Personal Transcendence Through Sport: A how to guide

My coaching philosophy distilled into 7 actionable steps for you take today

How do you pitch yourself?

In the business world you’re told to work on your ‘elevator pitch,’ how you would sell yourself or business to someone in 30 seconds or less. In the academic world, the best we get is ‘say it in one sentence that’s clear’ and truth be told, most can’t even accomplish this.

Over the past few years working outside of the academy, I’ve walked the tight rope between effective communication and complex ideas, finding my own style and language. This is why I love the world of sports, I can use examples and analogies that relate to people’s real life experiences to express the complex ideas but in a way that people can understand and then apply them for positive results in their lives.

So here’s my attempt at that ‘elevator pitch’ for my own philosophy on sports:

"By opening ourselves up to the objective truth of our efforts in sport, through the body and mind, we begin to subjectively know ourselves as divine beings with a spirit aimed at passion, creation, and love."

Let’s unpack that a bit

At their root, sports best function is providing deep and truthful self knowledge. The ancient Greeks believed it the best activity to help instill, generate, and cement character development and the attainment of moral virtue. The dynamic interplay between objective and subjective truth provides sport its unique place in human culture. That’s what my philosophy aims to highlight.

When we train, compete, and pursue physical excellence in sport and exercise we gain honest information about ourselves.

We develop virtues; determination, resiliency, strength, leadership, humility, etc. But we also learn about our preferences, style, tastes, and enjoyment.

The body and mind take the brunt of the objective truth. Sore muscles, tired lungs, achy joints, sweaty clothes, faster times, farther distances, heavier weights, longer and higher jumps, we feel them and have the numbers to confirm the results. We can’t hide or lie about the effort and outcomes.

And when you do it all with internal motivation, that inner desire to simply act and achieve for its own sake, you employ the spirit. You aim at passion, you desire to sacrifice and struggle towards excellence, you determine the tradeoffs, you gain the transcendence, and find flow and inner peace in the process.

From Theory to Practice: 7 Steps

But a philosophy is only as useful as it can be lived. The jump from theory to action is big, and if anyone tries to implement a philosophy into their daily lives, it must work as advertised and hopefully lead to a better way of living.

This is what I’ve been doing as a coach for the past 2 years, working with dozens of athletes and individuals, applying that ‘elevator pitch’ with lasting results time and time again.

After recently onboarding another new 1-1 client, I’ve distilled the process of moving from theory to practice into 7 simple steps.

While all different cases, what binds each of these individuals together is their desire to live out an authentic identity and becomes masters of self in order to shape their own destinies. Whether it’s reclaiming physical health, overcoming spiritual doubts and lack of self confidence, starting new businesses, or finally living genuine to your inner desires instead of external expectation, each benefits from starting these different individual journeys in the same place, with the objective truth of physical effort.

This progression works great for people getting back into the gym after too long away but it also works for people who do workout but need to find or rediscover their passion. Follow along and apply this wisdom directly into your life~

1st Step: Find that internal desire through joy of motion

What are the sports or physical movements you like doing? The ones you would do just for the fun of it. Identify what calls to your spirit.

You need to start tapping into internal motivation and one way to accomplish that is to give yourself over to play. By it’s definition, play has no end other than itself. Remember, they call it ‘playing sports’ for a reason.

Adults too often think of physical activity as a means to an end. Usually it’s for physical health but other times for status and reputation. This creates resistance and a barrier to motivation and consistency.

But when you do something because you want to, because you love it, because you desire it deeply, there’s very little in the world that stops you from making it happen.

2nd Step: Make that activity habitual in your schedule

Now that you’ve identified a physical activity you’re internally motivated to do, now comes the fun part. You get to DO IT! Or you begin to process of training to one day be able to DO IT. Either way, you are now on the path towards happiness, working towards a goal and seeing yourself making progress on the way towards achievement.

Give yourself space one time a week to fully engage in that activity.

My example is sunrise trail running, I LOVE IT. One day each weekend I get to escape into the forest for as long as I desire and that drives my consistency the rest of the week. I get up early so that I’m not a ‘zombie’ on the one day I’m truly excited to wake up early. I cross train and run shorter distances during the week so I can push myself or simply enjoy a nice long run.

What’s important is doing it in a sustainable way.

Don’t go too far, too fast. Don’t have gaps in between weeks. Figure out how to make it happen each week first, before tinkering with how it looks each time. Make showing up the winning metric and just enjoy the action.

3rd Step: Recognize the truth of your actions through active reflection

Give this process time. Keep showing up week after week aimed at that activity you love doing.

For every individual its different but around 6 weeks, it’s important to pause and take stock of your progress. 6 weeks is a magic number for people getting back into physical exercise. It’s at this point your body changes from avoiding the physical discomfort of exercising and starts to crave the hormones your body releases when you exercise. It’s also enough time to judge a new habit, new activity, or new process because the ‘newbie’ gains begin to wear off and you have to work much harder to enjoy the same benefits you used to gain.

This is the part most everyone misses about exercise as a means of self development. It’s not an automatic process that happens through osmosis. We need to be explicit. If the goal of this journey is to find self belief and self knowledge, you need to take that task seriously.

What you’ve already learned about yourself if you’ve stuck it out this far is that you can grow through challenge, you’ve gotten better, and that love is the correct motive power.

This is where the power of external accountability and conversation matter most. As a coach, this is where a lot of our calls aim, how to recognize the truth of your actions and fitting that into an updated understanding of yourself. If you don’t have the ability or desire to discuss this stuff externally, use a journal and write down the reflections to keep for yourself.

What’s most important here is making the implicit explicit.

4th Step: Become Heroic in facing off against yourself

The reason I guide people to start a personal development journey with physical activity they love is for this purpose.

In order to improve self, you need accurate self knowledge of the good and bad parts of your character. There’s a paradox about our virtues philosophers have observed for thousands of years, our greatest strength can easily be our greatest weakness when misunderstood and applied improperly.

Most people never attempt to improve themselves because that requires a type of brutal honesty they are not willing to engage with. But if you’ve spent the last 1-2 months applying yourself in a physical activity you’re passionate about, you have been cultivating the exact type of courage needed to face off against yourself. With good evidence that you are the person you aspire to be and become, you don’t need to be afraid of confronting the ugly truth about your own responsibilities in leading you to an unfulfilled life (in health, wealth, identity, etc…).

Simply staring in the mirror, seeing all that’s there, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and being confident that the good parts can help overcome the bad parts is a massive victory in self knowledge. Next up, using the same process that helped you gain consistency in physical activity to overcome these newly uncovered weaknesses.

5th Step: Internalize struggle and sacrifice to overcome your internal limitations

The whole point of utilizing physical activity and sport for personal development is to internalize the hero’s journey as your path in all areas of life.

The process of giving up something of value to obtain knowledge and experience of even greater value in order to realize your potential, that’s the hero’s journey at its simplest. The hero ALWAYS has to give up. In physical activity, sacrifice and struggle are the key ingredients. You give away physical energy, effort, and potential. You see that struggle sacrificed in the form of soreness, tiredness, fatigue, sweat. You also give up time doing ‘easier’ things like consuming entertainment or sleeping in. And in this process your body improves, you get stronger, leaner, faster, more agile, more powerful.

Because you anchored this process to your heart, through that internal desire we switched on back in step 1, the physical journey connects to your spirit. This gives you willpower training, how to overcome discomfort and adversity to realize purpose and meaning on the other side. That’s why it’s so important to have proper aim with your intentions. It’s impossible to transfer lessons from sports to life if your spirit isn’t receiving lessons and trainings. Sport exists for the spirit after all, to train it in virtue, and give it experiences in overcoming.

Here’s how you begin to make it all click.

When you got back into that physical activity or reengaged with that one you love most, what were some of the obstacles you needed to overcome? Some were external like schedule, gear, facilities, etc. Some were internal like resiliency, determination, motivation, etc… How did your find solutions? Did you complain and make excuses, no. You made a sacrifice and gained values on the other side. You did that hard thing consistently, and then it became easier and easier. It was a lot of SMALL WINS stacked on eachother to create a compounding affect.

Now you can begin to transfer lessons learned in the physical arena to mental and spiritual problems related to self knowledge, confidence, identity, and principle. Start small, make it manageable, do what you can, embrace the discomfort, internalize the sacrifice, and transcend your limitations.

You’ve done it with the body already, now aim at the mind and spirit.

6th Step: Anchor that process through chasing a large physical goal

There’s a deep truth about breaking through your limitations, resistance always comes strongest right before the transcendence.

Here’s another unsettling truth about personal development, once you do achieve the breakthrough the tendency is to coast on success. But in the coasting, individuals stop with the day to day processes that led them towards the successful breakthrough in the first place. Here’s my advice for both of those situations: DOUBLE DOWN ON THE PROCESS.

Fear and laziness sabotage the small wins approach, and make you forget about the power of the exponent. We must always be doing the things that work for us, no matter how big or small. If finding the joy of movement started this journey, it’s the same element that will power each of us through these moments of resistance and relapse.

A giant physical challenge is just the opportunity to ‘double down’ on the process that’s worked already.

A big challenge orients your priorities and values. Because it’s in an activity you have an internal desire to engage in, the competition provides its own internal accountability. You want to show up and do well. You want to proclaim your authentic identity and have it validated and confirmed through public performance. You demand to ‘know yourself’ in the crucible of competition to see if the better parts of your character rise up.

The added pressure of public performance drives the will towards excellence. When done in a play context, that is the proper equation of both reaching your potential AND bringing your highest moral qualities to bear for all to witness. I’ve had many clients finish our program by completing races, setting distance and time PRs, and battling through environments that previously terrified them.

It’s how we solidiy the process AS the point, but we need an anchor on the calendar to tether that process to.

7th Step: Use that truthful evidence about who you are to form a truthful identity and character you rely on in other times of adversity

When you transcend yourself in a public setting it’s a different dynamic than doing so in public. You don’t want to rest your self conception on the reactions of other people, they shouldn’t be the most important. But you cannot ignore them. Without reactions from others, we technically go insane (no check our our behaviour, no common standard of decency, no communal frame of ‘appropriate’). So when you ‘become’ and ‘transcend’ through a public competition it impacts your self belief and self knowledge in a powerful manner.

If you take stock of all the previous steps, they all work together to produce truthful knowledge of your virtues and character. That you are a person who can make the right sacrifices to obtain the right values. And the outcome is living a life day to day that reflect the deep inner truth about who you are, what you really value, and what principles mean the most to you.

You have an entire Hero’s Journey adventure as true evidence of yourself.

The brain CANNOT take it away from you anymore. It’s the truth afterall. So now everytime adversity hits you, and it’s almost always unforeseen, you can rely on the truth of who you are to overcome it. You have the character traits and virtues to rise above. You are that person, you don’t have to project or lie to yourself anymore.

Now you can BELIEVE in yourself because you KNOW yourself.

Takeaways

This powerful progression works because it rests upon truth. But truth isn’t easy to accept. In fact I believe truth is the scariest thing in the world, and love is the most powerful force. When we bring them both together through our hearts we manifest our potential to its highest frequency.

By doing the actions that correlate to our desires, and creating belief in our true selves, we become a better version of ourselves. The honesty and personal experience of sports make it the perfect place to begin and continue our everlasting journey to better know ourselves.

I’ve given you these steps so you can begin the journey on your own. From start to finish, you have all the information you need to aim properly at your personal breakthrough through sports. So go at it alone and find success in your own way. But if you feel the urge to head down this path with the same expert guidance through the process that’s seen my clients find lasting success in health and self-belief, use the button below and send me a message and let’s get working on your path together!

Happy playing friends!