So often the path we choose becomes our identity and in doing so blinkers us from ever seeing another’s perspective.

The sad thing about this is that this identity is caught up in ‘what we do’ and ‘how we do it’ and rarely with ‘WHY we do it’.

Our time can so often spent in defence or in constant justification of the methods we employ whilst dismissing the ideas practised by different fraternities, despite often being in the same discipline.

Our need to be right is often at the expense of never recognising another methodology that could get us closer to the real reason we embarked on a course of action, or a way of life, in the first place.

Our need to belong to something or to form an identity, paradoxically often limits us in those areas.

For example, two areas that I am interested in are Training and Psychology.
When I first started becoming interested in Human Psychology it was purely to find out why I personally did what I did and what, more importantly, I could do to improve my life.

Despite first studying Hypnotherapy and NLP, I refuse to be these things. I am neither a Hypnotherapist nor NLPer. For me they are simply tools to create a bigger picture – not an identity.

Since then I have continued to meet many people, read hundreds of books and go on a multitude of courses and lectures in an attempt to understand how our minds work. But my WHY stays the same. Simply to be ‘the person I could have come to originally, that would have had genuinely helped me change my situation.’

As long as I remember my WHY, I can stop myself wasting time defending ‘what’ or ‘how’ I do something with someone else, who is also attempting to be right.

This doesn’t mean I do not fall prey to needing to be right at times but it at least serves as a beacon when I am becoming lost in the sea of my own opinions and self-importance!

My training is the same. It would be easy to fall prey to the latest discussions regarding the best and worst training principles, whether Crossfit is better than bodybuilding for example (which seems to be something I see most days on the forums) or how bad someone’s technique is, but the argument is futile because it’s not about training, it’s a discussion about identity and about who is right and wrong.

Instead I would invite people to remember WHY they initially embarked on and exercise regime, rather than WHAT they choose.

I love training because of how it makes me feel at the end after a workout. (Often not so much during one!) But as I think back over the people I have trained with it has been irrelevant what we have been doing, as long as it has worked me hard or I have learnt something new that improves me. The only thing that makes me choose what I do today is because it fits with what my training outcomes are and what I want to achieve.

Like the psychology, with training I’m not a bodybuilder or crossfitter or whatever label someone may give me, instead I prefer to say ‘I’m just a bloke who likes training’

Because underneath it all, the WHY of the Crossfitter, the Bodybuilder, the strongman/woman, the long distance runner etc is all based around the same needs and in recognising this we can begin to remove prejudices and instead allow ourselves to recognise our similarities rather than our differences and that in fact we are all part of the same tribe.

Instead of arguing we can begin to spend the time sharing ideas towards creating what we all really want, which is to improve.

This is evident in so many areas where conflict arises and by recognising the similarities or the underlying reasons – our WHY for doing something, allows all of us a better chance of accomplishing our outcomes, rather than spending our energies defending what we think is the right way of accomplishing it.

Do not be constrained by tribal rules of a certain discipline. Instead recognise WHY you want to achieve something and investigate all the disciplines that can move you closer to that goal.