Video transcript:
One of the biggest things holding us back from competing at a high level is both the unwillingness to experience fear and the unwillingness to experience failure. And this isn’t irrational or unreasonable because failure and all the thoughts and feelings that come with it really do suck and anyone that says they don’t or that they’re easy to respond to is kidding themselves.
So everyone deals with the fear of failure to some degree but the difference between those who overcome this fear and those who don’t lies in the way that they respond to it. Some seek to avoid it, but the problem is, is that unless we quit, fear is pretty unavoidable in sport. We are always having to put ourselves out there. But when avoidance is our goal, we don’t trust our abilities to get the job done. Our minds try to tell us exactly how to do everything just so we can avoid that failure and this results in tensing up and unathletic movements that are far below what we’re capable of which leads to more fear and more failure.
Now some athletes lean into their fears. They’re willing to experience their fear because they know it’s normal and just like I’ve talked about with nerves in another post, they know they can use the energy that comes with it to perform at high level, but not only are they willing to experience fear, they’re also willing to experience failure, They don’t like it. They don’t want to experience it. But they know that it’s going to happen at some point. And what does this do? It frees them up to go compete to the best of their abilities because they know that when they fail they’ll be able to handle it. They probably aren’t even paying attention to the prospect of failure at all.
Bottom line: True peak performance requires a willingness to experience fear and a willingness to experience failure. You can handle it.