Aim High and Dream Big
The first step in preparing to Unleash Your Potential in both sport and life is to dream BIG. But sometime this isn’t always the easiest process.
When setting goals you have to have clarity in respect to what it is that YOU WANT. Not what your friends, coaches, parents, teammates or family want for you, but you have to put a lot of time into painting a clear picture of what it is that YOU want.
After working with numerous athletes I put together a practical guide that would help them develop clarity within their goals, this practical guide is what I call The A.I.D.
The acronym can be better understood by breaking it down like this: A – Aspirations; I – Inspirations; D – Declarations
In part 1 of the 3-part Power of Preparation series we are going to focus on defining your aspirations.
Clarity of Aspirations
An aspiration defined by Webster means a goal or objective that is strongly desired. At this point our main concern is “what we want” but we usually tend to get caught in “how to get” what we want, and we usually do this without having a clear picture of our dreams. The how is usually what slows us down.
We fail to truly define our aspirations because we get caught up in trying to figure out what we need to do to get there. This may sound silly at first but what seems to be common is that we stand in the way of our own aspirations.
Would you start to build a bridge without knowing exactly where the endpoint will be? We must have laser point focus on our aspirations by clearly defining them. One question I ask myself is that if I had access to unlimited resources, including money, time and people, what do I really want? It’s easy to define what we DO NOT want but we fail to figure out what it is that we DO want.
Practial Application
In regards to training if your goal is to get stronger, how much stronger? Do you want to increase your bench press by 5lbs or 50lbs? If you bench 200lbs and you increase it to 205lbs, technically you are stronger but is this what you really wanted? Most will say no, but since you didn’t have a clear defintion of what exactly you wanted you settled for less.
If you want to get faster and you run the 100 meter dash in 12.5 seconds and you lower your time to 12.4 seconds, technically you did get faster but I bet that isn’t exactly what you wanted.
The primary reason why most of us never reach our goals is because we settle for mediocrity instead of striving for excellence. The concept of actually achieving excellence scares most people, because they may feel undeserving of their dream based on the opinions others may have of them.
Being scared of success is very common because most of us have lost our ability to dream big. Dreaming is just another way of envisioning what YOU perceived as the most desirable.
Are you aiming to low? Are you short changing yourself on your dreams? Your dreams are your dreams plain and simple and the only person who can stand in the way of them is you. Now it may take you longer to reach some goals compared to others. You’ll add 5lbs to your bench press a lot faster than you will add 50lbs but…this doesn’t mean that the 50lb increase isn’t attainable. So when setting goals just realize that you may reach some faster than others but they are ALL attainable as long as you focus on them.
I don’t care what your goals or dreams are, but in order to reach them you must do these 3 things:
- State them
- Write them down
- Review them daily
If you get into the habit of doing this you will be on your way to really setting some strong goals while tapping in the power of preparation which is the first step in The A.I.D.
Stay tuned to the next post to learn about the Inspirations necessary to fuel your dreams in part 2 of this 3-part series.
Train hard, help somebody and recover fast!
“10 Laws Strong!”
-Rob “The Kinetic Guru”
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