Five ways to change your mindset and boost your wellbeing by Terry Blackburn, author of Be A Lion

15 March 2022

Having a lion’s mindset is key to health and exercise as much as everything else. If a lion isn’t fit, it’s not going to catch any prey.

Terry Blackburn

I want to have a great quality life and live a long life. That’s why I look after my health. I don’t want to die at 80. I want to be 100+, if that’s possible. Everyone wants that quick fix, but with exercise you’ve got to get your mindset around the fact that staying healthy is a continual thing that doesn’t stop.

Here are five tips to continually boost your wellbeing:

1. Focus on your posture

If you think of a depressed lion with a droopy tail and a slow walk, it’s going to look very vulnerable for other animals to take advantage of it. It’s going to be instant prey if a pack of hyenas comes along.

Posture is important – both for yourself and how others perceive you. When you stand tall – head up, chest out, chin up – you look better than when you’re slouched and looking down. You feel better. You look better. And you walk more confidently.

2. Change up your routine

Try not to do the same thing over and again so that it becomes repetitive or boring. For me, with exercise, it’s important to change it up. You could do cardio one day, weights the next day, HIIT training the day after, (which is high-intensity interval training). The day after that, you could then do CrossFit and then you could do a walk.

3. Gamification

Another tip to help with keeping fit is gamification – make a game of it. This might be: “I’m going to exercise for 30 days in a row” or “I’m going to see how strong I can get on bench press in the next three months by trying to increase the weight every Monday” or “I’m going to see if I can beat the time of my last run.”

Just make up some sort of challenge to keep it interesting. It is really important to keep up your motivation. If you don’t, you’re more likely to stop doing it.

4. Hire a personal trainer

Hire a personal trainer, if you can afford it. This is definitely worth doing, because even if you have a powerful reason why you’re doing it and you’ve made it into a game, there may still be some days where you’re lacking motivation.

Having a personal trainer there just to push you on will get the best out of you. Sometimes when you’re training by yourself, on the last couple of sets you will take it easier. You’ll do a couple less reps or you’ll drop the weight by an extra 10 kilograms.

5. Breathing

Sometimes when you wake up in the morning and you’re really sluggish, you may find that is because you’ve been breathing through your mouth rather than your nose.

I’ve been told that a good habit is to put your tongue to the top of your mouth. If you do this, then try to breathe through your mouth, you can’t. You end up breathing through your nose. This is much better for you, and if you do this in your sleep you will typically wake up in a better mood with more energy.