Your racing is not about the course, the wind, the elevation or the other competitors.It’s all about you and your response.
As athletes, we pay such little attention to that stark fact. We try to change ourselves to meet the demand, but the demand keeps shifting.
The only thing that can possibly be stable is your state of internal acceptance, and that means you have to give up your preferences, attachments, likes and dislikes.Regardless of what that session brings or what that course is throwing up, you gotta bring a yes to it. Yes is flow, no is tension.
You don't have to take my word for it; you can observe it within your own body.The flow state every athlete wants to find is in the down-regulated “yes” that acceptance brings. Most of the tension you are bringing is in your resistance to what is and the ideas you have about why you don’t have what it takes.
Give up self-berating, you can’t beat yourself up with negative self-talk and think that will frighten you into a top performance. So, never, ever speak against yourself, not even in jest!
Fully embrace this challenge without losing yourself in it. Remember that it is simply a manifestation within you; don't attribute it to external factors.What you are really reacting to isn’t the course, it’s yourself.
When you spit the dummy, give up, get angry, get frustrated, tell yourself how sh.t you are, when you hate that wind, that course, that nemesis competitor that you hate to tangle with, that’s all you dude. All of it is you and what you taught yourself in training. Address it within yourself and cease trying to mold the external world to fit your inner resistance to what is.
Your fear of failure, self-judgment, comparisons to others, and internal doubts are all forms of self-denial.Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose and you will free yourself to fly.
Allowing yourself to acknowledge what's happening within you won't harm you, but denying it will. If you want to know what real personal power is: just stay off thoughts!That doesn’t mean they won’t come, just that you won’t follow them down the same old rabbit hole.
You’ve been feeding your mind crap long enough, it’s had enough to eat. Put it on a diet, feed it only healthy food. All those ways you say no to yourself, others and the world and the resulting fried network we end up with because of it.
You won’t just receive the optimism you desire, you have to behave in a way that promotes it. I guarantee you, if you say no inside yourself, you are putting that out there too. If you find a way to allow your inner state to be as it is without fighting, your fight with the outside world will end.
When you get a point where there is no naysayer in you any longer, you will start to access the real transformational power within you.
The true athlete in you. I don’t think I need to spell out the application here in terms of performance. We tell ourselves it’s hard, that creates tension physically and psychologically. That thought is basically a flat out no to what is, how futile and how infantile.
Show up, grow up and you won’t blow up!
Gilesy