What are you chasing?

Is it money? A nice body? Sex? Is it victory over your competitors or a feeling of accomplishment? Or is it to have all of these things so that you can feel fulfilled, having spent so much time at school, work and the gym that you’re convinced that this is the only path to achieve your deepest desires?

Whatever the hell it is that you’re chasing, have you ever asked yourself why?

Why the hell am I killing myself to make as much money as I can? Why am I insecure about my body and use that insecurity as a proxy for my own self worth?? And why do I feel deeply unfulfilled despite the fact that I’m trying so hard???

Well, now that you’re thoroughly sad and wondering “Kev, where the hell are you going with this?”, with all that in mind, let me ask you a different question; what kind of person are you when you’re most proud of yourself? I’ll let you ruminate on that one for a second….

Having asked hundreds of clients that question over the years you’d think that I’d get a million different answers based on their goals, ambitions or personality type. But the truth is that rather than getting a million different answers I’ve gotten a million different iterations of the same answer, which goes a little something like this; ‘I am most proud of myself when I am loving, passionate, grateful, considerate, patient and kind. When I show up without fear of failing and give it my all despite the outcome. When I stare my fears in the face and say “NOT TODAY MOTHER FUCKER!”, when I overcome, and when I am brave.

So when contrasted against the first question and the title of this post this answer is extremely telling of the futility in some of our motives.

Nobody looks back on their deathbed and wants to be remembered for the amount of money they made or the games they won. They don’t talk about the body they developed or the amount of sex they had in their lives. We want to be remembered for the positive example we gave for overcoming the inevitable difficulties of a human life and how we connected with other people along the way.

It’s a moral question. And it turns out that regardless of the vehicle you take to get there, fundamentally we’re all chasing the same thing.

“So what the hell does this have to do with training?” Well friends, the truth is it has everything to do with it! Building yourself into a ripped freak animal isn’t a necessity for a happy life! Hell you could bake bread and be happy. But you see people fail time and time again on the road to achieving their aesthetic and athletic goals because the thing that drove them to pick up the bar in the first place is fucking empty and bout after bout of hard training has the ability to break through all the shit that you’re carrying around to guard yourself and get to the heart of who you really are. Training exposes you like nothing else I’ve ever come across in my life. It shows you and everybody else in real time if you’re the kind of person you say you are and if you try and exceed your current capacity it will spit you out along with the rest of the fools who tried and failed before you.

Which means that every single day it goes far beyond the fat that you shed or the weight you put on the bar. It’s an opportunity to practice humility. It’s the chance to realize your potential through pain and resilience, pressure and sacrifice and to confront your inadequacies and use them to stoke your fire. YOU ARE FAR MORE POWERFUL THAN YOU KNOW. But if you base your self worth in the result you will fail.

It turns out that the ultimate result of training isn’t what we’re after, it’s the person that we develop into along the way. But to put this into practice takes a tremendous amount of faith in yourself and trust in the process. Stop chasing the nonsense that’s never going to make you happy and use training as a proxy for developing the person you want to become. Because funnily enough, that is the most powerful tool you have at your disposal to achieve your goals.

Until next time,

-Coach Kev