Guest Post: The Right Motion for Exploring Fitness

This is the second in a series of guest posts by Susan Alexander.

Quick recap: The first post was about Mindset, which is the first of four principles of the model I created to empower any change you want to make in your life - whether it's exploring fitness, learning to eat sensibly, remaking yourself in some way, or any other change.

This post is about Motion, the model's second principle. Motion is the term I've given to the combined actions you take to bring about a chosen change. Whatever the change is, and whatever the actions are, they fit into the same evolutionary process that made the world what it is, organism by organism, ecosystem by ecosystem.

The process is natural selection, aka classic trial and error. Once we recognize that the process that evolved the world is the same process that evolves us throughout our lives, we can tap into it whenever we choose to make change happen.

The motion process - distilled to its essence

In classic trial and error, this is all you do, over and over:

• First and foremost, reject what doesn’t work.
• Be extremely open to what might work. Try things out. Experiment.
• Draw information from your inevitable mistakes and quickly correct them along the way.
• Find what does work. Once you do, keep doing it, tweaking and iterating to maintain an upward trajectory.
• Keep working. Awareness is key. Denial is the enemy. There may come a time when what works now doesn't work anymore. When that happens, stop doing it.
• Keep looping through the process to keep evolving.

The takeaway

You can take any actions specific to any change and implement them through this process. Looking at change in evolutionary terms demystifies it and transforms it into something we can be open to. So does seeing change for what it really is: learning skill. It doesn’t matter what kind of change you're making. Every change is skill-based, whether it’s physical (like working out in a new way), or routine (like eating differently), or thought-related (like changing a belief), or character-related (like becoming more assertive).

What's next?

As explained in the last guest post, my niche topic is personal change. I've taken all that I've learned so far and distilled it into four essential principles that drive change. Together, they comprise a model you can store in your head and use anytime you want to make a change in your life. So far, we've covered the first two principles, Mindset and Motion. In future posts, we'll cover the remaining two: Mastery and Measurement.

Over to you: Have you ever thought of change in evolutionary terms? Have you ever been conscious of teaching yourself something through classic trial and error? Does it help to look at the learning process through this evolutionary lens? Let's talk in the comments.

Susan Alexander blogs at gooddisruptivechange.com

You can follow her on Twitter at @SusanRPM4.