In which I show you rather more of the inner workings of my brain than you may be comfortable with. There are a lot of feels with my lifting. I love lifting, and it gives me real joy, but it also comes with a lot of negative mental chatter. And some very mixed metaphors.
Old habits die hard
One of the challenges of coming to a sport late is bringing all your emotional and mental baggage with you. I mean those deeply ingrained mental habits that will either set you up beautifully for training and performance, or build an obstacle course beyond the fiendish imaginings of any tough mudder.
Well-raised and well-coached young athletes seem to grow up with encouragement and belief which helps keep the weight of expectations in check, and balances the doubts. (With some of the gruesome examples from Trophy Kids excepted.) Without that history, some of us trip over a lifetime’s baggage.
Any habit gets stronger the more it’s practiced and reinforced–whether that’s getting out of bed and starting your morning training before your brain has a moment to question the wisdom of doing pull ups before coffee, or something as destructive as smoking. While I managed to quit smoking after thirty years, I’m still fighting hard against my tendency to fixate on everything negative in my performance, every error in a single lift.
Clearly, we learn from failure. There are advantages in identifying from mistakes and problems: if you can see them, acknowledge them, learn from them, and then move the hell on, rather than letting them gather and loom and lurk, and fill you with doubt. That’s how problems get fixed. Out of balance, they can take over.
Wolves and donkeys
Every sports psychology book on the planet probably includes a parable about the good wolf and the bad wolf. My bad wolf is a big strong fat bastard, because it ate the good wolf. Years ago. On toast. With extra peanut butter. The giant bad wolf spends a lot of time hanging out with my inner Eeyore. Between them, they can find the cloud around every silver lining.
After every lift I do–even the best lift–I can tell you seven things that was wrong with it. At least seven. Probably eight. Because that’s the first place my brain goes. Before even the “hell, yes” moment of a PB or a good third lift on the platform, I’ll be running through the flaws and bugs.
I suspect this is a combination of three things–it’s partly my upbringing, where “good enough” was never good enough. But I think it’s also a female thing, or a British thing. Or a British female thing: deflecting praise or compliments, even internal ones. The urge is to bounce it back with a mirror, or deflate it. Because clearly, anything that’s not negative is suspect. (OK, fine, this is probably just my wiring not a cultural thing. But if you want to make the average British female squirm awkwardly: praise her.)
Shifting that bug-hunting error-spotting tendency sideways to a starting point for improvement has been extremely useful. It’s served me well in my studies, and in my work. Trying to interrupt the instant bounce to the negative is a good habit to work on developing. Even if that usually slides into an almost instant “yes, but” it’s better than skipping the positive altogether. (Sometimes the “actually, that was pretty good” realisation comes several hours, even several days later, when the bad wolf and Eeyore has stopped paying attention or are busy falling over laughing at the idiocy of my inability to see the blindingly obvious at the time.)
A good session
After my previous post (and my previous training sessions which were a pretty much perfect collection of every error I could make, excepting only falling off the bench, or dropping the bar on my head), Monday’s training was a dream.
Sure, I could nitpick things here and there–one lift where I pull a bit to the left, another where my line is a little random–but, I was able to sit up and say “aye, that was OK” after almost every set. And I managed to do that before analysing the details and working out what I needed to tweak or fix or improve. (Though I still found time to curse myself for wearing baggy kit which made it hard to see exactly where my arse was on the bench.)
“Never good enough” is a pretty destructive place to be. The never is the killer. Why bother trying, if you are never going to get there? Not good enough yet, however, is a whole other creature. It’s a hungry, feisty little beast.
As long as I can hold on to the absolute belief that I can keep improving, that I can get stronger, and better, then the waves of doom-mongering are just noise. It’s just the tide coming in, the tide going out. Background noise. Entirely predicable.
Fixing it
Quelling the noise is something I’m working on very consciously. One method is to find and enumerate things that I can accept as both good and true whenever my instinct bounces up a negative. (e.g. “That was shit: I lost my line. But, I am strong enough now to get out of trouble even when I go wonky.”) The other way is with visualisation. As with the meditation practice where you count–acknowledging where thoughts inevitably creep in, and then resetting and starting again–I do the same with visualisation. Over and over again until I can run through a whole lift, from waiting for a “bar’s loaded” call, to seeing the white lights. If there’s a flicker of doubt, or a wobble, or anything that’s not automatic? Back to the wings I go. Because when I doubt, gravity wins.
If the self-deprecating mental chatter is just treated as background noise, the bug-hunting instinct becomes useful; it supplies a work list, not a catalogue of sins.
So, when I train this evening, I will to remind myself of the things I have to work on, and the things I need to improve without getting distracted by wallowing. Because Eeyore is tedious company. And I’ve got better things to do than feed complacent fat wolves. Oh, hey, I could feed Eeyore to the wolf. That solves one problem…