Training the Mind to Train the Body

This course is about getting in shape easily because there is no finish line for being in shape. There is no need to go fast when there is no finish line. We talk about getting in shape, or losing weight, as if it’s a destination we arrive at. Getting in shape is something we do for the rest of our lives.

Getting in shape can be easy like brushing our teeth or making our bed. It’s just something we do everyday for the rest of our lives. For some of us, making our bed everyday isn’t easy and we’ll definitely talk more about that.

The Marine Corps is functioning on a schedule. There's a deadline. They have 12 weeks to get recruits into a physical condition that can accomplish specific physical tasks. We civilians do not have the pressure of performing specific physical tasks within a certain time frame. Almost everything is optional.

Summer might be coming or a wedding or a class reunion but there are no physical tasks to accomplish at those events that require us to be in shape. We might want to look better for that event but we’re probably not going to be required to climb up a 25-foot rope with full combat gear on before we exchange vows with our beloved. Although, that's not a bad idea.

Easy is easy. The easier it is for us to get in shape, the more likely we are to get in shape. Yes, it will take longer than a 12-week fitness boot camp but it will also last longer. My intention for this course is to teach you how to get in and stay in shape for the rest of your life and to make that process easy.

What makes me think this course can teach you that? The word think is the key.

“Oh great,” you might be thinking, “I’m just going to think myself into shape. Ok fella. I saw The Secret. Thanks but no thanks.”

Hold on just a little bit. Let’s examine what it takes to get in shape or lose weight.

We all know what it takes to get in shape or lose weight. The basic process is to exercise more and eat better. It is no "Secret."

We also know why to get in shape. There are dozens of reasons why we want to get in shape.

We want to have more energy, we want to have a longer and healthier life, we want to look in the mirror and feel good, we want to be an example to our family and friends, we want to have better sexual experiences, we want to run a marathon, etc. We want to get in shape for any number of reasons.

Now we come to how we get in shape or lose weight. This also seems easy.

How do we get in shape or lose weight? We follow a plan, exercise more and eat better—consistently. We set a goal and focus on it. We commit to our goal. We discipline ourselves and stick to the plan.

I’m going to take some time here to explore and define the words “what” and “how”.

What we do to get in shape or lose weight is follow a plan, set a goal, focus on our goal, commit to our goal, discipline and dedicate ourselves to the plan and grind it out. Almost everyone knows what to do. Most of us don’t know “how” to do it.

How do we become disciplined? None of those diet and exercise plans on Google tell us how to become disciplined, they simply remind us that we need to be disciplined.

All those exercise and diet programs tell us we need to be committed. Ok. How?

What about being consistent? It’s the same thing. We all get it. We need to be consistent but how do we go about that?

This course is going to focus on how to be consistent. I’m going to teach you how to be consistent even if you’ve never been able to be consistent in the past. Creating consistency might not be easy but the results will feel easy.

How does someone like me become consistent when I’ve never voluntarily been consistent with anything that will benefit me? Let’s go back to my boot camp experience.

I was “consistent” with my diet and exercise for 12 weeks during Marine Corps Boot Camp. But was I?

Was I consistent or were five drill instructors trained in the fine art of ass-kicking just consistently kicking my ass all day everyday?

The Marine Corps forced consistency on me. I didn't do it for myself. Man, I was in great shape though. I ran three miles in 18 minutes and 10 seconds. I did 20 pull-ups. I did 80 sit-ups in two minutes. That constituted an almost perfect score of 299 out of 300 for my final fitness test.

Ultimately it didn’t matter. It didn’t last.

On the day we qualified with the rifle on the firing range, all the instructors ate donuts—in front of us. That was about week six of boot camp. We hadn’t seen a donut in six weeks and there they were, so close and yet so far. Those donuts may as well have been on the moon.

The vision of the donuts stayed with me for the rest of boot camp. I vowed that when I got home for my 10-day boot camp leave, I was going to eat a donut. Believe it or not, I was consistent with the donuts.

I ended up eating donuts every single day of my 10-day boot camp leave and did no exercising. I came back to combat training at Camp Pendleton no longer lean and mean.

During the 30 days of combat training, my meals became more controlled and my exercise was consistent and I got back into shape. Yet again, I wasn’t the one doing it. It was being done to me.

Remember the quote from the top of this lecture? “It is impossible to heal the body without healing the soul.” - Socrates

This was exactly what happened to me in the Marine Corps. My body had been healed or in this case, whipped into shape but my soul hadn't been healed. In other words, my mind had not been sufficiently trained.

We can paraphrase Socrates and declare “It is impossible to train the body without training the mind.”

Getting in shape and staying in shape for the rest of our lives can only come from an internal source. Our high school or college reunion won’t do it. Our wedding won’t do it. Our fund-raiser for a just and ethical cause won’t do it.

Those are all great things to be in shape for but they are external to ourselves. Once the day comes and goes, the fitness goes with it and the scales begin to tip toward being out of shape if we haven’t also trained the mind.

Self-created consistency is a byproduct of training the mind. It is the core of this course and our number one goal. I promise I will teach you how to do it.

It won’t be easy but the results will feel easy. I’ve said that twice now and I’m going to repeat it several times going forward so I should explain what I mean by that.

It won’t be easy because you will be tempted to feel as though you’ve failed every single day with this method. Identifying our failures is something we do quite easily and it isn’t easy to replace that behavior. However, we can get better at it every single day.

Removing the perception of failure will be difficult but our progress toward creating new behaviors will feel easy. That is why this isn’t easy but it will feel easy. The time will come when we’ve progressed so far that we have a day in which we find absolutely positively no fault whatsoever with ourselves. That will be a great day and we will get even better. We won’t be narcissists either.

I get better at training my mind every single day. There is no finish line. There is no success that can’t be eclipsed by an ever greater success. We can always become more consistent with the thoughts that will create the behaviors that will get us in shape, or help us to lose weight, for the rest of our days.

When I was younger my mind was completely untrained. The only things I seemed to be consistent with were damaging and I knew that they were damaging. I was consistent with the milk and Oreos. I was consistent with the pizza. I was consistent at paying my gym membership without going. I was consistent at watching TV and eating junk food while watching. I was consistent at procrastinating.

Why couldn’t I do the things I should be doing? Why couldn’t I do what needed to be done without having five drill instructors pushing me? Why couldn't I show up for myself?

Part of the reason was my personality type and what was modeled to me as I grew up. As I started to train my mind, I was able to go back and identify the sources of my inconsistency and, more importantly, replace them with consistent thoughts.

My personality was and is the most challenging issue. Every personality type has its strengths or its nature. My personality is strong when it comes to exploring new topics and ideas. However, the downside is that I can quickly tire of a subject and never develop the consistency to become a master of any of the topics that prick my interest.

You may have heard of this before. It's called "A jack of all trades and a master of none."

Some people naturally have a greater ability to follow a plan. It is in their personality. If they take The Big Five Personality Test their results come back high in conscientiousness. My son is like that.

He gets straight A’s at school because he follows every instruction, does every assignment, and listens to the teacher. I’ll never forget what he said when I picked him up from kindergarten one day.

“Daddy, if I just listen to the teacher I know what to do and I don’t get in trouble.” I was dumbfounded. It was so simple and it was something he came up with on his own. I didn’t tell him to listen to the teacher, it was a part of his personality.

Years later he said something similar when we went to the community fitness center. We lifted a few weights and he said, “I just keep doing this and I get muscles?” Yeah, pretty much.

He took up golf with me and has no problem practicing putting for an hour after we hit balls on the driving range. He’s becoming a really good putter. His personality responds to the repetition.

It gets even crazier. He was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease and the first line of treatment was to only drink Boost shakes for eight weeks and he did it as a 7th grader.

I volunteered to do the program with him but I failed. It was something external and therefore didn’t work for me. I did lose some weight and I felt pretty good but I still ate food now and then.

How was my son able to be so disciplined? I was blown away. It seemed to me as if he had a superpower.

He can do anything he sets his mind to because it is a part of his temperament and personality. He did struggle with following the liquid only diet and he decided to use medication instead but he did those eight weeks.

For people with a conscientious personality type, like my son, it isn’t that everything comes easy to them. It does not. My son does the work. However, some personality types, like mine, just won’t do the work—until it is too late.

My daughter is more like me when it comes to personality. We both came back with a high rating in “openness” on the Big Five Personality Test.

She can’t be bothered with trivial things such as making her bed. I remembered enough about my own childhood so that I was able to help her begin doing the little things but it is a struggle for her just like it was for me. She wants to be involved with the big issues of life.

The little mundanities aren’t for her. Yet it is in mundane daily habits that our success is hidden.

I was the same way as a kid. My room was always a mess because my mom wasn’t about to clean it up for me—that's part of the modeling that I needed to replace. When asked if I’d brushed my teeth, the answer was yes but the truth was—maybe. I lied about eating all the cookies. I ate sugar, literally, by the spoonful if there were no sweets in the house.

I knew I needed help and I wanted to become disciplined, that’s why I joined the Marine Corps before college. It didn’t work. Think about that. Personality and environment were so powerful that the Marine Corps did not change my mindset and I wanted a new mindset!

In college, I skipped classes because I hadn’t done the assignment. I wrote papers at the last second, I ate like a pirate. I didn’t drink alcohol, thankfully, but my eating habits might have been even more damaging than beer.

After college I continued to struggle with being disciplined, committed, and consistent for myself. When it came to doing a job for someone else I was always on time. I always met and often exceeded the expectations placed upon me. I always showed up for everyone except myself.

I started at least 20 “side-hustles” but I had no consistency so they all failed. I was passionate about all of my side projects but in the end it didn’t matter. Passion for a subject will get you started and it will also finish you. Consistency is what is needed.

Getting in shape, or losing weight, is something we have to do for ourselves. If you are like me, and you struggle to be disciplined, committed, and consistent for yourself, getting in shape is almost impossible.

It is so simple to understand. Just do a little bit every day. Focus on your goals and you will get there.

I KNOW!!!!

For me, just doing a little bit every day was the hardest thing in the world. Focus on my goals? Ok, I’ll do that for about three weeks. After that I’m just not interested.

The struggle is real when we lack consistency.

Why have I picked consistency instead of disciplined or committed? The words “disciplined” and “committed” have a certain aura about them that can be difficult to overcome. They both have an element of doing something while we are suffering.

Being disciplined is obviously related to the concept of being disciplined by your parents or teachers or coaches for something they think you have done wrong. Being committed is related to ideas of sticking with something when you really don’t want to.

Discipline and commitment have a lot of status, especially in the Marine Corps, but they are the same thing as being consistent. Think about it. How is being committed different from being consistent? In both instances you show up and you do the activity.

Disciplined, committed, and consistent are basically synonymous. Of the three, I think “consistent” works best when it comes to getting in shape or losing weight.

Consistent is a nice and neutral but powerful word. Everything we want is on the other side of consistency. It’s difficult to argue against consistency when it comes to accomplishing any aspiration.

Who cares if we call it disciplined, committed, dedicated, or consistent so long as we do it? What we call it is crucial. What we call it affects how we think about it. How we think about it determines our behavior. All of our thoughts are thought in words. The words we use are of the utmost importance.

Consistency is also a good way to deflect the perceptions of our family and friends.

I’ve run three full marathons so far. Those observing me have made comments such as, ”You’re so disciplined” and “You’re so committed.” I don’t feel disciplined. I don’t feel committed, so I reply with, “Thanks but I just want to be consistent.”

Once you start practicing the approach in this course, I guarantee someone you know will notice your progress and tell you that you’re sooo disciplined or sooo committed and how they wish they were too.

You will not feel disciplined or committed. You will feel like you didn’t do much of anything. There’s no need to argue with them. Tell them, “Thanks, I just want to be consistent.”

Also tell them to take this course.

I want to reiterate that this process is not easy but it will feel easy.

Let’s revisit the quote from Socrates at the very beginning of this lecture one more time.

“It is impossible to heal the body without healing the soul.”

For the purposes of this course, I am replacing “the soul” with “the mind”. It is impossible to heal the body without healing the mind—first.

Almost all exercise and diet plans try to change our behavior first and then throw in a few anecdotal tips on mindset. That is backwards. Our behavior will not change unless our thoughts change.

I am going to teach you exactly how you can work with your conscious thoughts to affect your unconscious mind in order to change your behavior. You will become consistent and it will happen quicker than you think.

Well, it will happen as quickly as you can think.

Thinking new thoughts is the key.

Signing up for this course is fast and easy! We do offer a 30-day money back guarantee. What do you have to lose? Enroll now!