When do we win?

From my recent escapades at The Commando Temple competition I wanted to reflect on my journey and for those like me, often crippled with indecision or at times self belief, this might inspire you to do something or to think about what stops you and the steps you can take to rectify this. Its also a moment to say a big thanks to all those involved at the Temple.

Its a long one again, so make a nice cuppa and settle in with me for a tale of high sea adventure and daring do!;-)

Are you sitting comfortably? Lets begin…..

“Why do you want to be a Champion? Why are you training?
If your answer has a word like MAYBE in there, ‘MAYBE if I do weight training then, MAYBE I could enter a body-building competition’, then sit down. Because if you think this way you will always be a loser. You are never going to make it, because there can be NO MAYBES!
You have to get up and say, I WANT TO BE A CHAMPION, and I will do whatever it takes – WHATEVER IT TAKES! I will do it.
That’s the answer I want to hear from you. You have to be hungry, and then develop that hunger. You have to create a goal for yourself, whatever that maybe.
If you cannot see it and feel it, and if you do not believe it, who else will?”

Arnold Schwarzeneggar

Wise words and I love this quote. I used to have it on front of my training journal to inspire me.

It’s said that success leaves clues. It’s easy to look at the champions and to ask their opinions to get an insight into the winners mind set.

However when we go away and try to replicate their face value enthusiasm and formulas for victory, we often find we start sabotaging our efforts from the offset.

We all know to win competitions we need to set goals, train hard, eat right, and get rest in order to be bigger, faster, and stronger.

We can be given what seems like the perfect formula for winning. The right diet, the right regime, the high fives and encouragement and yet the handbrake can still seem on or the steering wheel tide to take us of course? Why is this?

Winning is the way to be a champion. But what is winning?

Externally it’s obvious. And for the lucky ones who are predisposed to have a positively wired brain, winning is a matter of entering events…and then training hard and eating to win. Simple.

But here’s the problem.

For a lot of people who are predisposed to negative thinking, either through nature or nurture, me included, that before even entertaining and winning anything there is a massive fucking obstacle…it’s called entering a competition! (And the audacity to even think you can!)

Because inside of competition or any challenge for those with High fear of failure (HFF) there lies the real problem. Fear.

Now we all have fear, but studies have shown that people who are prone to pessimism, neurosis and anxiety tend to have greater activity on the right side of their frontal cortex than their left.

This is known as Cerebral Asymmetry.

We know it happens as a default setting, but we still do not know why.

But what is evident is that we do not think the same way if we are wired to think positively or negatively. We have a different starting point.

And it’s more than just a state of mind. It’s also powerfully connected to how your body responds.

If a mind is conditioned to believe it cannot win or has been effected by the overwhelming sense of loss or a traumatic event, it will often move away from pain by avoiding areas where lose is possible in the future.

Attempting to win at anything contains the over bearing polar opposite of lose.

When the fear of lose is greater than the elation of winning our brains will do everything to avoid those areas, or sabotage our efforts. If a competition (or any other challenge) is inevitable, we will at least have excuses at the ready to protect the ego. (“ye could have won but my didn’t stick to my diet”)

But it’s more than just fear of loss. It’s what we believe that lose will say about us.

We all live lives that in part have been created by other people’s opinions of us. Some good, some Bad.

Oscar Wilde even went as far to say “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”

However we all want to feel significant and if we have, or believe we have built a positive persona over the years, the last thing we want to do is expose the truth, to appear weak when others believe us to be strong. (I wrote poisoner instead of persona initially, which is interesting because having a persona can be exactly that)

Olympia Lepoint in her recent TED talk on reprogramming your brain to overcome fear, mentioned a very practical way to expose what is really stopping us, which allows us to stop being overwhelmed by fear.

She simply says we should name our fear. Get clear what the real fear is that’s stopping you. A competition is just the vehicle. As I have written about before in my blog ‘Weather warnings’ (http://younglobal.wordpress.com/), it’s our light house. It’s the light that exposes the truth for us.

For me competition firstly runs the risk of failing. This then exposes me, in my mind to the threat of appearing weak and with weakness in the survival brain means being vulnerable to attack.

Madness?

Yes but in states of high emotion, forget logic! We are back to our primary, mammal and reptile brain thinking. Survival of the organism!

But when we expose these truths, these fears, something special happens. We stop talking bullshit to ourselves about why we can’t do something and we focus on what’s really stopping us and how we are going to get over these fears.

Because until we take this brave step, and are willing to be vulnerable, to see what we know – but hate about ourselves, our minds are in turmoil with an abstract picture of what we believe is the reason why we are emotionally reacting.

When we name our fears they almost become tangible and contained.

When we know this we can decide a course of action.

I am not promoting a complete banishment of fears, nor do I promise happiness or spiritual enlightenment by this understanding. But by understanding the reasons for the often-paralysing fear of failure, we can short-circuit it and channel our energy towards effective goal-setting, after which we can make incremental – and measurable – progress towards these goals.

For me building up to the competition worked in several ways. And my understanding and ability to strip down how we think is only part of the equation.

What do we do then?

We need other people to help.

In the case of my recent competition, I would never have achieved what I did without the help and trust and support of the Commando Temple Community.

First there was the ‘suggestors’.

Those who can see our potential. (This alone is not enough because we also may know our potential but our fear of lose outweighs the possibility of our potential.)

But it’s the start, the ‘what if that was possible?’ is activated.

Then there’s those who either by fluke, or by knowing us, appeal to our values. They challenge or provoke us.

Lulu Weasle was certainly the seed planter, the good cop, gently, gently suggesting the idea of competition, and then dismissing it to subtly to let it germinate in my over active mind.

And then there was Rob Blair the challenger. Black and white no nonsense coaching which I need – such as “You’ll be doing the competition.”

My initial response was “no are you mental”.

And Robs response was not – ‘why would I compete? but more, ‘Why wouldn’t I?’ (With that smirk he does after a mad comment that is really a facial gauntlet thrown down to be picked up!)

In these times we have little flashes of who we are deep down. The little jolt of excitement before it’s extinguished by self-doubt. That moment of “I’ll pick that bloody gauntlet up!”

We allow ourselves in those moments of madness to recognise, that we do want to play in the sand box with the other kids, but have just convinced ourselves we don’t because of the mental bullies that play there.

The truth is I wanted to play!

And what’s interesting in these interactions, is that it exposes these positive truths.

People have mentioned my fighting spirit and never say die attitude and that’s what competition allows to surface. You can’t not have it when you are trying to run around with 150 kg on a Conan wheel at 64kg!

But unfortunately it takes a lot to pull us to the surface from underneath all the years of bullshit beliefs that have been piled over us. This is why appealing to our values and being challenged is often the way to distact us and allow us to smash through the crust that has formed over the layer of shit we live under and breath again.

In the last week coming up to the competition I felt I still wasn’t ready to compete, and Lulu Weasel made a remark, – “you won’t be competing, your just there for experience” and although true, I noticed it instantly got my heckles up. It shouted in my mind – “don’t fucking tell me I can’t compete! I want to compete, even to win!”

It’s the people that we trust and know, have our best interests at heart that we all need, to enable us to shine a light on what’s possible, even if we can’t see it ourselves sometimes.

Does it mean because I know this I wasn’t a little concerned about my impending doom?

Of course not, but what it allowed me to do was be proactive. I didn’t even concern myself about the competition. All I did was get the facts of what was required, and then train diligently to get to that point.

The training was my focus, not the competition. I could not control what happened on the day but I could control my training and my eating.

I could also use everything in my mental arsenal to bring me away from my imagined fears to my real ones and question them. I could use mindful meditation and other body works to change the default setting of a negative brain towards a more positive one.
(Are our personalities fixed part 1 http://younglobal.wordpress.com/)

Aside from Lu and Rob, there’s the guys who are high on life, the Jason Coultman and Jarek Drzewiecki who love their training and are almost quivering with excitement at the thought of competing and winning that is addictive to be around and that I can draw from their energy and involve myself in their workouts.

It’s the guys who take time out to show us how to do certain lifts. The instructors like David Goodall, and Fitsz Dubova and Mias(Sumayyah Shalchi).

The Big Joseph Dudley’s who give there time freely to help all of us with the big lifts. The Katarina Hell Cmanovska and Alex Kay who give a in depth master class on lifting when all you asked for was a quick pointer.

The Joseph Cohen and Bradley Barnes who show what’s possible for the smaller guys and that its possible to compete and win if that’s what you want and are willing to work hard.

It’s the people who advise us to be sensible and even to pull back from doing too much.

And those who are always there for advice and support even if its just a pace setter to chase round the Conan’s wheel and wanting to quit! Thanks Peter Marsden

Those who point out our strengths and where we can improve technique to utilise our strength.

Its stepping back and saying to ourselves, ‘I have to be worth something, to be more capable than even I believe, if these people are taking this time out to bother explaining this to me.’

And then lastly, and most importantly, there is ourselves. We have to know how we operate. When to do more and when to pull back. To know when others are right despite our fears, and when they are wrong because of what we need in that moment in time.

A competition can be won simply by being willing to walk through the gates despite all your fears waiting for you inside the walls of the arena. After all, as Maximus says in Gladiator – “Death smiles at us all. All a man can do is smile back.”

And we must cling to this memory, because it is easily forgotten to the words of ‘I could have done better’ that rattles through the negative mind after the realisation that its safe. It never takes a moment to say ‘fucking well done you brave bastard, you’ve single handedly killed 3 of your mental titans out there today and you have lived to tell the tale!’

And learning to understand these negative thought patterns, and were possible eradicating them is my passion, because there are so many people living half-lives, that with the right support and understanding both physically, mentally and dare I say it, spiritually, that could be achieving so much more and living fuller and more contented lives.

I do not believe we can be anyone we want to be. I think there are limits, but we can be the best of who we can be, and we must endeavour to do so if we are to live a happy and fulfilled lives