Hi friend,

The Sunday after I swam across Lake Lucerne, I stepped on the scale.

100.1 kilograms.

Wtf?!? Ok for swimming in a cold lake but now too much. More than I want to carry, in the water and out of it. And my first instinct was the wrong one: weigh myself every morning, watch the number, will it down.

Bht that instinct is the real trap. I can't control what the scale says tomorrow, and obsessing over it changes nothing. The number is the 95%.

So I did what I always do, do it differently than others 😂 I stopped chasing the scale, and I set a goal I can actually train toward: ten kilometers, under forty-five minutes. A running time, something I can chase down week by week.

I'm nowhere near it. My first test run, I covered ten kilometers in one hour and nine minutes. Slow as f... and I suffered the whole way. 10km of questioning my new goal. But that's the starting line, and the starting line is always slow.

Now every morning my coaches send me the day's session, built around my heart rate variability, how recovered my body actually is. My only job is to do it. Not to hit ninety kilos by Christmas. To run today's run.

That's the whole thing. The scale is the 95% I can't touch. Today's run is the 5% I can. So I pour everything into the run, and let the scale follow.

Now think about your own number.

You have one you keep staring at. The promotion that hasn't come. The revenue line that's been flat for a year. The goal you check every Monday, and it still hasn't moved. And like me on that scale, you keep watching it, as if watching it will move it.

It won't. Watching the number is 0%. It feels like effort, and it changes nothing.

Underneath every one of those numbers is a single action you could take today, and again tomorrow. The bigger role comes from doing the one visible thing this week that it requires, and then doing it again next week. The number is the scale. The action is the run.

This week's experiment: stop watching the scale.

Name the outcome you keep checking that you can't directly control. Then name the one action underneath it that you can do today. Do that one. Ignore the number all week. Just run.

The scale will move. But only after you do.

Make 5% Your 100%

Bernhard

P.S. Finding that one action, and staying on it until the number moves, is exactly the work I do with people one to one. If you've got a goal you're done circling, and you want someone in your corner to get you there, reply and tell me what it is. That's how we start.

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