Arnold’s Monday Motivation For This Week

Arnold’s Monday Motivation For This Week

‘One of the things I hear from all of you the most, whether it’s in the email replies, the tweets, or the Instagram posts, is that you have so much going on, you struggle with stress, and your stress makes it harder for you to focus on things like training and eating well.

I’ve talked before about how I dealt with stress when my life started to feel like too much in the 70s, between auditions, acting classes, training for bodybuilding competitions, bricklaying, buying my first apartment building, and starting to get my first roles in TV and the movie, but we have so many new members of our village, I think it’s worth talking about it again.

Plus, this week is going to be a practical example of everything happening at once because you’re going to see a few big announcements throughout this week’s emails. From FUBAR on Netflix, to our app, to my new book, you are probably going to be a little shocked by how much is going on this week — and that doesn’t even count the solar event I’m doing, the anti-hate event at my institute we are preparing for next week, or all of the media interviews that go with all of this stuff. It is a lot. And I know it isn’t just a lot for me, it’s a lot for Daniel and Adam, so this week, I’m going to have them both chime in on how they deal with stress, too.

In the 70s, with all of those things starting to happen at once, I started to feel completely hectic. You might call it scatterbrained. So I went to meditation classes. I learned to meditate for 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the evening. It helped me settle. But more importantly, it helped me develop what I now call my focus principle: I only have enough focus on one thing at a time. So I do not let the next thing in until it’s time. Daniel can tell you if we are talking about my solar speech and he brings up the interview with Men’s Health happening next, I bring him right back to the solar speech. Until that speech is ready, we don’t talk about anything else — everything else is just waiting down the list until we check off what we are doing right now. When I have busy weeks like this, I will keep track the same way I tell you to keep track of your goals. OK, this interview is done, check it off the list, now we only have 5 things left, but we are only going to focus on the next one.

I know when you have a ton going on, it’s easy to let it all hit at once. It’s the natural way to think. But you have to train your mind to line those things up, focus, and hit them one at a time. Since we have FUBAR news coming, think about a big action set piece in a TV show or movie where I might be fighting 5 bad guys at once. If they’re surrounding me and I have to fight them all at once, it’s going to be a pain in the ass. But if I can line them up and deal with them one at a time, I have a chance. Try to do that in your life.

What might that look like for a busy parent balancing a job and household responsibilities? When you’re feeding your kids, you are feeding your kids. That’s it. There will be a huge temptation to feed them with one hand while checking work emails with the other, but don’t let the temptation win. Then you’ll end up with crying kids and a crappy work email because you’re half-assing both things. Give your kids your full attention. Once you send them off to school or daycare, you can give those work emails your full attention. When you’re working on a project, tune out the emails and give your project your full attention.

One. Thing. At. A.Time. I want that to be your mantra this week. Because, as you’re about to see, it’s my mantra. And it saves me every single day.’