coaching yourself
I talk to my little Jiu Jitsu babies all the time. Come to think of it, I do the white belt adults the same way. Always angling for that Full House wrap up moral point talking to. I can’t help it, its the church in me. Trying to take what just happened or what needs to happen and packaging it into a workable metaphor or framework.
When I talk to my kids, one of the themes I come back to constantly is this: “one day, you may be in a situation where you don’t have a coach, and you will have to coach yourself.”
It sounds like a dark thing to tell a 7 year old, but I think it couldn’t be more important. The point of a coach is this: the external voice becoming the internal voice. The dark room being illuminated from an outside source, and the instincts and priorities of the one finding its home in the other.
Thats everything.
Thats why you should listen, thats why you should develop modeling behaviors. You never know what detail is the one that will change your life.
I have had, currently have, and will probably forever have coaches in my life. Sometimes in sports, sometimes in life. I love it, I love learning from someone else’s experience. I prefer it.
But you also have to develop the ability to coach yourself.
To me, that means knowing what tone to take when you talk to yourself. If I’m honest with myself right now, I don’t like the way I am talking to myself these days. My expectations have been and will remain insane and out of reach. I expect myself to make bricks without straw to use a bible phrase, and I expect to do it over and over again.
When that goes well its a high, when that falters, its easy to turn on myself. All of this proving behavior is a mix. I imagine some of it is garden variety insecurity, but I know some of it is correct and exactly where I am supposed to be.
But today I’m reminded that I need to talk to myself better. Not to let myself off the hook, but to support myself as crazy as that sounds. When I do this, when I give mercy to myself and push in a fair way, I feel my brother’s voice in mine. When I don’t, I feel like a prematurely old sour man. One who can never be happy.
I am a pusher. I know it in every part of my being. I have an intuition for where the goal post is and its almost never where other people think.
But when it comes to me, I need a new tone. I need to push myself from a place of acceptance and not from a place of lack.
I love talking shit to my training partners in the gym as a way to keep things fun. One of my favorite things to do is wait til one guy is hanging on by a thread and do the “get that or you suck” challenge.
Lets say someone has an armbar attempt, I’l wait til they have 20 seconds left, or they are loosing the elbow and say “get the arm bar or you suck, get the arm bar or you suck, shhhhhh” cause usually they don’t get it.
But honestly, I probably do myself like this. The problem is this is based on a logical error that this is my only at bat. If the game ends there, then yes, if you don’t get that arm bar, its over. But if you are in your bone marrow committed to the game and its perfection, this arm bar barely matters.