The 7 C’s Challenge
Are you looking for a fun way to motivate and maximize the mental toughness within your team? “The 7 C’s Challenge” can provide a great opportunity for you to fulfill these needs personally or within your team.
The 7 C’s Challenge is a 105 day challenge from Memorial Day to Labor Day that consists of making a commitment to avoid the following:
- Candy
- Cookies
- Cake
- Chocolate
- Chips
- Cola
- Complaining
Purpose:
The purpose behind the challenge is even though we all know we don’t necessarily need these 7 “C’s” we also know that we will want to have these at some point. Making the commitment to avoid these will build up a higher level of mental toughness within and your own personal will. This can also add a lot of value and teachable moments within your program when getting your athletes to understand the importance of trusting in the daily process of a training plan or challenging conditioning exercise. Many athletes first need to understand the purpose behind something before ever making a full commitment to attacking the process.
Perspective:
Is this difficult? Compared to what?
Being able to change an athlete’s perspective can be a very powerful tool to their overall self belief system. Providing examples of extreme accomplishments others have accomplished can drastically change the perspective on the task at hand in the present moment or the belief of accomplishing a long term goal.
Here are a few examples that you can share with your team that will certainly change the overall perspective on what your athletes may currently view as difficult, hard or impossible:
- Raven Runner – Robert Kraft has run 8 miles every single day on the hot sandy beaches of Miami since January 1st, 1975.
- Meru – A story of a group of individuals who set forth on a mission to climb an extremely challenging mountain in the Himalayas all while fully understanding there is a high probability of losing their lives.
“As a team you are the sum total of all of your experiences”
- Conrad Anker