Stuck in a cubicle, for 70 hours a week, working on something you’re not passionate about. All the sitting has made your hips, ankles, neck and back tight and your body doesn’t feel like it used it. All of the mental stress has started to add up and it’s affecting your sleep, social life and drive. When you get done with work all it feels like you have enough energy for is to crawl up to your room and sleep. The cycle repeats, you start to gain weight, start to feel worse, start to have less drive and passion. Sound familiar? Sound like something you’re deathly afraid of happening to you? Well these commandments are for you. Take control of your life before it takes control of you! These ideas are ones that I have talked to my friends and family about, that work these jobs, that they feel have made a great impact on how they feel, live and enjoy their lives both at and after work. Lets dive in.
1) Make your Bed and Clean your Room
A interesting start to a post from a strength coach trying to help you improve how you feel and live your life, but try it and let me know how that day goes for you. Its something so small but it’s a win for the day. Its momentum that you created and it’s a decision that you made, that you had full control over. These things are so powerful in a corporate world where it may feel like you have no control over the decisions you make. It brings a little order to the chaos that you’ll face throughout the day. It’ll also reduce your stress levels at the end of the day when you come home and feel like the tasks to do are adding up. Biggest thing I see with people that feel stuck are ones that have created a huge list of things they have to do and it scares them out of doing any of them. Start small and start making progress. Every morning make sure you make your bed and have a clean room.
2) Get a roadmap for your life, Set Goals
Would you go on a road trip across country without planning your route and how to get there? When to stop and where to sleep? Of course not! Do you know how stressful that’d be! So why are we doing this with our life? If you don’t have a plan and direction on where you wanna go and who you want to be, there’s going to be so much added stress to your life! Lets change this! Spend an hour of your day to map out your goals for the next year. Then map out what you have to do each month to get closer to that goal. Then map out what you have to do each week to get to your monthly goals. Finally you can break it down to what you have to accomplish every single day to get to where you wanna go. This makes getting that promotion or quitting that job and starting somewhere new or just becoming a better person so much less stressful. Have a plan and map it out every day. Set your daily goals. They don’t have to be huge but they have to be leading you in the right direction!
3) Sit Less, Move More!
“Sitting is the new smoking” is a real thing. It makes you tight, it wears on your body and this turns into a vicious cycle. The more you sit, the worse you’ll feel, the less you’ll move and the more you’ll end up sitting! Those abs will slowly disappear. That bikini body will no longer be there and our bodies will slowly start to show how we are treating them. So break this cycle. Move more, it doesn’t have to be anything crazy. Park farther away, go for a walk every morning, stand up from you desk and do something once every hour (walk to the bathroom or water fountain) Whatever it is just move. It’ll help you think clearer, have more energy and will keep the abs where they belong.
4) Don’t be the crabby lunch lady! Find and Bring Value
We all know the lunch ladies back in school that really fulfilled their role and brightened everyone’s day and the ones that were saw the role as miniscule and took that out on everyone. What was the difference in how these people made you feel? What was the energy they brought or took from you? Now look at how you’re doing your job, how are you affecting the others around you in this way? Are you the crabby lunch lady? I get it, not all jobs are sexy, not all jobs are a ton of fun, but that doesn’t mean you need to hate every second you’re at your job and it doesn’t mean everyone should feel you drain their energy at the job. Find and bring value in every situation you’re in! Maybe you hate typing up things that seem pointless to you at your job. Seems reasonable, but maybe that is building a skill set within you. Maybe it’s even just teaching you patience. Find the value in the things that you hate to do and if you really can’t, you need to work on taking those things out of your life. This will help shift your mindset of something that is draining you to something that is building you up and it’ll help you build up others in this way.
5) Mobilize
This is the meathead in me speaking now, but if you sit all day, you’re going to feel it. Your back, neck and body are going to be tight. So spend 10 minutes a day stretching. My recommendation would be to focus on your hip flexor, neck and glutes. I’ll post a couple of my favorite stretches below!
6) Meditate
Work, traffic, Instagram, boyfriend or girlfriend, texts, family life, social life, boss being a dick, unfulfillment, lack of control! All of these things float through your head at once and no wonder everything feels so daunting, everything feels like it could be the end of the world! So how do we stop this? Breathe! Give yourself ten minutes everyday to just breathe, let your mind go blank and just be. The clarity it’ll bring in your life will be huge. It’ll help show that maybe the things you’re stressing about aren’t that big of a deal. It’ll help give you a little more control of your life. It’s another active decision you made to better yourself. Lay down, put your feet up and breathe.
7) Find your Church
No matter how much you fight it you need other people. You need to believe in things, and you need to struggle for a cause you deem worthy. Without this that pointlessness of your life will creep in and that job will drain you way more than it should. So find your church. This doesn’t have to be a real religious church in any regard. For some it is, for some its their gym and for some it’s a side passion or project of theirs. But everyone needs something that they can hold onto when the rest of their life is in chaos. So I urge you to find this for yourself and then really put some time into it.
8) Eat Real Food
This one is pretty self-explanatory but most people don’t know about it and don’t do it. If you feel like you don’t have control of your life and you aren’t even controlling what you eat than lets start here. Cook your own meals, make it real food, nothing in boxes, nothing frozen, nothing from a fast food restaurant! Real cooked food. You’ll have so much more energy than before which will allow you to attack other aspects of your life and feel less trapped. It’ll also make you look way better, which will increase your value in the workplace, which will grant you more opportunities to have even more control of your life. (This may seem shallow but if we are honest who is getting hired, the sloppy overweight person that doesn’t seem to have control of their lives or the confident jacked human that is making active choices to better their life?) Eat real food!
9) Sleep
If you don’t refill the cup you’re going to have way less to give the next day, so sleep! This will help all of the things mentioned above. You’ll have less urges to eat crappy food, you’ll feel more clarity in the decisions you make during the day, you’ll accomplish more goals and you’ll earn more freedom. Set a schedule, make sure your room is dark and cool and get a good 8 hours of sleep! The value it’ll provide to your life in how you feel and how productive you are is unmatched by anything else you can do physically.
10) Challenge Yourself Physically
I believe this is a separate category than “Move” because this is where you really push yourself. I believe you need to physically challenge yourself to grow and you need to find something that you’re passionate enough to follow to do this consistently. Maybe its yoga, pick up basketball or a program with Jochum Strength! Whatever it is stick to it and consistently do it. It’s a choice that again pushes you to become a better version of yourself and will affect all aspects of your life.
Hopefully you got some value out of this blog. Really passionate about this subject so if you have any questions email me at jochumstrength@gmail.com. Let me know what you wanna hear about next.