April 10, 2009

Flea Circus

You've undoubtedly read about how you can train fleas to jump a certain height, right? If you haven't read this quote… I learned about this way back in college and it stuck with me (thanks Mom & Dad for tuition, figures I'd remember the important things)… While reading this you should make a few connections with our motivation (or lack thereof) or possibly, as I've realized for myself, you'll see a pretty strong correlation between your goals or expected results and your efforts.

"Flea trainers have observed a predicable and strange habit of fleas while training them. Fleas are trained by putting them in a cardboard box with a top on it. The fleas will jump up and hit the top of the box over and over and over again. As you watch them jump and hit the lid, something very interesting becomes obvious. The fleas continue to jump, but they are no longer jumping high enough to hit the top. When you take off the lid, the fleas continue to jump, but they will not jump out of the box. They won't jump out because they can't jump out. Why? They have conditioned themselves to jump just so high."

This all came up because of a push-up email Dennis and I have been sending back and forth recently. Well, that's how it started anyway. I was doing a burnout of push-ups the other day and I got to 32ish and I stopped and got up. I had more in me, my body just said "you're done, dude, get off the filthy ground." So I did. The next day after the email thread had started and Dennis push-upped about 40 or so I got back down without any thought of how many I was going to do. I hit 51. Hmmm. When I typically do my sets of push-ups I usually stop at 25. My thought was this: have I been conditioning myself to only be able to do 25 push-ups at a time?

As the thread went on we talked about hitting this point and the awareness of our own walls and "lids"… what we haven't figured out is how to break this conditioning… how do we let ourselves achieve greater goals and see the potential? I suppose it's just "keepin' the faith" as Dennis leaves every email to me... yes, a lead in to another post... (to come)

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