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.
