Choosing Clear Skies Over Self-Created Storms in Training
Unleash your athletic potential by choosing awareness over fear, and resisting the allure of self-doubt and mental catastrophe.
Our knack for conjuring potential pitfalls becomes the pitfall. It's as if we've got to mentally run through a catastrophic highlight reel of all possible failures and disaster scenarios, threatening ourselves into shape with fear as the driving force.
What's the consequence of this fear-filled fortune-telling? You're so fixated on the 'what ifs' and nightmares of failure, you become a master of manifesting the very disasters you dread.
Picture this - you've played out a cinematic disaster in your mind, all the wheels coming off spectacularly. And when reality mirrors your mind's horror movie, you have the audacity to feign shock.
Why?
You've trained hard, so why the meltdown?
The answer is simple – you've brewed this storm yourself!
You were the author of your downfall, scripting your story with doubt. This doubt gathers like menacing storm clouds, edging over the hopeful horizons of your dreams.
Without sharpening your awareness, those clouds darken your skies and plunge you into a whirlwind of fear. This doubt-fear tempest drowns the blue skies within you, leaving you to battle two giants on game day – the course, and your fear.
And guess who wins? Fear. Why? Because it plunges you into darkness just when you need the light the most. You foresaw this; you wired it into your system.
Your essence isn't built from your thoughts; it's built from the realm your thoughts emerge from. If you can discipline yourself to dwell there, you'll uncover a resilience you didn't know you had.
Your inner blue sky is the awareness that keeps you grounded in the moment, steering clear of judgment, doubt, and the subsequent kick in the teeth.
Each training session is a chance to choose clear skies over stormy ones. Embrace the emptiness of the blue sky – pure awareness, acceptance, non-resistance, flow, or any label you fancy. But the key is dodging the self-made disaster movie and the harsh self-criticism.
It's about experiencing the urge to react to discomfort, but resisting the knee-jerk response. No storytelling, no dramatising - just enduring the intensity of the moment.
Creating a narrative around your discomfort is the fast track to a stormy sky. Doubt and fear are as inseparable as the sky and clouds, and dwelling on doubt shrouds your sky in fear.
Staying in the blue sky is as simple as deciding to. It's that damn straightforward. And the competitive edge? Most athletes don't make that choice."
