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How I Learned to Lean Into Stress and Embrace Fear

This year I am coming up on 13 years of training CrossFit and I am still making progress.

What I love most about the way that we train at RIP is the base that it creates and the way it sets you up to live a more fulfilling life. We want our members to go and DO stuff with their fitness. We love having you do 5ks and half marathons; Hyrox and Strongman competitions; even the “bucket list” stuff, like skydiving and big hikes. We can get you ready for any of it. That doesn’t mean those things won’t be scary. As prepared as you might be the fear and anticipation will always still be there.

Here’s how I’ve learned to lean into the scary stuff, embrace stress and live a better life:

First, understand that your body doesn’t know the difference between fear and excitement. They feel the same. When you start getting anxious before an event, ask yourself: “Am I actually scared, or am I just excited?”

As adults, we’re not excited often. Our body’s default response to increased blood pressure, elevated heart rate and surging adrenalin is fear. Then we fall into a downward spiral and get scared when we should really be excited.

Here’s something a member of a gym I coached at once said about doing the CrossFit Open; “If getting nervous once a week for 3 weeks in the year is as bad as it gets, then really you’ve got it pretty good”. What he meant is that overall we have pretty good lives if just getting nervous before a tough workout or test is as bad as it gets for that week. This is something I now preach to the members of RIP Training when encouraging them to get involved in events and put themselves outside their comfort zone.

Second, know that anticipation is worse than the event.

Our fear of what might happen is always way out of scope from what actually happens. Our lizard brain takes over and our minds go to the worst-case scenario, and we run at max heart rate for three days before the event. When the event actually starts, we’re exhausted from replaying the possibilities over and over! We’ve already done the whole event—with every catastrophe included!—78 times!

Waiting, deliberating, anticipating—they’re always worse than doing. If you can choose when to start The Hard Thing, choose to start it right now. Skip the hard part.

Third, put the event in perspective: Will you actually remember this in a year?

If not, it’s not worth stressing about.

If you WILL remember the event a year from now, it’s REALLY worth doing.

Life is a series of moments. We rarely remember the easy ones. These standout moments—not the daily rhythm of eating breakfast and shaving—become your story. Any story without these moments is boring. So what do you want your story to be filled with? Plenty of big highlight moments where the main character (you) grew and became a better person? Or a steady tale of the same thing day after day where not much changes or happens. I know which book I’d rather read…..

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