fear

Walls Redux

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Revisiting and updating…seemed timely

The wall is a physical barrier that must be dealt with in our sport, but it is also a mental/emotional one.

It is in our nature to slow at a wall, to look up at it, to ponder how to get past it. Our tendency is to assume our path continues on past the wall, following the track we have been on, and that the wall stands in our way. In swim training, we must overcome this mindset:  our path does not continue on, but resumes in another direction. The wall becomes a chance to speed up, to readjust, to jump off and speed away on our new path. The wall is not obstacle, but opportunity.

My other experience with walls is The Wall exercise in team building. After working through a series of smaller challenges with a group where you have (hopefully) ironed out differences, insecurities, communication issues, and trust, you are faced with a final challenge. A huge and intimidating wall that the whole team has to get over. There are no handholds or ways to boost yourself, and it is too tall for even your tallest group member to jump to catch the edge. You MUST work together, using the gifts and talents of the group, to find a way over. It is one of the most initially disheartening things to face, and it is easy to fall into “this is impossible”.

I don’t know how others have experienced this, but our group struggled a bit at first. Several people (myself included) balked because of physical limitations like weight or bad back. Some people balked out of fear, or body image issues, or lack of confidence in their physical abilities. I say we struggled “a bit”, but the truth is that we hemmed and hawed and bickered for probably 15 minutes before we made any attempts to get over. FINALLY, a woman who had been a gymnast as a kid and was all of 5 feet tall, told a couple of the guys to give her a boost. Even pushing her as high as they could, she could only get hands to the top of the wall…but then, using her knowledge of gymnastics and flexibility, she tossed one leg straight up and hooked her foot on the top of the wall and pulled herself over. (To this day, it is one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen someone do.)

Once that happened, we were re-energized. Seeing it was believing it, and working together we got everyone over that wall…boosting from the bottom, reaching from the top to catch hands and help pull, shouting encouragement. When the last person came over, we were EUPHORIC. We all felt the lesson in our bones: we had accomplished something that seemed impossible because we worked together. None of us, no matter how talented or accomplished or naturally gifted, could have gotten over that wall alone; success was only possible as a team.

So how does all this philosophical rambling about walls matter in broader context? In preparation for writing this, I looked up the definition for the word wall, and was interested to find this:  an extreme or desperate position or a state of defeat, failure, or ruin. Those of us who supported a different vision of America’s future than the one we’re facing are feeling this deeply right now. We hung our hopes on joy and progress only to run face first into the wall of other people’s fear, prejudice, and apathy. What now, what next? This wall looms over us, and I now stand in front of it, feeling a bit desperate. I cannot see past it to where we go from here.

We can take lessons from both swimming and team building. We can speed toward this wall, and see it for the opportunity it is. We can have the confidence to race at this wall, lower our heads, hold our breath, flip and jump as hard as we can in our new direction. We can remember that we are not alone in this endeavor, and that our way to deal with the wall is in community. Our “team” can succeed where we as individuals will struggle. Our path is on a different course, one that we cannot yet see, but it will be there, and this wall that seems so daunting is our best chance at finding it. The alternative is letting the wall stop us, leaving us stuck in a place we don’t want to be and weren’t trying to get to. Screw that—let’s push off this wall together and see where our new direction takes us.

Fighting my Imposter Syndrome

/ Jillcoach / 2 Comments

The first time my head coach had me run practice for his elite senior group was nerve wracking. The kids didn’t know me well at all, and my mouth went completely dry facing this group of about 25 teenagers, with looks on their faces ranging from uncertainty to skepticism to hostility. Who was I to tell them what to do? Why would anyone want to hear what I had to say? My imposter syndrome raging, I resisted the urge to recite my resume at them and plowed forward.

I’m telling this story mainly because I’m back there again, only this time with venturing into writing and trying to figure out publishing in a social media environment. At the age of nearly 60, learning how to reach people and establish a following is more challenging than that first practice with a new group. NO ONE WANTS TO HEAR WHAT YOU HAVE TO SAY keeps pounding in my head, trying to get me to quit as I have before with my writing.

The thing is: I’m a big believer in paying attention to what the universe puts in your path, and over the last couple weeks I have encountered several blogs, podcasts, and posts where people are talking about everyone needing to use the gifts they have to get us through the next few years. It felt like something was calling me to step up and try again. So here I am, in the face of all my insecurity and imposter syndrome, putting myself out there just in case there is a nugget of something I’ve learned that would help another person navigate their challenges.

Insecurity is debilitating. It drags you back before you even start, constantly whispering to you that it doesn’t matter, no one cares, who would pay attention to you, it’s better to not even try than to try and fail. I saw it so much in the athletes I worked with—why work hard and put myself on the line when I might not win or reach my goal? There is vulnerability in caring and reaching wholeheartedly for what you want, and coming up short can feel awful and devastating. Our insecurity makes us back away from the consequences of trying and failing, but blinds us to the consequences of not trying at all. It makes us defensive and cynical, telling ourselves that our choice or non-choice simply doesn’t matter, that caring is for chumps.

But what is the alternative?

At a macro level, I think we saw the alternative in our last election. Millions of people told themselves “my vote/voice doesn’t matter, why even try, nobody cares anyway, no one wants to hear what I have to say, I’ll just bury my head and protect myself.” The consequences of this choice remain to be seen, but certainly seem to be rolling toward very negative for most Americans.

I don’t know how this journey will go for me, but I do know that I need to try. If what I write helps one person, then throwing myself out here and being vulnerable was worth it. What do I have to lose really? If I never get beyond a follower or two, that will feel embarrassing, but if I give up after two weeks because my insecurity is dragging me back, I will feel worse about myself as a person.

I don’t want to be click-baity…not my style. I want to be authentic and sincere, but maybe that’s not a thing that gets followers. Gotta try anyway, right? Maybe I should put a cat picture on my post to at least get someone to open it.

?????????????

Where to Start?

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I haven’t written in a while, and with everything going on, am struggling with where to start. To steal shamelessly from Julie Andrews:

“Let’s start at the very beginning
A very good place to start
When you read, you begin with A-B-C…”

When I started this blog, it was intended to bring forward some life lessons I’d learned from coaching and apply them to life more broadly, and perhaps if I was lucky, be a bit inspirational now and then. I need to depart from that format for a while in an effort to try to make sense of what is going on in our world, and perhaps through talking it out, find a way to move forward in a way that feels positive and productive.

I read recently that Kansas has passed a law banning transgender girls from participating in girls’ sports…a law that apparently affects ONE person in the state. One. In a state of nearly three million people, THIS was the issue that rose to the top of the priority list for the time and attention of the elected officials of the state. THIS was the most important need to be addressed. Not the educational system (ranked 27th in the nation, with over 497,000 students in public school), or improving state-maintained roads and infrastructure (over 10,000 miles worth), but something that affects a vanishingly small percentage of the population. Really?

When I look at this, and at how legislators across the nation are spending their time and political power, I can’t help but wonder “why?” Why is so much effort being expended to stop people from expressing themselves freely, exploring new and different ideas, or taking care of themselves and their families in the ways they see fit? Why is this level of control being exerted?

When I was coaching, the teenagers always wanted to wear “technical suits” for their championship meets. These are suits that provide some degree of compression and water resistance, and the kids believed passionately that they wouldn’t be fast without them. No matter how much I assured them that it was the work they had done to prepare their bodies to race, and not the suit, they believed otherwise. Why? The suit was something tangible they could put their hands on, and it gave them a sense of confidence and control they didn’t have in themselves. The suit pacified their fear.

Coaching gives you the opportunity to observe people in a lot of different emotional states, and fear was one I saw regularly. I think humanity as a whole is particularly gripped by fear these days: fear of changes in our climate, fear of dwindling resources in an ever-expanding human population, fear of disease, fear of each other. These fears are real and valid and overwhelming, and hit at our deepest fear, which is our inability to fix any of them. When everything feels out of control, you seek to control anything you can.

I think leaders in churches and governments very sharply feel this fear of not being able to fix these things; they know they don’t have answers or solutions, and they share the fears we all have. Unfortunately, some are responding by inventing issues and targets that we can aim our fears at, that they can then “solve”. Like the technical suit, it provides a sense of confidence and control, as long as they can get us to believe that fixing these invented issues will pacify our fear.

Their solutions are lies because their problems are lies. Like the Wizard of Oz, they’re trying to distract us from the truth, and the real problems only get worse while they waste time driving us apart over who people love, how they dress, whether they choose to have a child, and what words are in books. They could 100% get their way in all of these things, and we would still be facing climate change, dwindling resources, possible pandemics, and even more fear of each other.

I find myself getting angry with the people who believe these lies and latch onto these invented issues as though they are the real problem and what is “destroying” America. When I feel that anger and frustration (and my own fear), I have to remind myself that they’re scared and overwhelmed too…they’re just more comfortable believing the comfortable lie with the easy answer than I am.

I believe we need to work harder to connect with each other directly and not fall into believing lies and easy answers. We need to not listen when a newscaster or preacher or legislator tells us how someone else feels, or what someone else is trying to do to us. It is not gay marriage or men in dresses or books about racism that are making our daily lives feel hard or the future feel hopeless. I have been trying to train myself, every time something elicits an emotional response, to ask “Why do I feel this way? What does the person telling me this gain from me being upset?” For me, it’s been a step in the right direction, and I’ve realized that most of the time the people telling me the bad things want my money or my clicks or my attention.

My other small step has been to try to listen and calmly respond when someone speaks out of their fear or ignorance or judgmentalism. I tell a story from my life that has shaped why I feel differently about what they said. If they don’t listen, or persist, or get hostile, I tell them we have to change the subject or I’ll need to walk away. It’s worked surprisingly well with some people, but full disclosure: it’s a work in progress for me to not just avoid the conversation to begin with. Introvert here.

I’m considering volunteering as a way to reconnect with community and do something tangible toward fixing the real problems we face. I’m not sure yet what that looks like, and am having a hard time figuring out what to do. More to come.

Whatever you can do to manage your own fear, find some peace, take a positive step, or rebuild community helps in this world. At a minimum, it helps your own stress go down. If you have good ideas, please share in the comments! Hopefully, I will be writing more soon.

The “C” Word is Can’t

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i can't

I routinely ban the use of the phrase “I can’t” on the teams I coach, and instead try to teach positive self-talk, and learning different ways to express the challenges we face.

Can’t. It is one of the most self-defeating words in the language. Not only does it mean falling short of what one is trying to do, it also implies that one will not continue in the attempt. In my coaching career, “can’t” was not the wording used when someone was truly physically incapable of continuing…athletes have a whole different set of expressions when they are in that place. “I can’t” was what was used when what was really meant was “I give up”.

“I can’t” is the pressure release valve, it is the jargon to let ourselves off the hook and make the unpleasantness go away. “I can’t” is not a real state of being, but rather an attitude, and often an attitude about ourselves.

Things I hear when I hear “I can’t”:

  • I quit
  • I don’t want to
  • I don’t know how
  • I’m afraid
  • Don’t make me continue
  • I don’t believe in myself
  • I’m giving up on myself
  • Save me

We have to be careful, both about using the phrase ourselves and about how we respond when others use it. When a toddler learning to tie shoes gives up in frustration and says “I can’t!”, does the parent just do it for him? Or respond with “Let’s try again”? When an athlete backs away from a challenging training set, saying “I can’t”, does the coach take the easy route, shrug it off and turn attention to others? Or respond with a push of encouragement to keep trying?

We need to learn to hear what “I can’t” truly means. We need to hear the fear and insecurity behind that phrase, whether it is coming from ourselves or others. We need to respond with an acknowledgment of the difficulty AND a pep talk to move through it. “I can’t” needs to be transformed into “I’ll try.”

“I’ll try” does not guarantee immediate success in the endeavor, but does indicate a major change in attitude. “I’ll try” is positive, encouraging, and implies an ongoing willingness to accept and face challenges. “I’ll try” combats insecurity with small doses of confidence, and fear with the hope that at the end of the “try”, the challenge will be overcome.

Discomfort

/ Jillcoach / 1 Comment

swim injury

As a middle-aged former athlete, I live in the frustrating limbo of still being technically able to perform the sports and activities I want while also being stymied by pain. Things hurt. Every day. Good weeks, it’s the same pain each day; most weeks, it’s something new and multiple things each time I exercise. I’m trying very hard to recall my lessons from swimming to help me get through this.

While coaching teenagers, I spent a lot of time talking about the difference between pain and discomfort. Pain is severe, and means injury, and injury prohibits going forward until healing takes place. Discomfort, on the other hand, is a byproduct of hard work, and moving through discomfort is a mental discipline as much as a physical one. The ability to bear discomfort and move through it means one will ultimately be stronger. In athletics, discomfort is a step in the process of growth and improvement, while injury is a show stopper.

Learning to sort pain from discomfort is a skill, and when one is young and strong, most of what is felt is discomfort. It is the tiredness, fatigue, and achiness of pushing your body to its limits, over and over again, in the hopes of getting stronger. When one is young, the body responds easily to this push, and gets stronger quickly, repairing itself rapidly, ready to face another practice, and another challenge.

There is a different combination of pain and discomfort when one is older. There is still the achiness and fatigue, which takes longer to subside and longer to recover from. There is the pain of aging joints and muscles, twinging and zinging as we move, disrupting our workout flow. There is also the discomfort of the self-doubt which creeps in with every tight muscle, every sore knee, every white hot nerve. Things that never used to be a problem zing and hurt with every streamline, every push, every kick…and suddenly the battle I’m fighting isn’t physical anymore. My “demon” isn’t the 5000 yard workout my coach just set in front of me….it is the fear and insecurity that has crept in with each workout I’ve missed due to pain. It is the unsettling realization that my body is different, that I don’t know it and can’t count on it the way I used to. It is the trust I’ve lost and the panic I’ve gained over muscles and joints that no longer respond the way I want them to, the way they did for so many years.

If I were my own coach, standing outside myself, what advice would I give?

I would say this:  What you’re feeling is a normal and natural part of where you are in life right now, and the first part of defeating the mental discomfort is to accept that the fear and insecurity and frustration are a normal step in the process. Before you can move forward, you have to realistically accept where you are starting from. This “new normal” is now just normal…it is what it is, for now. Then you have to set goals: where do you want to be in a year? What are the milestones along the way, at 3 months, 6 months, 9 months? What do you need to do each week to make each milestone? And what are the self-care techniques, both physical and mental, that will help you stay on course each week?

It sounds so simple when I say it as though I’m talking to someone else. Although I’ve been talking primarily about the pain and discomfort that accompany physical challenges, I think this applies across the board. Accept where you are. Think about where you want to be. Set goals, and stair steps to getting there. Take care of yourself along the way.

Swimming really DOES have all my answers.

Walls

/ Jillcoach / 2 Comments

underwater

 

Walls and how we handle them are pretty important in swimming. There is only one individual event in all of swimming, the long course 50 meter freestyle, that doesn’t involve a turn and pushing off of a wall. How we approach them, how we leave them, our speed in and out, how hard we push…all of these are crucial to our success in handling walls.

The wall is a physical barrier that must be dealt with in our sport, but it is also a mental/emotional one. The tendency of most young swimmers is to slow down at the wall, perhaps to catch that extra breath at the turn or in anticipation of the end of the race. One overshot turn resulting in a cracked ankle or banged arm can cause a swimmer to slow in fear around walls for years. It takes a lot of training to master the gut response to see the wall as a stop signal.

It is in our nature to slow at a wall, to look up at it, to ponder how to get past it. Our tendency is to assume our path continues on past the wall, following the track we have been on, and that the wall stands in our way. In swim training, we must overcome this mindset:  our path does not continue on, but resumes in another direction. The wall becomes a chance to speed up, to readjust, to jump off and speed away on our new path. The wall is not obstacle, but opportunity.

In preparation for writing this, I looked up the definition for the word wall, and was interested to find this:  an extreme or desperate position or a state of defeat, failure, or ruin.I have certainly faced that kind of wall in my own life, and am facing one now. I have reached my goal of getting all three of my children raised to college age, in college and doing well. All are out of the house, and my path seems to have ended at a giant wall. What now, what next? This wall has been looming for a couple years, and I now stand in front of it, feeling a bit desperate. I cannot see past it.

I must return to what I know from swimming:  I must speed toward this wall, and see it for the opportunity it is. My path is on a different course, one that I cannot yet see. I need to have the confidence to race at this wall, lower my head, hold my breath, flip and jump as hard as I can in my new direction. The path will be there, and this wall that seems so daunting is my best chance at finding it.