Pre-Order your Yellowbelly food for this Thursday’s Cool Cruel Summer HERE.

For time:
50 box jumps, 24-inch box
25 handstand push-ups
40 box jumps, 24-inch box
20 handstand push-ups
30 box jumps, 24-inch box
15 handstand push-ups
20 box jumps, 24-inch box
10 handstand push-ups
10 box jumps, 24-inch box
5 handstand push-ups

This is not a new concept.  Most of us have probably woken up one day and thought “today is not going to be a good day”, and what happened?  We had a terrible day!  But was the day really terrible or were we just focused on everything bad that happened?

Here’s another example.  You’re driving down the road and you see a big pothole and immediately you’re thinking to yourself, “pothole. bad. don’t hit the pothole, don’t hit the pothole!”, and what happens next?  You nail it as if you were aiming for it from the start.

Our beliefs guide our consciousness in our experience.  They lay the foundation of what our experience is believed to be and then our consciousness searches out the examples in our daily lives necessary to fit the story our beliefs have created.  So, in theory, if we change our beliefs we could change our reality.  What on earth does this have to do with CrossFit?!  I’m getting there.

When we approach a WOD that has pullups, for example, and immediately think “well I can’t do pullups” our beliefs have given the directions to our consciousness to support this belief, and that’s what it will do.  We jump up to the bar because the Coach has said try even if you normally use bands but we’ve already determined what the outcome will be and lo and behold our reality supports it, and nope no pullups.

What if, instead, we had the belief that “I haven’t done one of these before, but heck, I have two functioning arms I know I can do this”.  I’m not crazy, I’m not suggesting that the belief alone is going to magically make this happen but now you’ve laid the mental groundwork that this is something that is within my capacity.  If I approach pullups this way every time I begin strengthening those beliefs and they begin redirecting my consciousness to find the reality that supports this.  And who knows, maybe that drives me to start hanging around an additional 5 minutes after class to work on pullups.  Weeks maybe months go by but then one day, it happens!

Believing you can’t do something sets you up to continue that same pattern.  And because you haven’t done something yet does not mean that you can’t, it simply means that you haven’t yet.  Don’t confuse desire with belief.  Of course you want to be able to do pullups but wanting them and believing you can attain them are two completely different things.  Think about everything that you thought you couldn’t do when you started CrossFit but now you can.  You’re not a different person now, yet you can do these things.  Sure, physically you may be different but the capacity or potential was there all along, and it’s still there now with things that you’ve yet to accomplish, but your beliefs could be holding you back.

Now some of you may be saying okay Shane this all sounds like some hippy spiritual self-help bs.  Maybe it is, but if you’re continuing to struggle with the same old things(not just pullups) and your beliefs have been the same all along, why not try a different approach?  And in the beginning, maybe it does mean saying things and convincing yourself of things you don’t necessarily believe, but if you continue to say them and think them I bet your reality slowly begins to reflect them.  And soon you won’t be able to deny that they are in fact true.