How to Think Abundantly

I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts lately while I’m at the office and one of my absolute favorites is a fitness-related podcast from the crew behind a site called Barbell Shrugged. For those of you who may not have heard of Barbell Shrugged, it’s a group of guys who got together to blog, podcast, and video blog about health and fitness. They come from a variety of training disciplines and after listening to my first podcast of theirs, I immediately wished I could have a beer with each of them. They’re personable, knowledgeable, and have a great outlook on life and their own pursuit of making the world a better place.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to do in the fitness industry. I recently completed a personal nutrition course and while my goal isn’t to be a nutritionist or a personal trainer, I’ve realized over the past several months that people have become more and more comfortable coming to me for tips and help with their own fitness journey. For some, they’ve wanted to know how I adjusted my nutrition to lose inches, while others have asked for strength training pointers based off of knowledge I’ve accumulated from my own fitness endeavors. All of that has led me to think quite a bit lately about what I can bring to the table to help people become healthier, happier versions of themselves.

So, back to the Barbell Shrugged group: I recently discovered they have a sort of a side (for lack of a better term) venture called Barbell Business, which focuses on providing valuable tips and information for gym owners and trainers to increase the number and quality of their client base. Even though I’m not a gym owner, I’ve started listening to this podcast of theirs, too, because they are quite simply so full of useful information that you can apply to any aspect of your life, that their recordings are still incredibly interesting.

Last night I was listening to episode 61 of the Barbell Business podcast, which centered on the topic of living life with a mindset of abundance versus scarcity, when one of the guys, Mike Bledsoe, dropped his bit and it really struck a chord with me.

“Ideas are a dime a dozen. Ideas come and go all the time. Google wasn’t the first people to come up with a search engine, right? Now, where they differed from the rest of the market is how they executed that. What their overall purpose and drive was, was maybe different than Yahoo. And that’s really what put them ahead of the game was execution.

So, when people get caught up in the protecting their ideas thing, I’m like, it all comes down to execution. If you have an idea and you can’t execute it, you don’t deserve it anyway. Someone else if going to take it and execute really well because the world deserves to have that idea.

And if you keep that inside and you let that fear keep that from getting out, then you’re doing the whole world a disservice.” – Mike Bledsoe, Barbell Business podcast, episode 61.

I’ve had a lot of ideas in recent years and I’ve gotten excited about them, until it got to the part where I became overwhelmed by the logistics of executing them. Mike’s words and the no bullshit delivery struck a chord with me and made me realize that I needed to change my mindset to focus on the potential, instead of having a scarcity mindset when it comes to executing my brilliant ideas.

I highly recommend you go and listen to either the Barbell Shrugged or Barbell Business (or both) podcasts because those guys really are full of valuable information.

Photo Credit: Barbell Business, “How to Think Abundantly”