Motivational Monday ~ Self Doubt and Fear

We have mentioned fear many times before but having recently experienced something that brought up lots of these thoughts about performance and fear, we wanted to touch base on the subject again. This time, we want you to look at it from the perspective of self-doubt. Let’s put ourselves into a situation for fully grasp the concept. Imagine you are in an event/race where high performance is your goal - something you feel confident you can complete in a certain way. As you begin, you start to doubt your ability and your mind starts creating this fear that builds inside you. Now, even if you could do it physically, you probably won’t because you are so scared you may not do it. Instead of working toward your goal(s), you have regressed and are further than you were from achieving any of them.

Specifically, imagine you are a strong person who has practiced rope climbs numerous times. Here you are in the middle of your race and you begin to attempt the climb and you get three-fourths the way up, and you freeze. Your muscles start to fatigue like they do when you work hard but suddenly fear takes over your body and you lose focus. You look down and begin to think about all of the bad things that could happen to you. Now, you are not going to reach the top because you have convinced yourself you cannot do it. If you start to question your strength and fear falling or worse, failing, you are never going to test your limits and see what you are made of and how much you can accomplish. Having done this same exercise multiple times, you know you are capable, so what happened? You began to doubt your abilities and what might happen if you fail and just by doing that you “failed”. If you had put all of your energy into thinking about how you were going to make your next move, you might have succeeded. Even if you didn’t, the outcome would not be worse than if you gave up on yourself and let yourself stop trying. We want you to think about this example and how it might relate to you in your life (not just in fitness). Rather than fearing success or failure, focus on doing everything you can to be positive and work toward the end goal you are hoping to see yourself reach. Success and failure are two interesting terms because for each one of us, they mean something different. For the person climbing the rope, success may be defined as reaching the top and failure as not reaching the top but maybe for another climber, success means never quitting and  and failure means letting go without putting in 100% effort.

During this week, think about what success and failure mean to you and how you define each in various situations in your life. Once you understand these terms, dig deeper and identify your associated fears and self-doubt and concentrate on redefining each situation so that you can move forward toward your ultimate goal(s) without sabotaging your progress through self-doubt.

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Get Fit For It,

D & K

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