GAME PLAN 2023: AMORE

Before locking on to a metric of physical success for 2023 please allow me to offer my tuppence. 

As the dusk is setting in on year’s end decisions will be made. The giving part has passed and want is in the air. What do you want, less of or more? A few days ‘off’ loosens the schedule buckle a notch offering cognitive breathing room — headspace for contemplation. New year’s resolutions can receive their annual focus. What will it be this year? Physical aspirations will have their usual place at the table of dreams. 

For almost 11 years I’ve listened to the desired outcomes of hundreds, possibly over a thousand, goal setters. I’d ask “Why are these goals important to you?” Behind wanting to get faster or stronger, there were deeper needs waiting to be recognized. Weight loss and muscle gain often started the conversation that led through pain and fatigue resolution to the most common bedrock of motivation, the desire to feel better – a sense of ease, belonging, pride, or at least being less ashamed.

Some people wanted to expand their limitations. They were looking to achieve feats of physicality that could reflect, prove, or further, a sense of personal, and physical resilience. Others just wanted to be more in tune. They wanted to draw their body image from abstraction into a sensual reacquaintance — comfortable in their own skin. Coordinated, balanced, and at the bridge - ahoy. The embodied experience showed up as desirable enough to give meaning to life — the body as ‘me’, ‘here’, and ‘now’. The origin of the impulse to reembody captivates me. Is something lost and sought, has integral development been stunted, or do we not grow into ourselves without conscious attention? I wonder - how has enjoying the body, as simple as it seems, proved so enigmatic?

The absence of thorough physical education on offer through formative years has damned the majority to physical ignorance. The body, an adaptive mystery influenced by physical and social surroundings, as well as the microecology within, is baffling. Nobody would hold it against you for not wrapping your head around your aches. Research in neuroscience, psychology, anatomy & physiology, anthropology, and archaeology, continue to produce head-scratchers. Discoveries and new questions about being a human being colour the cutting edge of science.

So how does one goal set for that? Being a human being.

I’d like to offer an alternative framing to the 2023 outlook. Aim for amateur or at least novice. In an era of dreaming big, and shooting for the stars, the idea of aiming for amateurism may seem like limp thinking — after all, what’s in it for you? Well, possibly a honeymoon phase for the rest of your days.

‘Amor’, to love, is at the root of the French ‘amateur’, “one who loves, lover”. An amateur is not a nearly-made-it professional. The notion that an amateur of any art engages for no gain is nonsense. A professional chooses and successfully figures out how to get paid for doing what they love. An amateur does it for the love of it. I have clients that run up mountains, across peaks, and back down because they can. Some fight around the world because they can. Others push their mountain biking, sea swimming, hiking (in their 70’s), mountain climbing, and on and on for something. These are intelligent people, with zero tolerance for squandering the moment to moment. The gain is their own, illuminating, invigorating. They toil and struggle and go back for more.

To be the ‘lover of’, with your own spring of life, you must first be the novice. You’ve done it before, you’ve fumbled your way from unconscious incompetence to realising you suck, staying with it until you don’t, and forgetting how you can do it — the bicycle, the car, the new job. It’s a process that can be repeated over and over, re-beginning better with experience, adding another branch as you reach into the unknown.

The journey from novice to amateur is shadowed with the show light pointing towards top-tier performance. This I think works in your favor - nobody cares. But learning this takes practice. One of the largest obstacles, if not the largest obstacle I’ve encountered, personally and in coaching, is the fear of being witnessed. I’ve had clients afraid to practice in front of their spouses. Many have resistance to moving unorthodoxly in their own garden for fear of neighborly judgment. Simply coiling and uncoiling the torso, skipping, or raising an arm induces alertness. 

The gauntlet of the novice, worthy, I think, of taking on the mantle of 2023 physical aspiration is the practice of composure – moving with, to go without, the fear of judgment. Self-regulation is the forgotten core skill of the professional. Unconsciously competent at keeping a cool head and heart, the pro has navigated the physical and psychological challenges to perform well, witnessed or not. The amateur has met a similar skill level. She has overcome the challenges that obstruct joy in the doing. Favorable moments accompany increasing composure while skill and attributes develop. The amateur finds, loses, or forms, themselves in a perpetual motion - a physical love affair that breeds capability, resilience, and self-connection.

The amateur athlete, dancer, or physical hobbyist in general, is leagues away from the novice beginner line. They just kept showing up, ate the humble pie that was sweetened at each milestone, and learned to find tranquility in the struggle — they managed to fall in love with it.

This year’s end, if you are so inclined to set physical goals, why not aim to fall in love with your body in motion? Focus on showing up, staying composed, and nothing else. With that goal (and game plan) locked in, the only reflection remaining is into your own novicehood. Where are you - the starting line, choosing where to begin, or further on and close to amor? Maybe you are already at an amateur skill level and forgot the savoring part, confusing play for performance. Or perhaps this is all old news and you already stay able to play.

A year from now, should you stay the course, who knows what you’ll be doing because you can? Who cares? Only you’ll know why, and explaining it is not required. That’s Amore.