Harness the feeling of hitting the safe spot, how does the hold feel, what is the movement feel like in the eddy, how can you grow that sensation? HOW do you feel when you hit the safe spots? The sudden good handhold on a tough climb, the dropping of the headwind as you enter the trees on a long run, the broad eddy after a series of challenging rapids? WHAT is that sensation? Relief. Relaxation, spreading through your body freely and easily. Remember the last time you were stuck there in the thick of a tight spot and then, boom, up came a rest point. You exhale. Not just breath out! Your muscles ease off and you can take a moment to look over what is coming up without the instant need to perform. AND then you look over the next few moves, or down the next winding section of river and spot the next rest point. Take a breath. Inhale, really feel it, and throw yourself into it. "Per aspera. Ad astra. Through difficulties, to the stars." How can you hold onto that sensation of relief? Find the feeling of it, and let it breath calm into your fingertips and spread down to your toes. Even if the moves are only moderately difficult. Spread that feeling through your body. Let relief take over. UNLIKE the sensations of fear, or jealousy, seen as very negative emotions that I have written about up-setting here, relief is something positive. It is something that we want to view and find the mental triggers for, and then learn how to use them as a tool to make ourselves keep on performing. Better. Again and again. WHEN I focus on Relief as a sensation I feel tense climbing holds under my toes, edges that are sliding my toes off, and fingertips that are searching for a positive edge to pinch onto. I hit a big hold, unexpectedly or knowingly, and I feel a wave of relaxation course through my whole arm. It spreads across my aching shoulder and into my leg right down to my toes - which are still on the too small edges. FOCUSING on canoeing, I am edging aggressively and powering upwind. As a coach much of my time when I am pushed is when someone gets it wrong and I have swimmers to deal with. I am powering up wind and counting heads bobbing up and down. Everyone is out and no one it climbing onto the boat. My paddling pace does not slow, the water just becomes 'thinner'. The strokes of my blade are easier, I snap out the paddle and the recovery to the next stroke is swift, not feeling like it is taking forever. I power on, by the time my boat stops next to the upturned boat the swimmers know where to be, what to do when they get there and I have the boat partially out of the water. (Kayaks are on my front deck and empty by the time I stop, on a good day!) RELIEF to me is not a sensation, it is an experience. And it is a state of mind that I want to explode into as many holds on the cliffs, and edging moves between eddies, and bounding uphill sections of my runs as I can. RELIEF is turning for home. Relief is rolling onto the top of the cliff and hitting the plane of Flat. Relief is still water on a blustery day or flooding river. Relief is seeing the beach we will have lunch on. Relief is a lowering of gradient, a sudden drop in a hammering headwind. Relief is an easing of the rain as I push pedals hard and crunch through gears. Relief is a seat and a cup of tea when the weather, the boats, the group and the Gods were all against me. ONE of my tops, by Higher State, has in the neck Per aspera, ad astra. "Through difficulties. To the stars." That is Relief. The moment the difficulty stops, and you realise you are there, in the stars. The stars do not have to be a three minute mile, an olympic gold, a First or A-Star grading. The stars are wherever you place success. And hitting those points of Relief are pure success. Embrace the sensation, let it flow over you. WHAT makes you feel Relief? Take that sensation. How can you feel it now? Practice. Succeed now. Succeed more.
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FEAR is a very big word. There is a world to be written about Fear. Here, I address Fear as a navigation tool. How can Fear help you to get to your dreams, targets, destinations? FIRSTLY you have to feel the fear. You have to see what it is that is making you afraid. I get scared when I am climbing up to, or more often above, my gear, stretching the limits of where I feel it is necessary to be, reaching for the next hand hold, then the next, and the clip comes from the one after that! Or, I find the holds are slippery, or turned to slip me off balance and throw me out and spit me off. I get scared running when I hit deep puddles and end up wading and it is dark and cold and I am a long way from home. (This winter has given me lots of chances to get wet and cold and scared.) WHAT is it that I am fearing when I am out climbing? Taking a fall, failing, hitting the wall and being injured, humiliation as I feel I ought to be able to do this route. Yes. Lots of the fear is bound up in my sense of who I feel I 'should' be. I should be able to climb this route, I should be stronger, I should be better. The belief that I should be able to carry on, but do not quite know where the reserves will be coming from. “...being brave is not the absence of fear but rather the strength to keep on going forward despite the fear.” FEAR has nothing to do with stopping. It is choice that makes you stop. Fear has nothing to do with failing. It is choice that makes you fail. Choose to accept the Fear. Choose to take it as a power-full indicator of where you are; emotionally, physically, spiritually, mentally. Power-full negative emotions will provide strong signs of what is going on at hidden levels and give you an insight that will not be found if you ignore the Fear, or brush it off. WHAT is it that is making you feel that Fear? Is it risk of mental or physical pain? Do you risk being humiliated? Do you have potential for increased pain and suffering as you go along the route to your end point? AS a runner I often found myself this winter aiming squarely at the centre of the deepest wettest sections of paths so I can get the soaking out the way and then turn my focus from dry route finding to powering on through the rest of the run and enjoying the moments of feeling strong going up a hill, or free pacing back down the other side, or pausing to listen to an owl in the woods nearby, or... Worrying and Fearing about getting wet feet has been pointless. I have found myself wading up to me thighs on footpaths, frequently knee deep, I have crossed fords wading over bridges that are normally three feet clear of the water level. SPENDING my time in Fear about this, or that, would make me turn around and go home. It has not been a comfortable winter. It has been cold and wet and involved a lot of drying out my shoes after the runs. And scrubbing mud from between my toes too! The benefits of facing down the Fear is that I have found empty trails, swollen rivers to watch, by ways and footpaths to splash along and come out the other side to squelch away from. "turn around the Fear..." It has been a bad winter when the running events get cancelled due to flooding, of the course and car park in the case of the Wokingham Half. Meanwhile, I stick to the high ground from time to time. Endure the dry luxury of road running once in a while. And the rest of the time, I suck in the Fear and get my feet wet. HOW to turn around the Fear, find it as a navigation tool and aim to turn it into deeper insight. Using Fear to see what you want takes practice, it is an emotion that we spend our life dodging, avoiding and escaping. LOOK over your favourite sport, look at times you have backed off when Fear came knocking, look at how you could have chosen to turn it around. How you could have reset it to be beneficial, to grow from it rather than shrink to it. JEALOUSY is being afraid that They are better than You. That They have more to give, or take, or show than You. No-one has your path. No-one has your experiences. No-one has your life. WELL, not quite. Some-one does. Some-one has the unique lessons and learnings and teachings and insights that You have gained. They allow representation of the world in a wholly new and unique fashion, a fashion never represented before in the whole of history. THAT some-one is You. Only You have your infinite path stretched out behind how, and the infinite possibilities of your future strewn ahead of you. No-one has your path. ONLY your history and your decisions can shape your future. Watching others get paid more, perform 'faster, higher, stronger' or react differently - more calmly, more confidently - with jealousy and wish for their reactions and their abilities is a self-destructive response. AND it is a fear-full response. Jealousy is a belief that some-one else has some-thing that you do not have, and cannot attain. To present on your sporting arena a watch a climber effortlessly glide up a route or seeing some-one paddle flawlessly through a series of rapids or smash out a game of tennis or score from fifty yards out or... what-ever, feeling jealous is born from a belief that 'That is not for me.' and a belief of 'I am not good enough to do that.' GREAT achievement always was followed by great effort; and great, repeated failure. Each failure was met with a dusting off, a standing up and a carrying on. " feeling jealous is born from a belief that 'That is not for me.' " ONLY You can be the some-one to change: how You react, how You perform, how You achieve, what You achieve. Your Jealousy is a fear of never being good enough. Only you can feel your emotions and choose to act upon them, or suppress them. YOU can dream it: you can do it. The void between the Dream and the Do are choosing positive action. Taking the next step. Not the first step. The first step is identification. You have cleared that hurdle. Your jealousy is your identification. You know what you want. You have felt it burning in your head and in your heart. Now you need to find the actions necessary to make progress. WHAT are you jealous of? Who makes you feel jealous? What do They have? How does that relate to your life? How can You bring that into your life? What will it take? Are you willing to put in that effort? Are you willing to fail at those hurdles, to fall down and bleed, and pick your Self up again? Are You willing to burn in that way? Burning down and burning up: lighting the way forward for your Self with your falls and also for any daring bravely enough to follow you. What makes you burn in that way, glowing your inspirational light to the world? WHAT makes you burn? Found it? Good. NOW... act. RE-FRAME: This is all about language. This is all about choice. This is all about decision. YOU have a choice to make. You can choose to make a difference to how you view the world. You have within a preset inclination towards, or away from, any number of feelings, actions, emotions and experiences. AS a long distance runner my task is to keep moving onward when my body would rather have paused, stopped, given in, collapsed at any of the doorways I pass on my route. As a climber I an inclined to find the most challenging, dangerous, complicated route to travel to the top of a cliff. (Most cliffs I ascend have a 'walk off', a path that can be walked down. If I want to see the view from the top, why not just walk up there?) WHY push? Why sweat? Why bleed? Why suffer? TO achieve. FOR success. FOR joy. The sensations of suffering, of pushing the body. The reasons for the sweat dripping into my eyes. The sharp rocks when I climb, that scratch and cut as I jam my body against them hoping for a little extra friction, another inch higher... the suffering is the reason we Do sport. We suffer that we might in the end, achieve. "can fear be a power-full navigation tool?" RE-FRAMING is about looking over our concepts of negative emotions and experiences, and shifting them into helping them to find our way. How can fear be a power-full navigation tool? How can jealousy clarify our desires? "I'm smiling on the surface, I scared as hell below." THE object here is to grab something dark, turn it over and hold it up to the light. Taking the darkest of times, focusing on them and finding the pain and suffering, then reasoning with it in the light of steady meditative focus allows it to become a learning point. AS you read through my examples and learn a little about what scares me, what makes me turn around, back off, re-assess my situation and also see what makes me push deeper, finding my hidden reserves, think over situations when you have experienced these feelings and look over how you can use those emotions and memories to re-tune your attitude to face the situations better next time and perform differently. UP-SETTING is about upsetting the record you have been playing and making the replay different, better. More in line with your values, your beliefs, your ideals. IT is the dream of the success, the top out on the cliff, the finish line of the race, the achievement, that we DO the suffering for. Yet the suffering, the fear, the pain can be power-full tools to help us see where we are going, how to get there and what we can gain as we go along the way the our end. DODGING around slightly over friendly horses that insisted on coming to welcome me to their paddocks, I skipped and squelched my way across flooded sections to the top corner of the paddocks where my recalling of the map took me. Fences pinched together and the puddles were the same constant ruin of a mess. The mud the same light brown waterlogged shade. I plodded on, finding the driest spots and step stepping over and around the water. BOOM; I am shin deep. Step forwards to keep my balance, boom, two feet up to the knee! Start the extreme wading. Step, step, step, heaving, pulling, lugging my legs with me. Still deep. Remorseless. The horses watch me curiously. Wade on. Look up. Look back. Look ahead. A puddle stretches across the path, both sides flooded. If it's eighteen inches deep here, that'll be worse. Turn around, wade back. Heave. Pull. Lug. "Every success is plagued by repeated and frequent failure." SOMETIMES you just have to turn back. Sometimes there is no other way. To go on is foolish, dangerous or just too uncomfortable. Turn arounds are not failure. They are measured decisions. What was I balancing? Depth of water, potential of taking a muddy swim - in water that could be five inches and could be five feet, probably five degrees - dodging the unknown I heave and pull and lug back to a broken down 'that can't be the way' stile that I scrabble over and then find a footpath that peters out, a Staffordshire bull terrier (friendly) and an electric fence (not friendly!) Turn around. Again. TURN arounds fill with them moments of fear. Moments of feelings of being conquered and beaten and defeated. We are not allowed to turn around. Not allowed to retreat. Being beaten is bad. That is the way we are going and we are going that way. No retreat. No excuses. "That is the way we are going and we are going that way." NO chance. Any success is beset on all sides by potential paths of winding broken trails of fear and trails of failure. Every success is plagued by repeated and frequent failure. Failure is the footprints of success, following it surely and steadily. You have to lose much to find success. THE victorious podium is shadowed by failure. The footprints that lead to it are faltering, they stumble here and there, wander off distractedly now and then, come back to the trail wearily and return again. And again. "Make positive performance out of your everyday simple actions. " FAILURE is fear-full; that is full of fear. It is something we have been trained to escape from, avoid and dodge. Our failures are the stepping stones across the rivers. They show us where to go, where not to go and they help us to navigate true to our values and to find the way across to the safe shore of success. FEAR too is a navigating tool. Fear guides our internal radar, telling us what our body can do, what might be risky, what could be dangerous, where we may be set back. Attuning your mind to your fear is a sure way to foresee the potential pitfalls in plans and actions. FEAR is a sign that we are making progress. Fear is a sign we are pushing hard enough. Pushing well. Fear shows you the way to turn, or where you need to resolve (re-solve!) and clarify your vision in order to make positive performance out of your everyday simple actions. NEXT time you feel the pinch of fear, tune in to it and listen to what is being offered. Fear as well as courage can be a fine guide. Words of caution will take you safely across the river too. Listen to what Fear has to offer, and re-invent your plans accordingly. |
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AuthorAndy Clubley-Moore: joyful outdoor sports activist, writer, father, husband. Lover of life, activity, success and barefoot living. |