One evolution at a time

A very dear friend of mine gave me a awesome christmas present:
A documentation of the US Navy SEAL- Selection Process called "BUDs- Basic Underwater Demolition Training".

Men from every social group, every color, every ethnic background, every education possible, together, be it in the "Grinder", a small place with nothing to fear but endless Bodyweight Exercises starting at 0400 a.m. and ending at 0400 p.m., together carrying, lifting, balancing huge tree trunks, together enduring endless periods in ice-cold water.

One scene inspired this very Blog-post:

An aspirant was failing to perform a log- exercise with the perfect form and tempo expected from the instructors.
Therfore he was punished with an seemingly endless set of pushups.
The camera- team was allowed to conduct a short interview under one condition: he had to give it in the pushup- top- position.
So they asked him, while he struggled to keep his body up under his own weight, amplified by his clothes which were wet from all the water, made even heavier by sand clinged to the canvas, his hands trying to find something in the sand to hold on to:
"How will you make it through the next log- exercises if you have to do all those pushups now? How will you make it through the rest of the day?"

He responded: "I don´t think about that right now... Right now, I´m doing pushups. So I focus on doing pushups. One at a time. After doing pushups, I´ll do what the instructors tell me to. One evolution at a time."

For most people he will seem like a stereotypical drone of the US- Military. Following orders, already powered down his own will.

If you look closer you will see a man with an understanding of the situation evolved only possible from endless hours of physical exhaustion and careful thinking of ones´ mental processes.

When do accidents happen? When do we make mistakes?
Only in moments when we are doing something, maybe we are already tired, and our mind starts to wander.
I know this mental process very well, since I am a hypno-therapist, I worked long hours figuring out how to induce/produce it.

The soldier mentioned above uses Trance- like states to focus on the exact thing he is doing right now, therefore switching of the parts of his conciousness likely to give up.

When would you rather give up??
-When you have to one more 1)pushup, 2)article to read, 3)room to clean, 4)etc.
-When you got a whole day/week/month/life ahead of pushups, articles to read, rooms to clean,...
The imagination of a long period of time ahead with activities you dread can be overwhelming.

So what he does is to chunk it. Split the whole period up into several activities.
By doing this, he reliefes himself of mental pressure, allows a more fluid work- process and achieves a higher focus on single tasks.


One step, one evolution at a time!
(You better write this one down!)


Myself, I found this extremly usefull.
I´m the kind of person who has his education (which is quite time consuming), is physically active, does coaching, reads (most of the time 2-3 books parallel) and tries to have some sort of social life.

Most of this I can not change.
But what I can change is my view of causality, how to arrange things I have to do and where I fit in things I want to do.

For example, I recently discovered "Speed Reading".



I watched the series, discovered I enhanced my reading speed(with same comprehension rate) within 15minutes of watching and 8minutes of practice from 300 Words/min to 400 Words/min
So... It works to some degree.

Since I spend much time either reading stuff for my medical education or reading up on relevant topics for my personal trainer- education I thought and give one of the books a try and do the outlined 7-day-program.

Every one must know one thing: such 7-day-programs are ALWAYS only the start.
They give you a basic understanding (if they are very good) and the rest is up to you.

But if you have to read a lot nevertheless, why not get the basics of speed reading and then incorporate the practice into the obligatory processes?
2 birds with one rock. ;-)

So: I put all my other books on hold and I will focus on the speed- reading practice for a week, maybe I´ll be done faster.
After that I hopefully have increased my reading speed and comprehension rate and will be able to catch up on what I`ll have missed up to then.

I keep you posted.


Train hard and enjoy life!
All the best,
Harry