In 2022, I joined a running club to reduce my marathon finish time. The Toronto Running Rats run every Tuesday evening in downtown Toronto, and I ran consistently with the club for the next couple of months. The running club had a diverse group with different running goals and experiences. One of the most important things the club did for me was seeing what was possible with my running; there were multiple Boston Marathon runners in the club, runners running sub-3-hour marathons and have been running for a long time. Running with the club weekly allowed me to run with people on another level, a mastermind of like minds. I used the runs to train for the six marathons I ran in 2022 and set myself up for my 2023 goal of running across the Canadian provinces.

The most important lesson from the running club experience is “Awareness proceeds change.” I knew subconsciously that it was possible to run a sub-3-hour marathon, and I had seen people do it on TV. But running with people who have done what I was aiming to do myself and getting tips from them every week heightened my awareness of what is possible. I am nowhere close to my running goals, but I am getting closer. Between 2022 and 2023, I have so far run fifteen 42.2 KM full marathons, and I have been able to reduce my marathon time from 3:59 to 3:20. It took a lot of hard work, increasing my baseline and consistency to get it done. It is a great feeling to see my hard work in the gym, road runs, and cross-training pay off.

One needs to recognize the need for change to make any change happen. Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung once said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you would call it fate.” Most of us suffer from possibility blindness as we are unaware of what is possible; hence, we cannot aim for it. As is often said in boxing, you can not hit a target you cannot see. Nothing moves until you move. To become what you need to become, you need to expand your vision of what is possible by increasing your awareness and changing your perspective.

“You can’t hit a target you cannot see, and you cannot see a target you do not have.” — Zig Ziglar

If you wanted to, you could find plenty of reasons not to strive for your potential. ¹ Maintaining the status quo is easier. But that shouldn’t stop you. Trying to build your life without removing your limitations and increasing your potential is like building a car in a small shed and being unwilling to knock out the wall to get the car out on the road. Remove the limitations, and the world is open to you.

You have great value. You have great potential. You can achieve greater significance in your life. It starts with developing self-awareness. More specifically, you need to become aware of the caps of your life and recognize which caps you can’t remove and which ones you can.

Trying to build your life without removing your limitations and increasing your potential is like building a car in a small shed and being unwilling to knock out the wall to get the car out on the road.

Roger Bannister ²

In 1954, there were medical articles that said that the human body can’t run a four-minute mile. They said that physically the body was not able to withstand that much pressure. And then what happened? In 1954, Roger Bannister, a young medical student, went out and ran a mile in under four minutes. Today, any miler that’s going to have any kind of national recognition runs a mile in less than four minutes. Between 1954 and 1956, 213 men ran under four minutes, all because one guy broke the barrier.

Irving Baxter

In the 1900 Olympics, Irving Baxter high jumped 6’2″. People said the impossible barrier was seven feet—no one would ever jump over seven feet. Then a guy by the name of Fosbury figured out that high jumpers were jumping the wrong way over the bar; they shouldn’t go over feetfirst; they should go over headfirst backward. Everyone else laughed and ridiculed while he worked on an unorthodox way to jump over the high bar. Critics dubbed his method “the Fosbury flop”—but he “flopped” over seven feet. Recently an East German jumped 7’8 3/4″.

Most of the time, to effect change in our lives, we need to see someone do what we thought was impossible. In sports, records get broken after a pioneer breaks the record initially, and others begin to believe in the possibility of breaking it, too. Learning is said to occur when there is a change in behaviour as that change in behaviour leads to increased awareness that ultimately leads to change.

Meditation

Daily Calm with Tamara Levitt – Success

We’ve been conditioned to think that the goal is all that matters and if we take our eye off the goal we would fall off course. There is this rush to attain and arrive. The problem with this approach is that when we are solely fixed on a specific outcome we disconnect from the process. The more fixed we are on a particular outcome the more of a chance our narrow-minded vision would miss the possibilities, solutions and surprises.
The goal isn’t to rush through life missing it altogether, it is to find meaning and joy in everyday moments. Joy isn’t found in the destination but in the journey and enjoyment of the journey is the key to joy. When we focus on the process,we are more likely to arrive on the outcome we desire.

“Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it”

― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Daily Jay with Jay Shetty – Hit Shuffle
Openness, welcoming novel experiences and being game to trying new things. Studies show that people who score high in openness tend to be more curious and creative, they also report a greater sense of well-being including a higher level of happiness.

Podcast