Don’t Worry

Worry, worry, worry. If there’s something we can count on every day, it’s that we will find something to worry about. Whether it’s something big or something small, our brains are constantly alerting us that danger could be right around the corner and that if we aren’t stressed about whatever that may be, it’s going to bite us in the ass. Death, taxes, and worrying.

We can’t be all that surprised, our brains are largely the same as those of our ancestors whose environments definitely warranted a good amount of worrying. The issue is that while a 600 pound tiger with 7 inch canines hiding in the trees is definitely worth some alarm bells going off about, most of the stuff that we spend our days stressing about isn’t even close.

Worry is just the precursor to fear and fear is paralyzing, it stops us in our tracks and tells us to shrink and make escape plans instead of plans to stand up tall and deal with whatever it is we need to deal with. The most fulfilling experiences of most of our lives are the ones where we are able to get through the chatter in our minds and become fully immersed in what we are doing. Those times when there is no credence given to the voice of doubt or fear in the back of our head and it's just us and our task, with no separation between the two. People will call this the ‘flow state; being ‘in the zone’, and a whole host of other names. It’s a state of mind that most of us are lucky to be able to recall at least once. Once we get a taste, we desperately want to experience it again, but we have a stubbornly hard time finding our way back.

What is standing in the way of us and complete immersion in a task, particularly something like skiing or running that is exceptionally challenging physically? Generally, it is just all the crap swirling through our heads at every moment. Particularly that crap warning you that you should really be worrying and preparing for whatever scary could be just around the corner. There’s a whole lot of fear well hidden in there! This isn't usually fear for our physical well-being, but an even newer evolutionary fear; fear for our social wellbeing.

Comparison is the thief of joy. Whoever said that was onto something great. When we think about our most spectacular mental collapses in races and we really get into the nitty gritty of what was going on under the hood there, what is actually at the root of that? For me, I can say that 9 times out of 10 that collapse came from a disconnect between my perception of my performance relative to others and where I wanted my performance relative to others to be. In layman's terms, I was probably just getting my ass kicked by people I didn’t want to get my ass kicked by and that made me shrink and look for a way out.

We are hardwired to compare ourselves to others constantly. Social status and prestige became an important evolutionary mechanism for survival within groups long ago. Once we started living in big cooperative groups, all of a sudden we had to worry about surviving the tigers, and also surviving the judgement of our peers. This is good because it keeps us all in line with being honest and reciprocal which makes societies work all in all pretty well. It’s not that good, however, for extracting our best effort out of our bodies in a ski race, and it’s definitely not good for putting us ‘in the flow’.

So how do we start to peel away these layers of fear and worry to get to the point of where it is just us and our effort? The first, and most important step is probably just to recognize that fear for what it is. If we are afraid of doing something hard, like a race, because we are afraid of performing poorly in comparison to others, that's a problem! But when you zoom out and actually look at that fear for what it is, you realize it is ridiculous! Why the heck would we care about how fast we can go around a ski course compared to others or how fast we can run up a hill compared to others? It says nothing about the content of who we are as people or the qualities that make someone worth admiring.

This can be a hard reality to wrap your head around, particularly for junior athletes who seem to be particularly good at judging themselves and their worth based off of comparison to others. This realization, however, is the first step towards liberation from the parts of sport we dread into a much more fun, fulfilling, and sustainable athletic life that will feed every other corner of our lives.

If we eliminate the fear of comparison, then we are able to reshape what it means to fail altogether. To fail is no longer to fall beneath a certain place on the result list or get beaten by certain people. The only way to fail now is to not try. And this is where it gets really fun. The excitement of you vs. you. The opportunity to show up and challenge yourself so that you come out on the other side of a task feeling like you emerge as a better person who overcame something hard. That is the feeling that will keep you burning longer than any result ever will and will allow you to get all the other crap out of the way so that you can really find where your limits are. Paradoxically, when you stop caring so much about your objective performance and results is when you can unlock your best performance and results.

It’s not like this makes sport really easy all of a sudden. It is still really hard to push yourself to your best effort even without the fear of comparison. The difference in when your focus is on yourself and success is based on your effort, you are immediately put into a clearer and more personal, performance enhancing mindset. Instead of nervous dread for a hard effort, you get to feel excitement and eagerness to get to try.

Through this change in approach we can get to know ourselves better and be deeply fulfilled by our efforts, regardless of how they may appear to others and get ourselves closer to that flow state every time. Our brains worry because they love us, and we appreciate it. But it’s important to set boundaries with that worry and remind your brain before anything hard that you can take it from here.

Pre famously said, “to give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift”. The gift we have is the opportunity to grow and become the best versions of ourselves every time we get to the line. So forget what anyone thinks and let's all just get in there and experience the joy of losing ourselves in our own effort.