Our main goal at Eclipse is to improve your everyday life. Not achieve a 300# snatch or break a 6 minute mile (although we will definitely cheer you on if you do), but to improve your life every single day. Fitness isn’t a singular achievement, it’s an ever evolving goal that’s unique to each person. We want to be there to push you past your comfort zone, to find new goals, to do things you never thought possible. Yes it’s going to be scary, but sometimes you have to embrace the fear.
Our bodies don’t understand the difference between excitement and fear, to your brain they process the same. Next time you start feeling anxious stop and think “are I scared, or am I excited?”
As adults, we aren’t excited often. We experience stress far more often than the feelings of pure joy and excitement kids do; you can take Dylan to What-a-Burger for dinner and she will act like she just won the lottery. So when adults start to feel excitement we actually usually process it as nerves and fear, because that’s what we’ve been conditioned to feel over the years. At some point we stopped getting excited about life and instead focused on the stressful parts, the parts that don’t actually matter and we won’t remember in a year.
How many of our members get so nervous about the Open they won’t even do it? I know I’ve had to make my mother-in-law do it for multiple years. She’s not going to the Games, that’s not the point of the Open for 99.99% of the people who sign up. But instead of getting excited about what is supposed to be a fun team building event, people get nervous about how they will perform and talk themselves out of doing it at all. So what if you don’t hit a new PR or get as many reps as you wanted, what does that change about your day to day life? You know what you will remember a year from now – your team cheering you on, Nate’s ridiculous outfits, and your judge even more excited about your last 2 reps than you are. Brooke still tells the story of me lying on the ground for a solid minute before picking up the bar to do one thruster and then lying back down during an Open workout years ago. I couldn’t tell you my score for that workout, but I remember Brooke, Grace and Sally right there screaming their heads off at me to get back up and get one more rep.
Remember, the anticipation is always worse than the actual event. People will spend all day worrying about the Open workout Friday night. A workout that will take about 10 minutes, so why spend hours stressing about it? Just come and enjoy the amazing atmosphere with all your friends working out, trying their best right alongside you. The hard part is going to be the same no matter what, so why spend all day thinking about every possible outcome. I’m choosing to believe you have better things to do with your day, if not let’s fix that.
Life is so many moments and memories combined. It’s the scary moments, the times you weren’t sure you could do it, the pride you felt when you realized you could – these are the times that make life worth living. These are what you look back on throughout your life, these are the memories we want to help you create.
https://catalystgym.com/how-i-learned-to-lean-into-stress-and-embrace-fear/