That’s how you overcome the fears.
I talk about looking into your shadows, fears, and failures so much because you have to know what’s hiding there in the dark corners of your mind like a boogie man. Those fears that are making you live a little less fully and shrink away from life a little too much. You have to unearth them and look at them in the bright light of the day before you can attack and overcome them.
I want to share with you a specific moment in my journey and show you how burying and hiding from even the smallest fears can rob you of a full life, and how engaging in athletics and competitions have helped me confront some of my own.
Here, I am getting a PR for my squat at 75k, 165 pounds. That number was like a wicked boogie man in my mind, it was always in the way of me improving my squat numbers. When I was 17 years-old, I walked into my weight-training gym class and was told that we were squatting bodyweight for reps, and that was going to be our grade for the quarter; “If you’ve been doing the work this should be no problem.” was the teachers theory. At the time, I had not squatted over 95 pounds, but “no attempt” was an automatic failing grade. I weighed in at 165 that day, and that was what the bar was loaded to. I can still feel the speed with which that bar took me down to the ground as I started to approach parallel. And there I was, sort of ass-to-grass curled in a little ball, with the bar balanced on my back, unable to move in any direction. I had injured my knee badly enough during that lift I was unable to bend it for two weeks. In the grand scheme of my life this was NO BIG DEAL. I didn’t live nurturing the moment in time. Except when I would squat. Before CrossFit and powerlifting I’d never break parallel with a back squat, when I finally convinced myself to squat below parallel, then I’d never train any weight over 135 pounds. I’d find some reason to avoid it and de-load my training cycle.
Here is the real deal with this moment though. You really can’t tell from watching this video all the drama and fear going on in my head. That was the first time I had tried to squat 165 pounds since I was 17 years old, that was the weight I had spent 25 years trying to avoid. My heart was about to pop out of my chest. That entire lift felt like an eternity, the way time slows down when you in the middle of a car wreck. And to my surprise, after I hit the bottom of that lift, I knew it was mine! But then I hit my usual sticking point in the squat, where I have to grind through, and then I could feel them start to take the bar away. I am so surprised you can’t see it, but I was shaking my head, NO! NO! NO! I was so worried that they interfered with the lift enough that I was going to get a ‘no lift’. When I saw those three white lights I jumped for joy, I had overcome that fear, and it was on the record books! What no one knew until now is that big ol’ crocodile tears welled up in my eyes as I walked off the stage. I had to run back to the ladies room and cry it out, I felt like was purging out the last bit of infection from a too long abscessed wound.
Life goes on after most failures, in fact, life has gone on quite well for me for a long time. But still one stupid moment in the gym 25 years earlier lived quietly in me robbing me of my self-trust and confidence. You must strive to overcome those little fears and failures, in some fashion, any fashion –but it’s best if you do it head on. Because if you don’t they will set up shop in your mind, somewhere quiet and out of the way where you don’t even notice them, and like a parasite they live on, stealing little bits of your energy, weighing you down and holding you back.
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