There is a magic secret of ten minutes. Ten minutes can either make you or break you. Whether it is quitting smoking, working out, eating right, there is a magic to 10 minutes.
When I first started putting a fitness routine in my life, I had a goal. My goal was to do P90X. I committed to doing the full 90 days. No excuses, non negotiable. Well going from not working out at all, to working out for an hour and fifteen minutes was tough to say the least. Looking at an hour was difficult. Looking at 90 days seemed impossible.
Each day I would tell myself that I was going to go up and do 10 minutes. The idea of going to work out for ten minutes was a lot easier to swallow than working out for an hour. When that ten minutes was done I went on to do another ten minutes, and so on.
How do you eat an elephant? One small bite at a time.
When we have large goals (and we should have large goals), looking at them can seem daunting. It can be dizzying and disorienting. That why we break them down in to smaller, more manageable pieces.
Workout after workout, 10 minutes at a time I would complete it. Every day I would go in thinking “can I really do this for an hour today?”, and every day I just broke it down and committed to ten minutes at a time, before I knew it, the hour was up.
When I quit smoking and I had an urge, I would tell myself that I would smoke if in ten minutes I still wanted a cigarette. By the time the ten minutes had passed, I didnt want to smoke anymore and the craving had passed.
The same with eating. If I craved something bad, I would wait ten minutes.
Taking ten minutes to stop and reflect, recenter and refocus on our goals.
One of my favorite parts of P90X is during Plyometrics when Tony says “You can do anything for 30 seconds”. It really helps put things in perspective, and also helped propel me along, each 30 seconds after 30 seconds after 30 seconds.
