This Is Your Training

100,000 hours. That is how much the average person will spend at their work over a lifetime. Jason Jaggard shares this information in his book Beyond High Performance. He argues that how we view our work deeply impacts our results and our very selves. If one relates to work as a means to a paycheck, that will have an effect. If one focuses on doing the bare minimum needed to not get fired, that will have a different effect. 

Jason shares another more transformative way to view our work: the athlete’s mindset. Athletes spend most of their time in training, exploring what they’re capable of through deliberate practice designed to improve their results. 

It seems to me that whether it is our work, our marriages, our families, or anything else for that matter, it is easy to drift into stagnant mindsets. It’s easy to just get through things, but what if every part of our lives were a gift to explore what we, along with all those who matter most to us, are capable of together?

This week, I invite you to ponder: 

What’s an area of my life in which I may have drifted into a stagnant mindset? What would change if I were to relate to it with an athlete’s mindset instead? What results would I be training towards? What kind of person would I want to become in the process? How would I set up effective training toward these ends? Who would I enlist to be on my team? 

God bless,
Dan