Reframe the game

I’m going to give you the most direct route to athletic success I can possibly give you.

Go Deep or Don’t Go!

Look for your opportunity’s hidden within each session, they are there, if you can’t find them, it’s because you are not engaged either in the process or within yourself.

Bring your attention right into the process, which by the way is occurring inside you, not out there.

Look for something you don’t know about yourself, specifically finding your areas of weakness, an aversion to a certain session, weather conditions, sense perceptions, check them out, enquire into them, “I don’t like this” Ok what is it about it you don’t like specifically?

Find out what thoughts the dislike is made of and then reframe the game, can I relax and accept this dislike as part of this process? “Yes I can” is the reframe!

Followed by acceptance, a letting go of the thoughts that are made of resistance, the more you do this, the more you realise that in actual fact the thoughts are not made of resistance at all, resistance is made of thoughts!

What can I do? See it clearly, stop it in it’s tracks.

We need then to change the way we think about our athletic process and the subsequent behaviours that are formed by those thoughts.

The unconscious habit is to form behaviours that fit a patterning that minimises stress and risk, modern man has made it his goal to increase his comfort, this is our learning and we have to challenge it if we are going to move past it.

Comfort equates to apathy in an athletic goal, and even in a life goal pathway. You can’t achieve your goals from a comfortable armchair.

You saddled up for it so commit to resting in comfort when you are dead.

This sounds like a cold steel edge doesn’t it?

People often think because I speak of non-duality, love and compassion that it means going soft, no it does not! It means nothing of the sort.

In my capacity as an athlete coach, mental skills coach and mentor, I know challenge and discomfort are key to growth, development and a deeper sense of being alive, being vital and with purpose.

I often speak of inner revolution and growth, there is absolutely nothing comfortable about it, inner growth is no different to an athletic goal, if you open that pandora box, you have signed up for challenge and discomfort.

So it’s good to be aware of the following immutable fact.

Growth can be painful and comfort can kill you!

If you fail to hit the mark, or lack the required physical talent so what? Failure is not fatal.

Embrace discomfort. Your long term athletic and personal growth depends on it because the development begins where the comfort ends.

Strange that the very thing we most often avoid, “discomfort”, often leads to a deeper sense of peace and pleasure.

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it, and this you have the power to revoke at any moment”~Marcus Aurelius

There is no way out of this life conundrum. If you try to avoid pain, you will ultimately be in pain trying to avoid it.

The second we have gone into blame or an excuse is the second we have tried to chose comfort over pain. Shifting the feeling is not dissolving it, if anything it empowers it.

The patterned thinking and behaviour that tries to move you into comfort, actually moves you into pain.

If we allow this process to go on unabated, or if we stay unconscious in it, we end up giving up, the mental exhaustion will supersede the physical effort and we will cave in.

Everybody talks about the mental game, people often say the process is 70% mental. But how many people actually follow through to look into, and to accept  the discomfort that is hidden in it?

A lot of the time I simply don’t see athletes align themselves with the goals they want to achieve. Equipment and the physical is less than half of a process that takes place at an unseeable depth.

A new bike is much more glamorous than an uncomfortable ride into your own depths right?

But which one do you think would create the greater time saving?

What are you really willing to trade for your goals?

What the goal and true inner commitment really does is what we are most frightened of.

It’s strips us bare of all our bullshit. It removes all the untruths and exposes the soft underbelly. All the nooks and crannies we hide ourselves in.

Committing to the mental game is being willing to strip away all that you are not!

To be willing to remove all illusion, all projections and disassociations and to accept reality the way it is served. We can only accept reality when we are laid bare of the ways we hide within ourselves.

The alignment with the goal means that we are willing to fall vulnerable and exposed in front of ourselves and everyone else.

To be naked with the goal, honest in front of it.

Challenged, uncomfortable and trusting the discomfort to move us into the window of personal revolution and athletic evolution. As it does!

Everything else is rhetoric.