Van Gogh was known for his dedication to his craft, and some say he understood the importance of hard work and persistence. He believed that great achievements often come from many small steps over time, rather than one big leap. 

Detachment can be a tricky concept to understand. The Law of Detachment – from my book The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success – helps us realize that being detached doesn't mean you don't care, but rather that you are blissfully free from attachment to outcome. You set goals but don't cling to your idea of exactly how they should manifest, you act in accordance with your values but remain flexible about the fruits of those actions, and you treat people with loving kindness but resist the urge to control them.
When your happiness depends on anything outside your own Self, you are a slave to external circumstances. Detachment allows you to be happy for no reason – to take joy in the sheer fact of existence, the way a child is happy. This is true freedom.
Carry these 3 affirmations with you today to start living the Law of Detachment:

 I allow myself and the people around me to be exactly as they are.
 I do not try to force solutions to problems. I trust that if I remain present and open, a perfect solution will spontaneously emerge.
 I embrace uncertainty as an essential ingredient of my experience. When I do not rigidly impose my idea of how things should be, I step into the field of infinite possibility. Depok Chopra

Don't Sacrifice Function for Fitness

 Written by Brandon Bennett

When it comes to removing negatives, one of the hardest conversations you’ll have is when telling people they should stop training or exercising. Exercise and training have become a big part of people’s identities today. Telling people they need to temporarily put things on hold or implying that the bootcamp class or running club they’ve been participating in may have actually been eroding their production can be a touchy subject. If you don’t believe me, try telling an injured runner to stop running. 

We often find people who have the illusion of fitness. They find or modify environments so they can move in isolated ways or participate in group training or endorphin-producing activities that may cloud their perception of dysfunction. They’re chasing more plates for an exercise or a faster time in a workout, but in their pursuit of fitness, they’re sacrificing function. Function and fitness should grow together—but giving up function to get fitness won’t let you keep fitness for very long.

For example, after ACL reconstruction, we’ve seen high school athletes trying to return to running who demonstrate single-leg balance measures four standard deviations below those of a 70-year-old adult. They’re good compensators and may be able to accomplish the act of running, but if we looked at them as 70-year-olds, we’d consider them unsafe to even take a walk for risk of falling. 

Plenty of people can perform with a medical or functional problem by gritting through it or compensating around it, but suffering through activity shouldn’t be our standard operating system. That medical or functional problem might not improve and may actually get worse, creating even more problems. 

The connection between exercise and health is so drilled into our brains that we continue to pursue fitness activities, believing they’ll improve health or function…even to our own detriment. 

No matter if your clients are with you to improve their health, fitness, or productivity in a given activity or sport, your responsibility is to protect the integrity of all of them. When someone scores below the acceptable thresholds on the movement screens, if the conversation doesn’t address pushing pause on exercises or activities that jeopardize that integrity, then you’re part of the problem, not part of the solution. 

Of course, telling adults they aren’t allowed to do something works about as well as it does for teenagers. If you’re continuously telling them “You can’t do this. You can’t do that” and don’t allow them to work out or participate as they envision, they’re going to go find someone who will tell them what they want to hear rather than what they need to hear. You need to communicate that having a movement pattern or body part that’s painful, dysfunctional, or asymmetrical doesn’t mean they need to scrap their fitness plans—just the fitness that’s counterproductive.

I often ask patients and clients, “Can you commit to temporarily not working on your fitness while we work on other things that may have a bigger influence? Can we put your fitness goals aside for a bit, hit a corrective strategy for a week or two, and then come back and reassess?” If you’ve done the work on the frontend to gain buy-in of the process, asking those questions and vetting the potentially counterproductive exercise or activity choices will be less painful. Guiding clients and patients through that experience can produce massive change with no added stress because better perception drives better behavior in both the short and long terms. Education is best invested once better awareness is in place, because once awareness is set, protective behaviors should be clear, simple, and actionable. The conversation moves from one of “You shouldn’t” to “Why would you?” 

All content on this site, regardless of date, should ever be used as a substitute for direct medical advice from your doctor or other qualified clinician. All coaches should have at least a masters degree in a coaching area.