Our ability to forecast trouble causes trouble.
It’s like you have to convince yourself of all the catastrophic ways you could fail and the potential ways things could go wrong so you can threaten yourself into form using fear as the whip.
Those thoughts and forecasts of impending doom, oh no, what I blow? What if?
Because we are not present when we think like this, we often get really good at fulfilling the very things we don’t want to experience.
You know what I’m talking about, that mental picture you create of the wheels falling off and how terrible that will be. Then, when the wheels do fall off, we have the audacity to suggest we are surprised.
Why?
Oh but I trained so well, I don’t get it?
Yes, you do get it, you get it because you created it!
You forecasted it.
The forecast is brought to you via the feed we call doubt. Doubt creates the storm clouds that build up on the periphery of your hopes and dreams.
If you don’t bring a high degree of awareness here, those clouds will cover the sky and you will end up in a storm of fear.
That doubt and fear storm will choke all the blue sky out of you and you will end up trying to compete on event day with two formidable forces, the course and the fear.
The fear will win out. Why?
Because it will get dark on you when you need the blue sky most. You forecasted it and hence you programmed it.
You are not made of the thoughts, you are made of what the thoughts arise in. If you can train yourself to stay there, you will tap into a resilience you never knew you possessed.
The blue sky in you is the awareness you need that keeps you present with the stimulus without descending into judgment, doubt, fear and the subsequent arse-kicking.
Every session you line up for brings with it an opportunity to choose blue sky over dark clouds.
The blue sky is empty. We could call it pure awareness, being with what is, non resistance, flow, or any other label you want to apply, but at the end of the day it’s about staying away from forecasting and self-judgment.
It’s about feeling the impulse to react to the discomfort and not going into a reaction, refusing to make a story of it and just staying in what you are in, regardless of how intense the feeling in you is.
Creating a story of the intensity of the feeing is what causes the dark clouds to start building up.
Doubt and fear are not separate, just like the sky is not separate from the clouds.
Focusing on doubt covers the sky in fear.
All it takes to stay in the blue sky is to decide to. It’s that god damn simple. The opportunity you have as an athlete is that most won’t and most don’t.
Gilesy