Breaking Limiting Beliefs, Dealing With Failure & Adaptability
Here’s a real life example of how to break limiting beliefs, deal with failure and being highly adaptable.
Generally speaking, are you seeing what’s possible for yourself (what works) ? Or are you focusing mainly on what you are struggling to do (what doesn’t work) ?
How healthy are the inputs you are feeding yourself with ?
Chances are, the “negative” have a bigger impact on you than the “positive”.
More often than not, the negative feedback you get from your everyday training (or during competitions) impacts you negatively, which brings your attention to “how bad you are” and thus, “how much better the others are, compared to you”.
The problem ?
This reasoning process doesn’t make you evolve properly.
Worse, it greatly affect your performance and make you move backwards, in a negative feedback loop. It keeps feeding itself with more and more negative beliefs, thoughts, feelings and actions.
What the self-help world call “willpower” is actually the ability to move on, despite failing over and over again. Keep in mind that if you are not able to use willpower to your own advantage, it will just make you more resilient to hit the wall harder and harder each time you try. You’ll just be more rigid, blindfolded and stubborn. You will use force over intelligence and end up training too much for too little results.
To reverse the curse, solutions exist to actually climb up or get around the wall.
You can interpret it like this:
What you call “negative” experiences or “failures” should instead be signals to you that what you’re trying to do, should be done differently, in order to work. Those signals of “not succeeding” in your task are here to make you build another plan, change direction, change perspective and take another action to achieve your goal.
Why do I show you this video in this article ?
In the case of my video, every single “failed movements” led me to adopt a wider, more intelligent perspective on my specific movement.
Even though my first tries were very experimental, I kept on trying with an open perspective.
I kept asking myself how I could do things better, with a better technique, a better timing and the right momentum.
Instead of beating myself up by thinking “OMG, I just cannot do this !” and basically producing stagnation and frustration, I focused my attention on the actions I could take to make things better. And nothing more. I wanted to actually change things around and move forward, to produce positive results. And go up the f**king wall.
Time and time again, I changed perspective until things eventually worked out the way I wanted.
I used intelligence over force.
What is this skill ?
It’s called adaptability. It basically gives you the ability to change perspective on a given problem in order to find a solution from the position you are in. Instead of repeating what doesn’t work.
In this video, my performance is about one single, short move. But this can happen for much longer efforts, for example during entire races and competitions, even for years.
And if you think that all athletes possess this skill, you’re wrong. Many athletes have extremely rigid mindsets and are narrow-minded during trainings and competitions. Many – particularly those who like to think of themselves as having “a lot of grit” – are simply wearing blinders. They don’t see what they are doing.
It’s actually pretty rare to find someone mastering this skill. On a regular basis, I see more athletes getting into that negative feedback loop, beating themselves up over and over again, hitting the wall harder without actually working for a better, more efficient solution.
This pattern can occur at a small level (during a few trainings), but most of the time, it keeps occurring during entire seasons, sometimes for years. And it is painful to see.
Instead, they could create a powerful, positive feedback loop that reinforces their skills, confidence, allow them to make better plans and to take better actions to ultimately rewards their hard work and efforts.
If you struggle to perform at your best level, ask yourself this: am I wearing blinders ? Am I using force over intelligence ?
The answer might surprise you.
