Battle Busyness and Focus on Your Functional Fitness
While artillery thundered and crashed nearby, and the rattle of musket fire built to a deafening crescendo, the commanding general of all Union forces sat quietly under a tree and whittled for hours.
General Ulysses Grant was famously imperturbable.
His quiet determination and stoic acceptance of circumstances belied his maniacal focus on one objective above all else… winning.
General Grant was an Essentialist. He knew with crystal clarity what was expected of him and what he needed to accomplish. He had an implicit understanding of his essential intent. That was to destroy his opponent, General Robert Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.
The antidote to chaos, overwhelm, and busyness? Steadfast clarity.
If we could all achieve even a small measure of Grant’s clarity of focus and truly commit to our own essential intent, we could reverse every epidemic of health-related chronic diseases and, in the process, put every personal trainer, nutrition coach, and probably psychologist out of work.
It was early May, in the third year of a war that seemed interminable, when two massive armies collided and grappled in the most inhospitable and unmanageable terrain in which a battle could be fought. The savagery and horror of the Battle of the Wilderness is so legendary that Civil War historians and geeks like me still assume a tone of hushed reverence and horrified awe when speaking of what occurred in that tangled forest in northern Virginia over 150 years ago.
Casualties mounted to unprecedented levels as whole regiments were wiped out and entire divisions bled white. Confusion reigned. The ground was the worst possible place in which any commander would ever want to fight a battle. The fighting see-sawed back and forth for more than two days and left tens of thousands killed or grievously wounded, many of the wounded consumed in a blaze as the forest caught fire from the fighting.
Throughout the fight, Grant remained in the same spot, outwardly serene as he whittled one stick after another, quietly issuing orders and receiving reports of the battle, allowing his subordinates to do their jobs and manage the details.
The fighting pretty much ended in a draw. But, unlike any of his unsuccessful predecessors, Grant did not retreat to recover and regroup. Instead, he ordered a flanking movement, attempting to march his army around Lee’s, which only led to the next unimaginably savage battle a few days later and just a few miles down the road at Spotsylvania Courthouse
In a now-famous dispatch to update President Lincoln on the Army's progress, Grant wrote, “We have entered our sixth day of very hard fighting. The results this time are very much in our favor. I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.”
We can all take example from Grant’s clarity of mission and his implicit understanding of the essential intent. In what must have been some of the most intensely stressful moments imaginable, he was able to filter out everything that was non-essential and remained locked in on what he and his army needed to get done.
If you don’t take time, you won’t make time.
In this post, I shared how busyness is the enemy and excuse I hear most often as a functional fitness trainer.
Busy-ness is succumbing to the non-essential. It’s us allowing ourselves to be distracted from our own essential intent.
Who do you know who isn’t busy? We are all so distracted by non-essential “priorities” that we often feel like our lives, as well as our physical, emotional, and spiritual health, are in shambles.
How many people do you personally know who have it all together? Who successfully make time for what matters to them? Who, like Grant, have the peace of mind and clarity of focus to be able to calmly navigate the maddening frustrations and competing demands of modern life, while serenely whittling sticks in the midst of a raging battle?
As a functional fitness trainer, I get it—busyness is a mess of our own making.
Ironically, most of these troubles are self-imposed. When we have priorities, rather than one priority, one essential intent, we introduce all that pressure. Too many of us have wildly unrealistic expectations of what we can do and get done. We take on too much, most of which is non-essential and little of which serves the precious essential intent.
As you might expect, this is pervasive in the business world, and many of my career-minded friends and clients who are in business struggle with this. But, I observe this just as commonly in many of the retired grandparents and stay-at-home parents with whom we have the privilege of working.
To all these good people, I pose this question...
What’s the one most important thing that you could be doing today, right now, that would have the most meaningful impact on your life and bring you the most contentment and peace of mind?
OK, that is your essential intent.
Now ignore everything else on your To-do list until you’ve completed that. Or at least until you have taken a measurable step forward toward that objective. Focus on that priority first, at the exclusion of everything and everybody else. Then, do the same thing tomorrow, the next day, and every day until the objective is met.
“Everybody??? Did you say everybody?” Yes, I did.
“But, Paul, you don’t understand, I have so many other people who rely on me. I couldn’t possibly prioritize myself! That would be selfish! What would they do? How would they get along without me?”
Well, let me tell you about one of the first lessons that was pounded into us during our Plebe year at West Point, from where, like General Grant, I am a rather below average graduate.
When your personal needs are met, you have the capacity to meet the needs of others.
A leader’s priority is to make sure their own personal needs are adequately met, in as efficient and effective a manner as possible, so that they are then capable of focusing their full attention on the needs of their troops.
Their functional fitness, nutrition, hygiene, and self-development are their first priority. If they don’t have their s#!t together, how can we rely on them to take care of their soldiers?
So, prioritizing our own needs is not selfish. It’s necessary. In fact, it’s mission essential.
One could argue that without that commitment to our own self-care we will continue to scuffle through life and fail to gain clarity of and pursue our essential intent with the sense of purpose and single-minded determination of somebody like General Grant.
If this topic interests you and you’d like to explore it in more depth, I recommend the book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, by Greg McKeown.
MidStrong is for life.
At MidStrong, our functional fitness trainers help busy midlifers take time to prioritize their food, fitness, and function—and enjoy the best years of their lives.
To learn more about our functional strength training workouts, available online or here in Westborough, MA, talk to our team.