Hello Everyone!
This month I am writing about one of my favorite topics to use myself and share with others: training ahead of the curve. Here is the challenge for this concept: Think about whatever challenges or opportunities are ahead of you and write these down. Next, build and start a training plan NOW to “get ahead of the curve” (be proactive and take action to gain an advantage) and be as prepared as possible for this challenge/opportunity.
The fun part of this challenge is it can lead to both dramatically better productivity and dramatically more fun in life than you can imagine (with productivity and fun directly connected). It can also prevent many potential bad outcomes including health outcomes, career challenges, and more. You might think at first this concept is for young people, but it’s not and I’ll give examples of how it applies to all ages. If you are still breathing, you can train ahead of the curve.
My first experience with this concept came when I was in my mid 20s and I wanted to figure out how to conquer severe anxiety that had held me back in many ways. That’s when I built the foundation of the personal improvement program we still use today at PeopleOne Health (and SparkAmerica) that brings together the best of health and fitness with the best of goal-setting, motivation, leadership, and behavior change science. An overview of this program is in my free mini-book, that includes many topics from my New York Times best seller The Spark.
This program gave me the passion and energy to become an entrepreneur and my friend and I built a tech company with only 5 people that became ebay’s first acquisition. I realized looking back that I had put myself through a program that prepared me mentally and physically to become a successful entrepreneur at age 27. This put me on a path to be involved in many other fun and exciting activities – with a mission in life to help other people – including eventually being a co-founder at PeopleOne Health which could become a historic company for helping people.
In the middle of this, I started SparkPeople and our website was used by more than 100 million people with at least in the hundreds of thousands of success stories. I sometimes wonder about all the different goals these people reached after using our program. We saw stories like an author who was overweight and depressed, had written 3 books with none of them published. Then she used our program, built her confidence, and wrote another book that led to a 2-book deal worth more than $1 million. Talk about training that seized an opportunity to use her writing skills!
I always wondered what would happen if I had this program in high school. I got to see what might have been with my youngest son’s experience. He used a version of this program to become a star football player and recently got an offer to play D1 football at a great university, his dream goal. He’s also dating the homecoming queen :).
Other examples of training ahead of the curve include:
Balance Exercises
This is a great way to prevent falls as we age. Research shows falls can be devastating to your health as you get older. You can use balance boards or just stand on one leg (a challenging variation is to do this with your eyes closed). I do this for a few minutes many days while my meals cook in the toaster oven. A related concept is to work to keep your strength as you age. This is an example of how this concept can apply to any age.
Pregnancy
When I was having kids, the recommendation for women was that you could exercise during pregnancy, but you shouldn’t really increase your fitness levels, but should just maintain your existing fitness level. This argues for getting in shape prior to pregnancy.
Parenting/Grandparenting
Both of these exciting stages of life can take a lot of energy. If you get in shape before these stages, you are more able to have fun keeping up with the little ones.
Fake Deadlines
Learning how to work under deadline pressure is a great skill that can make you more productive and advance your career. A simple way to train for this is to give yourself a fake deadline. Like give yourself 30 minutes to complete a project to the best of your ability and see what you can get done. This practice is much better and less stressful than being thrown in the deep end of deadline pressure.
Be Ready To Fight
In 2018, I had semi-emergency surgery to remove a golf ball-sized brain tumor after having a brain seizure walking down the street. My neurosurgeon told me that if I wasn’t in otherwise good health and fitness, my outcome might have been much different – he talked about not having many happy endings with his patients. My message from this is to train ahead of the curve for this because you never know when you might have to fight for your life from an unexpected health issue, a car accident, or something else.
Now let’s take a look at the keys to build this skill:
Keys To Train Ahead Of The Curve
Look out and visualize both opportunities and potential challenges in your future
Think about why a specific opportunity or challenge is meaningful to you because you will work/fight harder when something is meaningful
Think about what it will take to be successful with this opportunity or challenge. Do research by reading or talking to others to learn about what it takes to succeed.
From all of this, build a training plan now and get started
Ideally, you should do this 6-12 months before the challenge or opportunity hits so you have time to get real results, but any time is better than none
Build it into your daily routine to visualize this goal/opportunity/challenge on a daily basis or at least regularly
Use all areas of life to help you succeed. For example, I think one of the main mistakes people make when trying to lose weight is to focus too much on food. As a result, many people become obsessed with food and develop an unhealthy relationship with food. If you instead think broader and focus on all the different ways you can improve to be in position to reach your weight goals, you’ll look at these areas too: fitness, stress management, building healthy relationships, good sleep, helping other people (being a Positive Force for others helps you stay on track), and visualizing the big reasons why you want to be Fit & Healthy.
I wish you the best in training ahead of the curve to reach your most meaningful goals in life!
If you haven’t connected with me yet in the community, here is my profile (you need to be logged in). I’d love to connect! Let me know if you have any questions about training ahead of the curve or anything else once we connect.
Have a great month!
Chris “SparkGuy” Downie
PeopleOne Health Co-founder & Board Member
