Embrace Your Internal Operating System

I have met way too many people who live from one blog to the next waiting for the new WOD. The vogue involves trainers rushing to release a random exercise selection. The greatest difficulty with the Digital Age is public domain overload. Exercises, programs, and protocols may flood our screens, and distract us from developing our own personal training doctrine (underlying assumptions and beliefs) and how particular training strategies deliver performance.

Everywhere we are told that we are incompetent, that we must defer to some external source of wisdom, that we are somehow deficient in our perception. However, if we delve deeply and confront our preconceived ideas, fears, doubts, desires and needs, we will release the natural authority over our own lives.

Do you know the nature of your training; is your philosophy deliberate? Not knowing leads to self-sabotage, hesitation, doubt, and resistance. Basically, if you don’t have any goals in mind, any method will get you there. In other words, you’ll be going nowhere, but you’ll get there lighting fast.

We each operate from a personal philosophy, conscious or not. Everyone operates within the parameters of their cultural, social, community and biological operating system. Whether you are aware of your philosophy or not does not alter the fact that every one of us possesses, and is subject, to an operating system. Daily we should seek to massage our ever-evolving philosophy to a conscious level, and check it against the influences we PERMIT to impact us.

This begins at the core. How have you been indoctrinated, and how are you continuing to be indoctrinated? What have you been taught is the truth about the issue? What are your general beliefs about how much you should weigh, how much fat you should carry, how much muscle, how well you should move, should you be pain and injury free, can you be, how well should you move, how does food REALLY make you feel, how much do you truly enjoy eating before, during and after the meal, et cetera?

The flavor of the month guides us like lemmings off a cliff. Underlying assumptions go unquestioned when rushing to the newest fad. Without a deliberate philosophy how can we ever hope to see through the distortion of trend and fashion to what works FOR US as individuals?

Teachers serve a purpose, but only as a guide pointing in the same direction, seeking next to you our collective potential. Each of us manifests our coaches at any point in life. We’re perpetually surrounded by lessons which we can choose to ignore. Training happens every second, and every moment of life, each decision is an act of conditioning.

Acknowledge that your philosophy engages a continual state of amendment adapting to the needs of the new day. Protect yourself by deliberately considering which changes to make and, most importantly, which changes to resist, for the popular vogue of the media and the trends of the community must be held with suspicion. As written by Soren Kierkegaard, “The crowd is untruth.”

You are all the guru you have ever needed. You are the teacher you’ve been seeking.

Respectfully,

Scott B. Sonnon