CrossFit Oakland

Well this is the kind of stuff that ignites a flame war. Thanks for posting it, this article makes you think.

I'm a big believer in the influence on outcomes of positive thinking, visualization, and peers. But all of this is well known stuff and scientifically documented.

Somewhere "The Secret" crosses the line from common sense (you want to improve your metcon - train with some really CrossFit people) to nonsense. I just can't figure where that line is.

Keep posting stuff like this - it's CrossFit for the mind.

Reading that just made me plain mad.

It's a well-written piece, though, for sure.

Regarding The Secret, the kind of pabulum that passes as deep insight these days is kind of sickening. Oh well, I'm just a grouch.

I actually watched The Secret movie a few months ago (you can watch it online). It's basically about The Law of Attraction all wrapped up into a What The Bleep Do We Know type of movie. The Law of Attraction has been around forever, is very well known in self help circles, and basically states that like attracts like. So, according to the theory positive thoughts attract positive outcomes and negative thoughts create negative outcomes. But do our thoughts really have this much power? Can we, as it claims in the book/movie, really just think up our own wish list and sit back and watch it unfold? Supposedly, the trick is to truly BELIEVE that these good things have already happened - to live as though it is already a reality. But can people just think their way out of poverty and an oppressed system designed to keep them down?

Oprah says yes, yes they can, because that is exactly what she did. Oprah's childhood was awful - she was impoverished and horribly abused. But she believed that she would escape the hell she was living and education was her ticket. She poured herself into school, books, learning - and she thrived. When she was trying to break into broadcasting, all odds were stacked against her - she was an overweight, black woman trying to break into an idustry that was sexist, lookist, and racist. But Oprah, although not at all happy with her weight and the way she looked, truly believed in herself even when no one else did. She just knew that she would be a huge success one day. And, we all know the story - she defied the odds and became one of the biggest rags-to-riches success story this country has ever seen.

So given this, I can definitely see why Oprah is the poster child for The Secret. I don't dispute the power of positive thinking but I do have a problem with the concept that we create our ENTIRE reality with our thoughts as The Secret claims. Are you poor? Well, you created that. Got cancer? You did that to yourself with your thoughts. What???? I mean, that is just crazy. As the author of the article points out, this is a "blame-the-victim" mentality and I agree that it's very unhealthy.

So, like most things, The Secret is not all good or all bad - there are both light and shadow elements to it.

Pros and cons:

Promotion of postive thinking and believing in oneself: Good.
Blame-the-victim mentality: Bad.

Heck, this would be a good paper topic for one of my classes. Thanks Max!

Maren's clearly much better than I at taking a balanced approach to these types of articles!

I started thinking about The Secret from a Crossfit/sports perspective and I think the power of positive thinking definitely comes into play when doing rigorous physical activity.

I remember playing in a tennis tournament years ago (I'm not a tennis player, I just took a class in jr. college) and I totally choked in the final match because I kept getting angry at myself for missing shots. It became a vicious cycle - the more angry I got, the more I missed; the more I missed, the more angry I got. My self talk during the match was crap. I was saying things to myself like, "Maren, that was such an easy shot, how could you have missed?" and "You're going to cost your partner the tournament, you idiot." I got myself all whipped into an emotional frenzy and my game kept getting worse and worse and worse. That's when I realized that tennis is as much of a mental game as it is physical.

Remember Andre Agassi's big slump in the mid 1990's? He claims that working with Tony Robbins (definitely a big believer in the Law of Attraction) and a rigorous training schedule helped him break out of his slump. I just read in an article about how emotion affects physiology:

"If we're feeling down, our breathing becomes shallow, our shoulders slump. On the other hand, when we're vital and confident, we hold ourselves upright, and breathe fully. Physiology and emotion are inseparable. Try feeling down while walking confidently and smiling...impossible. We can change our performance by changing our state and change our state by changing our physiology."

url: http://www.championtennisswings.com/movelikenadal.html

Of course, it's ironic for me to be championing the whole "think positive" movement, when I am the biggest Crossfit whiner ever. But I've been trying to change that, and I think it's helping! ;-)