Pump it up!

Stimulus! Stimulus! Stimulus! No matter how many times does one repeat the word, even scream the word "STIMULUS" out loud, one can never end up over-emphasize the importance of stimulus in human life. It's what keeps us alive. It's what gives us a sense of what the world feels like. Survival relies on the ability of an organism's ability to respond to stimuli. Life has evolved, and continues to do so, to improve our ability to respond to stimuli. Else, all eyes, ears, nose, nose hairs, tongues, skin and all the senses, even the 6th one, go straight down the drain. Now, before my rant delineates me from the issue I shall rant further about, allow me to convince myself that I have driven home the importance of Stimulus in our lives......

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I'm still convincing myself...

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Aha! Convinced!

With that sorted, let's move on.

There are two types of stimuli. One is external. The other, well, no points for guessing, is internal.

External is all that we feel..... and blah...blah....blah about all that the skin, eyes nose, ears and the tongue doing their own thing. We know what they do. Yeah! Those things. I feel stupid saying what the 5 sense organs go about doing. Besides, it is sheer underestimation of the intelligence of the reader. Now why would anyone want to underestimate the intelligence of all the gracious, but nevertheless jobless people, who invest their precious time reading the stuff you painstakingly write? Huh?

So with external stimulus left to the reader's imagination, I shall move on to Internal stimulus. That way, I can save a ton of stuff that I'd otherwise have to write. Moving on!

Each one of us goes about doing our thing everyday. It could be fighting with fire, driving a bus, or a car, or another person crazy. It could be all the myriad of things that human beings have come to engage themselves in. But one thing common to everyone, no matter what we have, in the name of a job description, is this. We all experience a constant variation in the difficulty and intensity of work we have to get through from day to day. Just in case there is someone who does the same thing over, and over, and over, and over, and over again, each day, everyday, then your job.... 

But in most cases, let's hope that's not the case. I shall even take the liberty of hoping that what each one of us does, is something he/she is passionate about.

In that case, say one goes about doing his/her thing. One fine day, the task for the day looks particularly daunting. So difficult that the difficulty of the task that lies ahead is, maybe... just mayyybe, more than what you can handle. What does one usually do? In most cases, we slog it out, put in all we've got. And many a times, we find that we have gobbled more than what we can chew. That might not even be the case, but at least that's the impression we form in our head about the situation.

This is where internal stimulation comes into picture. Professional athletes use it a lot. Non-athletes use it too, but it is a lot more easier(common) to see an athlete use internal stimulation, than to see a layman on the road use internal stimulation. I know... I know.... All this yak about internal stimulation, but what on the planet is INTERNAL STIMULUS?

Quite frankly, I pulled the two words and the following meaning straight out of my ass. Internal stimulus is our innate ability to evoke an unnatural response to an external stimulus. Please don't look this up in a dictionary.
Here's the deal.It is always easier to do a daunting task when you have your insides pumping... HARD! You feel like you can deliver a 1000 watt shock to someone when you are excited about something. We also know this as the Flight-or-Flight response. Strangely, you don't need a dog chasing you to get all pumped up from inside. Of course, that said, a mad dog on your tail will surely help. But not necessary.

All one needs to do is look at the daunting task at hand in a condescending manner, and just get a bit aggressive about it. It is a bit like what The HULK does. He gets mad... followed by....err this...

HULK SMASH

Most often, when the task gets crazy-hard, you're not exactly aiming to hit the nail right on the head. You just want to bash the nail into whatever it was supposed to be driven into.

I read a bit of this "Internal Stimulus" on some page about Neuro-Linguistic-Programming(NLP), and never made much of it at first. But then, I saw how athletes train for peak performance. These guys(athletes) don't just go about training hard, and then training harder. They know how to tap into their latent energies. And that latent energy, we all have. The way the athletes do it, is specific to each athlete. But in most cases, they let out a shout, a growl, or some noise. Else, they rub/clap their hands vigorously, jump, or do something very animal-like, something that taps into our primal nature, that which lets us access the stronger version of ourself. And boy! Oh Boy! does it work!!

My coach at the gym told me to pump myself up before I was to lift a weight I hadn't tried to before. All I grunted was "LET'S DO THIS SHIT!!". And woala! Nailed it! I did get a few glares from the treadmill mongers, but who gives a damn?

Sir Richard Branson's coined phrase "Screw it, Let's do it!" is an example of a line he uses to pump up his, and his team's morale. Same principle. The more you get excited about something, the less daunting it seems.  Basically, you've tricked your body into the Fight-or-Flight response, without needing a dog to chase you.

The science behind getting pumped up is this. When we get all pumped up and excited, we prepare our entire nervous system to fire up. This in turn, overrides the imposed inhibitions on our body imposed by our surroundings, our perceptions, or more often than not, by our own fears.

I feel there's a certain symmetry in the universe. Be it that you lift weights, or that you're getting into one of the most riskiest propositions in your entrepreneurial career, or that you are entering a building on fire to save someone's life, or no matter what the daunting task is that is looking you right in the eye, PUMP IT UP!!

And if you're up against something too big to handle......