What I want to do here is explain in some detail what the first change is all about, for my benefit and yours.

As I stated, it is Live by a Schedule. Now some of you may think the sound of that is not very appealing and wonder why anyone would want to do it. I can understand those feelings. My struggle is that I have so many things pulling me in so many directions that if I don’t organize my time I never get the things done that I want to or need to. So for me a fairly strict schedule is the solution.

Also, I find if I don’t follow a schedule and just do whatever I feel like doing I end up wasting huge amounts of time reading the newspaper or watching TV or other mindless activities. Living by a schedule will help me stay on track to meet my commitments to myself.

Living by a schedule, for me, has many benefits, not the least of which is that it will help me get to bed on time each night. Not getting to bed on time, in my estimation, is the number one thing that messes up the rest of my life. See the post Staying Up Late – Is it Worth It?

So here is my proposed daily schedule:

5:00 a.m. Get up, personal study, meditation and planning
6:00 a.m. Aerobic exercise consisting of either running or hiking
7:00 a.m. Breakfast
7:20 a.m. Shower and dress
7:50 a.m. Leave for work
8:00 a.m. Arrive at work

3:30 p.m. Begin to wrap things up at work
4:00 p.m. Leave work

10:00 p.m. Begin getting ready for bed
10:30 p.m. Lights out, go to sleep

This is the schedule I plan to live by as closely as I can each week day. For weekends it will have to be different. I’ll talk about weekends tomorrow.

There are some people who go to extraordinary lengths to take care of their car. They wash it, they wax it, they keep it tuned, they get it serviced on a regular basis and they keep everything in perfect working order. They have meticulous records of every oil change and rotation of the tires. Yet these same people neglect a much more important piece of machinery – themselves.

We see people all around us plodding along, making mediocre attempts in their jobs and their relationships. They are crippled in their attempts at success because the energy has gone out of their lives. When obstacles arise they don’t have the strength to rise above them. They are easily defeated. They go through life only half-awake!

When you burn a candle at both ends you will eventually get burned. Don’t squander and abuse the most incredible instrument you have – your body. Give it the care and attention it needs.

Shouldn’t our great aim in life be to preserve and keep our physical bodies in the best possible condition so we can experience and live life to its fullest? Why not make every occasion a great occasion? If this life is worth living then isn’t it worth living well?

In order to live life to its fullest we need to take care of ourselves both mentally and physically. “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” What you think about yourself is manifested in your life and pictured in your body. If you are to make the most of yourself then you should never picture yourself as anything other than what you would actually want to be. See yourself as the person you wish to become. Your thoughts and actions are manifested in your body.

Everywhere you go you find people who are half-alive and barely awake. They resemble walking zombies rather than fully charged human beings. The world is full of them. They are the products of physical self-abuse and wrong thinking. They commit emotional suicide by killing every chance they have in life through neglect of their mind and body.

The saddest thing is to have an opportunity come our way and not be able to take advantage of it. Life passes us by because we aren’t ready to live it. We’re bogged down by poor health, fatigue, exhaustion and weariness. We’ve abused the instrument with which we live life with. When the conductor raises his baton, we are unable to join in the symphony. Our talents and gifts go unused. We are silent.

Too many of us overtax our strength and energy by pushing too hard. We live in an X-Treme world where it’s cool to push everything to the edge. We take risks. We eat too much. We stay up too late. Then we go to bed with sleep aids and wake up with the use of artificial stimulants. We have no time for true rest and relaxation. We are fooled by false economies, thinking we are saving time and accomplishing more. It’s a counterfeit sense of accomplishment. We’ve squeezed all the juice out of the fruit and are searching for more where there is none.

They say it’s a sin to be unkind to others. Isn’t it just as much a sin to be unkind to ourselves? Whatever you do in life, take care of yourself. Be good to yourself. Care for and protect your vitality, energy and strength because they are the tools with which you accomplish everything else in life. The person who does this and has no money is rich compared to the person who is wealthy and has squandered their vitality and precious energy. Whatever you do, protect and care for the most amazing machine – You!

However, I have found it very difficult at times to get myself out in the mornings to do a daily run. So a couple of years ago I began hiking and trail running and have since fallen in love with it. I am blessed to have a mountain with several different hiking trails within a mile or two from my home. So now my daily exercise consists mainly of hiking.

I find hiking to be so much more interesting than running on the streets. Running consists mainly of watching asphalt go by, mile after mile. Boring! Hiking and trail running, on the other hand, have so much more to offer as far as keeping it interesting. Yes, you do have to keep your eye on the trail, but you are also surrounded by nature. And nature never stays the same. It’s always changing. The transitions from each season to the next are wonderful to witness. The change from hiking in the morning daylight of summer to hiking in the dark, like I do now in the fall, is stimulating and challenging.

So, most every day I go out in the early mornings for about a half-hour hike in the foothills and canyons near my home. On Saturday mornings I go on longer hikes for about two hours in length. Here are some photos from last Saturday’s hike. The fall colors were dazzling!

This morning’s hike was marvelous. It was dark yet there was enough light from the quarter-moon to light my trail to where I didn’t need my flashlight. There were thin clouds moving quickly past the moon in the dark that were simply beautiful.

I have to admit, I didn’t feel so great this morning when I got up at 5:30 a.m. In fact I felt lousy. I was so tired and had a headache. So it took a lot of self-discipline to get myself going. I was amazed that as I went on my hike I began feeling better and better and by the time I was done I actually felt great and still do. That just goes to show you that you have to stick it out and don’t let aches and pains or fatigue stop you from your daily workout.

Have a great day!

Copyright © 2009 Garold N. Larson

When you work on muscles, you have to start off with a weight you can lift and then gradually work your way up. So maybe you have to start off at 110 pounds. Let’s say you do the 110 pounds for a while and you do it long enough to where it now becomes easier. So the next thing you do is you add 10 pounds to that. Now you’re lifting 120 pounds. You work on that for a while until it becomes easier. When 120 pounds becomes easier then you add 10 more pounds. You continue on up like this, gradually adding more and more weight to strengthen the muscles in your arms.

We can relate it also to running. I can remember training for my first marathon. A marathon is 26.2 miles long. My good wife Lisa was my trainer. We didn’t start off by doing a 26-mile run. We didn’t even start off doing a 5-mile run. I don’t think I had ever even run more than five miles in my life. I couldn’t even run a full mile when I began my training. I’ll never forget the first time we ran three miles. I distinctly remember that when we completed the three miles I collapsed on the ground gasping for air. I remember that I was so thrilled that I had actually run three miles! It was a major accomplishment for me.

The way we trained for the marathon was to run two miles every morning, Monday through Thursday, and then rest on Friday. Then on Saturdays we would do a long run. Each Saturday morning we would add a mile or two to our long runs. So our first long run was three miles. Then the next week our long run was four miles. Then five miles the next week. Gradually, week after week, we worked our way up to where our final training run before the marathon was 24 miles. I remember that day, running the 24-mile long run, and thinking back to our first three-mile run and thinking, “Wow! Three miles is nothing! Running three miles is so easy!” Now we were running 24 miles! We worked up to it gradually over time. If we would have tried to run 24 miles that first day it would have been a huge failure and I would have given up and would have never completed a marathon.

So how does that relate to self-mastery? Well, every thing about a marathon is self-mastery! But a marathon, like weight lifting, teaches us that you can’t do it all at once and this applies to self-mastery in other areas of your life. You can’t change everything all at once.

So I’m relating this all to self-mastery and the changes that you want to make in your life. If self-mastery is like a muscle then you must work on it like you would work on a muscle. You must strengthen that self-mastery muscle by starting off with small and easy things and then gradually work your way up.

So how do you do this? I suggest you look at your life and determine what needs to change. Make a list of all the changes you would like to make. Then take one thing and focus on it. Work on it for a week or two until it becomes easy for you. Then begin the next thing. Gradually strengthen your self-mastery muscle one change at a time.

I have been doing this for a while. In fact I started on August 1st of this year and made some major commitments to myself of changes I desire to make.

More recently, as part of this process, I have focused on exercising every morning except Sundays. That’s what I focused on and now it has become a habit and even perhaps an addiction – a positive addiction.

Currently I am focused on getting to bed on time every night. When I get good at that then I will move on to my next goal. I have a series of improvements that I want to make in my life that I call my self-mastery goals. I can’t do them all at once. So I work on one thing at a time until it becomes a habit, until I strengthen that self-mastery muscle. Then I move on to the next one.

So in summary, the message for today is that self-mastery is like a muscle which needs to be exercised in a gradual, progressive way. Examine your life, determine what you want to change, and then work on one thing at a time.

Master Yourself, Master Your Life

Thank you.

Copyright © 2009 Garold N. Larson

My hiking morning goes something like this: I get on my hiking gear, jump in my car and drive up to the trailhead parking lot. This is about a mile from my home. The hike I usually take, especially in the winter, is up in the foothills of the mountain. It’s consists of a trail that goes in a loop where the trail runs along the lower portion of the foothills and then it heads up a very steep part of the mountain and loops back on another trail across a higher portion of the foothills and then back down to the trailhead parking lot. Got that?

I’ve been doing this every morning except Sundays and I have quite enjoyed it. I’ve hiked this trail quite a bit over the last three years but my consistency has been spotty at best. There would be months go by at a time that I wouldn’t do any hiking and then other months where I would be consistent. The goal is to do it every day. So I’ve been doing it very consistently for the last several weeks.

Well, a few days ago I stayed up late working on a project. (See Staying Up Late – Is It Worth It?) So the next morning I was exhausted. I slept in. When I got up I was very disappointed with myself. I realized I just didn’t have time to go hiking that morning for the first time in a long time.

So, as I went through my morning, running behind schedule, I found myself just dragging and very down on myself. I felt so discouraged and frustrated. I felt like I was missing something, that things just weren’t right. I couldn’t picture myself going through the day without my morning hike.

Finally, as I was sitting there pondering what to do, I turned to my wife and said, “You know, I don’t really care how late I go in to work, I’m going hiking.” So I got on my hiking gear and went out and did my morning hike. It was wonderful. I loved it. When I got home from my hike I felt so much better inside.

I started thinking about what happened there and I realized that I have become addicted to hiking. I was actually experiencing withdrawal symptoms from not going on my hike. It was good to realize that I was becoming addicted to hiking and that when I didn’t do it I was in fact experiencing withdrawal pains.

I’ve heard of people becoming addicted to running or other healthy lifestyles or activities. I can’t say that I’ve ever been addicted to running. I’ve done a lot of running in my life. I’ve run nine marathons. They were tough and the training was tough but I never found myself addicted to it.

For me hiking is different. It’s definitely a workout. In fact, as I tape-record this blog entry while hiking you can hear me huffing and puffing on my tape. But for me, hiking is also a mental exercise too. It gets my mind going and gets me away from the day-to-day cares of home and it gets me out among nature. There is a feeling there that is hard to describe. It’s a wonderful feeling. I don’t know if it’s the endorphins getting going in my brain or what, but I enjoy it very much. I was pleased to see how much it affected me when the thought of not going went through my mind.

So what is my self-mastery message today? It is this: Find something like hiking or biking or swimming that you enjoy doing and do it every day. I know two individuals who do this. One I see out nearly every morning on his bike. The other I know goes every morning to the local community pool and swims laps. I would imagine that they most likely have the same experience that I have where it’s something they look forward to every morning and when they don’t do it their day doesn’t feel complete, like they are missing something and their whole day is affected.

My wife Lisa is most definitely addicted to running. She is the most dedicated runner I know. No matter what, she is out running every morning and if for some reason she can’t go it influences her whole day. I think the morning hike is becoming the same thing for me.

My message to you is to find something that will do that same thing for you. Maybe it’s running, maybe it’s hiking, maybe it’s an aerobic workout on a DVD or maybe it’s running on your treadmill. The idea is to find something positive that you can become so addicted to that your day will not feel complete without it. Once you get to this point you look forward every day to your workout. It’s not something you dread any more.

May you be unstoppable in your efforts to take care of your mind and body.

Master Yourself, Master Your Life

Thank you.
Copyright © 2008 Garold N. Larson