Some years ago I was a die hard Taiko Drumming player. Taiko is an ancient art of drumming that is very physically demanding. It's like beating on trashcans as if the devil had possessed your soul.
Like many Taiko instructors, my Sensei was akin to a typical drill Sergeant full of spirit and discipline. He was kind, but never gave an inch.
One day, someone asked him about drumming technique. At the time, Sensei was going over different drumming speeds and the range of motion your arms went through. As per the law of physics, as your range of motion gets bigger your tempo slows down because each hand needs to travel a longer distance to the drum and hence takes more time. So the question on the floor was if we should drum with a big range and slow tempo or with a smaller range and have a faster tempo.
Without batting an eye Sensei told us to play with a big range and at a fast tempo.
We all snickered but he was dead serious. I thought there was no way we could go fast and big. We told him he was asking us to do something impossible but he simply looked at us and said "do it anyway."
As we played and our range of motion grew we did indeed slow down our tempo, but the funny thing was we were still playing pretty fast. We were playing bigger and faster than we ever played before. We had broken through some sort of self imposed barrier and now were doing something that blew our minds.
After the drill Sensei told us what happened and it forever changed my life. He said. "Too many people look for circumstances to mold their behavior. They let their life control them rather than they control it. As a result they feel powerless and at the mercy of the tides of life. However, there are a few people who don't let life push them around. They have an attitude that says "do it anyway" despite the odds."
When it comes to getting in shape, every single successful weight loss story and body transformation has a "do it anyway" vibe to it. The individual was injured, poor, sick, uneducated, weak, fat or very busy. Everyone was up against the odds with life fighting against them, but they figured no matter what happened, they would succeed anyway.
Too many people have a mind set where they are looking for a way out. They want some reason to be let off the hook and the reasons are very easy to find. If you want the back door you'll find it in age, gender, time, economic status or your own history. The problem is that letting yourself off the hook immediately throws you back to being at the mercy of life's currents and you lose control forever forsaking your ability to improve your health. However if you chose to have the "do it anyway" mindset you retain your power, keep control and push on.
I'm not saying that the "do it anyway" attitude will make things easy. In fact, it can make the going far harder than you ever thought possible, because the only easy road is to look for those back doors and excuses. But once you resolve to "do it anyway" hardly anything on earth will be a match for you and your resolve. You will be strong. You will be a force to be reckoned with. You will be unstoppable.
