An IRON Mindset for Work and Life
An IRONMAN is a substantial physical and mental challenge to complete. 2.4 miles of swimming, 112 miles of cycling, topped off with a 26.2-mile marathon. Many of these events occur in fatiguing heat, humidity, wind, and sometimes the curveball of cold or rain, or both. (Remind me why we do this crazy stuff!) To arrive prepared, you must have developed great fitness, and be healthy and fresh enough to perform. The journey requires planning, commitment, and consistency through various natural ebbs and flows of fatigue and motivation, and life. Successful athletes embrace the journey, carve out an ability to focus on the essential elements while filtering distractions, and cross the finish line with a host of lessons to apply to future events.
Successful IRONMAN athletes build, over time, an IRON Mindset: A way of being and doing that enhances performance predictability and sets them up to be highly adaptable in all areas of life, remain focused, and resistant to fragility.
Fortunately, we are pretty good at preparing athletes for these types of events, from champions to those happy to finish under the 17-hour cut-off. As a result, we have qualified more amateur athletes for the Hawaii IRONMAN World Championships than any other coaching company. Through these countless success stories, we have learned that the teachings of the journey to a successful IRONMAN directly correlate to performance across all aspects of life. So whether your goal is sports performance, work performance, or life performance, adopting an IRON Mindset will project you to greater heights.
This piece will cover:
Inescapable Truths About High Performance
There is no easy option. The fragile will wilt, and the uncommitted will fall away. But if you remain in the game, carve out consistency, and refuse to falter when adversity does strike, you will emerge. The result will be massively satisfying, and the most valuable aspect will be the lessons and experiences of the journey.
This could be a passage of a speech that I might give to an excited IRONMAN athlete. The content undoubtedly relates to the journey of outstanding personal achievement in sport. Now, go back and re-read the passage and apply the lessons to anything of value in life. The words and sentiment fit to your career, parenthood, starting your own company, becoming a great artist, leading a business team, or anything else that presents an undoubted challenge on a path to the ultimate reward.
Pretty simple, eh? And, that’s great, but I want to cement something in your mind before we progress. I want the words to truly marinate because adopting an IRON Mindset isn’t some magical secret recipe that makes life and work performance easy, harmonious, and utopian. On the contrary, nothing worthwhile comes without commitment, hard work, and challenge.
This is not about perfection. It’s about creating sustainable performance across work and life.
With us establishing this fact, we can learn and apply some of the critical elements.
The Key Elements of an IRON Mindset
What does it take to be successful in an IRONMAN? First, let’s lay out a broad sweep of the journey:
Define Purpose: Have a clear vision of what you want to achieve and what event to pursue.
Assess: Go through a process of identifying the training and equipment needs, where to place your focus, and where your biggest strengths and weaknesses reside.
Plan: With your goal established and assessment complete, you must define your focus and craft a plan. It always feels like there is too much drawing your attention, so narrowing down your actions to the critical basics that will result in readiness is key. Planning isn’t about pretty spreadsheets as much as outlining a progressive roadmap of focus to inform decisions around training, habits, and equipment while filtering unnecessary distractions.
First Steps: The journey begins. Patience and small victories are always better than reckless excitement and giant leaps in the hope of huge gains. Don’t stray from the plan now because you are giddy about the adventure.
There Will Be Obstacles: The most successful folks in life are adaptable, especially in the IRONMAN journey. No matter how good your planning, expect the unexpected and realize that serious setbacks, distractions, and roadblocks are inevitable. At this juncture is where high-quality coaching comes into effect, as you continually course-correct and recommit.
When athletes cycle through this process, stay committed, follow through on the plan, pause to reflect, and draw lessons from their experience, they progress. They get fitter, build muscular resilience, develop wisdom, and become battle-hardened. Barriers that might have felt like immovable boulders before become objects to navigate around and grow from.
When the athlete finally reaches race day, they must use every ounce of physical preparation and all the lessons, toughness, and grit gained over the training journey and apply them to the rigors of the race. Why? Well, guess what. No matter how well you establish goals and plan your race, race day will consistently deliver the unexpected. But, applying the lessons of the training journey will emerge. You will succeed. And, the irony is that it isn’t, typically, the result on race day that folks find the most satisfying. Don’t get me wrong. The pride lives on. However, folks quickly realize that it’s the journey itself that creates so many lessons, memories, and joys that endure forever.
Applying an IRON Mindset to Work and Life
We can all build an IRON Mindset. You don’t need to be an IRONMAN to draw from the lessons and apply them to life and work. The truth is that it is a journey unto itself to develop all the skills and traits of an IRON Mindset. Let us outline some of the key lessons and takeaways for you to act on today.
The Power of Purpose: If you don’t know where you are going, you will be somewhere else. Give yourself the best chance to thrive across sport and life with an established sense of direction. The purpose should be the primary driver in anything you care about, and a goal (or race) is simply a checkpoint along the way. An example of this is weight loss. An overweight person might have the goal of losing 40 pounds, which is an objective and a defined target. However, a more powerful motivator for him is the real purpose, as he has to make nutritional and activity choices daily. Perhaps, it is the objective to lose weight so that he can be active to play with his two kids and not be the guy sitting in the chair unable to share in those memories.
Embrace the Journey: Long-term success arrives out of consistent, effective practices. You don’t need to be great every day. Some days there will be challenges and setbacks. Longer-term effectiveness flows if you set your mind to a workable and sustainable personal recipe. When I work with high achievers in business, this massive mindset shift leads to enhanced productivity. There will always be ‘something else to do.’ Many of us live in a state of constant guilt for not finishing everything each day. Shift the lens to the longer-term, execute what you can each day, and, over time, effectiveness emerges, and guilt subsides.
Nail the Basics: With the above in mind, focus becomes a critical puzzle piece. If you look at what an athlete could focus on, I can quickly come up with one hundred different answers. The same is true for a CEO, team leader, or employee. Consistent performance emerges from placing the vast majority of focus on the few most important elements that will get you 90% of the way to your targets. So, what are three to five key areas that you place most of your focus on? If there is a secret to sustainable performance, this is it.
Respond, Don’t React: No champion enjoys failure, but they are comfortable with it. Being able to respond effectively when things don’t go your way, is an essential facet of the IRON Mindset. It is vital to continually pause, emerge from the day-to-day weeds, and course correct in your efforts toward the mission. Equally, it is critical to develop a responsive, or some might say adaptable, mindset to adversity. Failure and obstacles are not shortcomings to be taken personally and you are not alone in experiencing such challenges. Instead of panic and frustration, learn to let the setbacks marinate. So often, taking this approach enables a better path to be found, and the experience goes a long way towards building your fragility armor.
Find Your Resilience Through Movement: When discussing performance, we are bombarded with the trendy words of the day: resilience and adaptability. These are two positive traits to embrace, but that’s easier said than done. Building a health platform and taking on a sporting journey is a great path to ingrain a skillset that improves your ability to respond and adapt. In any endeavor, I don’t believe optimal performance can emerge without a consistent commitment to healthy structured physical movement and training. I am not suggesting we all need to be competing athletes, but if we care about showing up the best we can every day, a platform of health is non-negotiable.
Here are four ingredients to a performance recipe that apply to almost every human:
Posture and Stability: Aching back or neck? A tough time picking up the kids? Place a focus on functional stability as the backbone to help foster improvements in the other legs of your fitness stool.
A Better Butter Burner: We all benefit from a strong heart and improved aerobic conditioning. Walking to the bus shouldn’t be tough. We are designed to move a lot and improving our cardiovascular functioning is essential for everyone.
Lift Heavy Things: Strength training is important, and our bodies and minds thank us when we commit to consistent gym work. Recognize a little goes a long way, and you don’t need a membership to see results.
Spice It Up: Interval training is powerful, and boosting higher-end anaerobic will fast-track results for even the most novice exercisers. This means short bouts of powerful work, with more manageable recovery sections between each. This is tough but supplies plenty of performance goodness.
The IRON Mindset. Draw from the traits, tactics, and approaches of the most successful athletes who conquer the most challenging endurance events on the planet and apply them to your life. I believe everyone is an athlete and benefits from training, but I realize that not everyone wishes to complete an IRONMAN. You don’t need to, but you should consider chasing an IRON Mindset.
Cheers,
Matt Dixon
Do you want to learn more about the IRON Mindset?
Matt Dixon has successfully helped several leading companies and leaders carry the IRON mindset not only into their training but also into boardrooms and the marketplace. If you’re interested in 1:1 coaching or for Matt to speak at your company about the IRON Mindset in business, reach out matt@purplepatchfitness.com to learn more!