not YET...

Somehow I know a lot of teachers, both the kind that are professional and the kind that enrich us all over a cup of coffee regardless of what they do for a living (not that the professionals don’t enrich our lives over coffee too!).  I think this is why I see so much stuff about the growth mindset.  My summary of the growth mindset is that we understand that we are malleable creatures who can learn and change; this means that we are not limited by our faults or talents, but by our willingness to do the work.  We may not be good at something yet, but we can practice and improve.

The implications for this, in a fitness context, can be transformative.  When we understand that we are learning, we can be a little more patient with ourselves as we make mistakes and a little less critical when we don’t do something perfectly the first or twenty-third time.  We start where we are and we celebrate improvement.  Maybe we even focus a little less on the arriving part of the experience and pay attention to where we are right now on the journey.  We also get to have a lot more celebration as we master little bits of the skills we want.

So maybe we are not as strong/flexible/enduring/coordinated as we’d like to be today.  We are doing the work faithfully, learning from our mistakes and setbacks, and pressing on in our awesomeness to even more awesomeness.

We can do this.