Choose Your Antarctica - Project GWR Week 2
Hi everyone, and welcome to week two. Ingrid has a saying she lives by: find your possible. This week I want to talk about how you find it. We registered for seven marathons on seven continents in seven days, and some days I still don't know if it's possible. In this video I explain why a goal that big changes your behaviour more powerfully than a sensible one does, and how daily stress becomes the bridge between where you are now and where you want to be.
Watch time = 2 minutes. Worksheet below.
Choose Your Antarctica
My daughter Ingrid has a saying she lives by. Find your possible. I love it because it points you past the obstacle in front of you and toward what you are actually capable of, which are rarely the same thing.
Here is the honest part. We have registered to walk seven marathons on seven continents in one week, and some days I do not know whether it is possible. That uncertainty is not a flaw in the goal. It is the thing that makes the goal work.
A big goal does something specific to your behaviour, and the research on this is unusually clear. Edwin Locke and Gary Latham spent more than thirty years showing that specific, difficult goals produce better performance than easy goals or vague encouragement to do your best. When you commit to something hard and concrete, you direct your attention differently, you persist longer, and you start searching for strategies you would never have bothered to look for.
Something else happens too. When the goal is big enough, you stop asking what you should do today and start asking what a person who does this would do today. You are no longer managing your behaviour. You are becoming someone whose behaviour follows naturally. I want to be careful here, because identity language gets thrown around loosely in the wellness world. What the evidence supports is narrower and still useful: how strongly you identify with a behaviour predicts whether you keep doing it, above and beyond how much you intend to.
Then comes the part that actually gets you there, and it is physiological. Your body only changes when something asks it to. When you demand more of your muscles than they are used to, you activate signalling that drives your cells to build new mitochondria. When you load your bones and tendons progressively, you trigger the remodelling that makes them denser and stronger. None of that happens because you chose a goal. It happens because you applied a stress today, recovered from it, and then did it again.
Last week we talked about rest. This week is the other half. Stress plus rest equals growth, and you need both terms or you get nothing.
So the sequence is global, local, global. You choose something big enough to reorganize how you live. You do the small thing today. You repeat the small thing until the big thing arrives.
Ingrid's ankle took two years to heal and she is now walking toward Antarctica. Neither of those facts was obvious a year ago.
Your 1% this week: choose your Antarctica, and make it big enough to be frightening. Then do one small thing toward it today. Not tomorrow, and not when the conditions are right. Today, while the goal is still fresh enough to move you.
You can find that prompt in Question 2 of our worksheet.
