Five Words That Will Help You Reach Your Goals

For many swimmers, the holiday-training season will have a significant impact on whether they reach their goals for this season or come up short. The end-of-December, early-January training period can often be the most difficult part of your training, which can also make it the most important part of your training.

Far too many swimmers lose their intensity and motivation during this emotionally and physically challenging timeframe. The days are short during this winter grind, the practices tend to be brutal and most swimmers are already pretty fatigued by this point.

The key question that comes up here is “how do you maintain your focus and intensity so that you don't give in to the natural impulse to space out and back down?”

Last fall, I talked about needing to carry your personal goals into these tough practices with you, your “big enough why.” The article focused on using your goals to remind yourself of why you are putting all of this effort out and why you should push yourself in practice when you might be bored, exhausted or in too much pain to continue to go hard. I also mentioned four key words that will provide you with the ultimate success strategy that will take you to success in everything you do, both in and out of the pool: Get comfortable being uncomfortable.

I would like to expand on this specific success strategy in more detail, especially because if you really want to turn those dreams into a reality, then you'll need to live it during your training and into the new year.

Just to review, “getting comfortable being uncomfortable” means that you want to continually push yourself out of your physical and emotional comfort zones. Simply put, you want to push yourself to do the difficult, unpleasant and often anxiety-provoking things that many swimmers tend to avoid as if it were a plague. When you do push through those hurdles, when you practice getting comfortable being uncomfortable, you will expand the things that you can do and shrink those things that you think you can't do. 

Keep in mind that if you don't stretch your limits, you'll end up setting your limits!

Pushing yourself physically is self-explanatory: when you're tired and want to back down, you simply step on the gas and go harder. Handling pain and fatigue from oxygen debt in these cases is predominantly mental. That is, you improve your ability to push through pain mentally by keeping your focus in the now, on the feel of what you're doing, one stroke at a time.

Pushing yourself emotionally requires that you go against your thoughts, doubts and anxiety about leading the lane, going into a faster lane, working on your weaknesses or trying to keep up with faster swimmers. When those negative thoughts arise, you do not want to give them space in your mind. Instead, you want to constructively distract yourself by focusing on the feel of your own movement through the water.

Whenever you question and challenge your perceived limitations, you will grow and develop both as a swimmer and a person. I say this because you are always limited most by what you think and believe are your boundaries. 

Something to understand is that performance is always self-fulfilling. This means that you'll always get what you expect.

If you tell yourself repeatedly that you cannot do something, then your attempts at going against this self-limiting belief will always be half-hearted. Whenever you do attempt something that you think is difficult and, perhaps even “impossible” and your motivation is weak, you will be less likely to persist and keep trying.

However, if you continuously tell yourself, “I can do this,” then when you do run into difficulty, failure or obstacles, your adversity will not dampen your motivation or efforts to persist with the task. Simply put, you will likely have more motivation until you're ultimately successful. 

This self-fulfilling nature of performance is important for you to keep in mind every time you attempt to step outside of your comfort zone. Why? Because every time you try to “get comfortable being uncomfortable,” you'll always be greeted by self-doubts, anxiety and feelings of inadequacy. These emotions, while hard to ignore, will then feed your negative thinking and self-doubts even more.

Your job, whenever you hear this kind of internal negativity, is to push through it by focusing even more on what you're doing in the moment. You should stay focused on what you're doing, one stroke at a time, and suspend your judgment about whether you think you can or cannot.

As you get to the other side of this challenging holiday-training season and you're feeling tired, bored or burnt out, embrace the “get comfortable being uncomfortable” strategy and, when you start hearing that negative loop running in your head, have a positive attitude to fight through the doubts.

Remember, if you think you can or you think you cannot, you're absolutely right!