Behind But Ahead

December was pretty dismal for me.  Embarrassingly dismal.  Which you'll see if you read my Number Update blog I've posted.  I found myself out of time, out of energy, out of momentum.  And my numbers suffered....badly.  

But the month was not a total loss.  I found myself making some important mental connections and having some really good internal conversations with myself.

There are a few thoughts, questions and realizations that came about that I thought were worth noting.

1.  Although I wasn't fulfilling my daily number quotas, I can be proud (at least a little bit) that I never succumbed to "why bother?" or "what's the point?".  I never allowed myself to do NOTHING.  However small, I always did at least one thing every day with intent and mindfulness.  Often more, because one sometimes became 2...or 3.  But even if that was all I could manage, it was at least one.  If this is something I can sustain on a regular basis wherever I might be, physically or mentally, literally or figuratively, then I will always be moving in the right direction.

2.  The classic "egg or chicken" dilemma.  Was I not keeping up with my training because I was tired and without any energy?  Or was I tired and out of energy because I wasn't keeping up with my training?  Food for thought.  And easy to test.

3.  I think I might finally understand why focusing on trajectory is more important than just numbers. I realized that when I look at our number requirements, I tend to look at "what I haven't done" rather than "what I have done".  Meaning, I will see the 4,000 pushups that I'm behind on, more clearly than the 40,000 pushups I've managed to accomplish.  And it became clear how this weakens me.  For example, if I manage only half of the pushup requirement every day for a week, by the end of that week, my focus is that I'm behind by 480 pushups (for those that like numbers, I'm using a 365 day calendar year in this example).  Two weeks...960.  A month...over 2000 behind!!  How do I catch up??  And if I can't catch up, then what's the point of doing any?  I eventually began to see how watching the negative number grow is debilitating.  It drags you down with it.  In actual fact, I should be looking at the over 2000 pushups I completed that month and simply work at getting THAT number grow.  There is no need to "catch up".  It's not a race.  It's betterment.  It's mastery.

I can acknowledge that this is likely the WORST training month I have had in the last 3 years.  And I felt myself getting down and feeling badly about all of it.  But by learning from others around me this past year, and taking to heart many of the team discussions we've had, I made a choice to put some conscious thought into what I was going through and what I was experiencing.  And that honest reflection resulted in some positive outcomes.

So although I'm "behind" I can now see that I've actually moved ahead.