Before I go any further, take a minute to click on the video for this week’s Tip! It tells the story you are about to read in pictures…moving pictures, but pictures nonetheless!
Fear! We all face it. Sometimes it rules us. Sometimes we rule it.
Although amazing, our mind is not always our friend and fear is one unfriendly feature. Our fear-mongering mind likes to wander.
To be more specific, it likes to travel to four places – the positive future and the positive past and to the negative future and the negative past.
All four places of travel have benefits at times and all four places can also trip us up…and tripping in the Swiss Alps is not what we want to do!
But before I had a chance to worry about getting tripped up by my mind or my feet in the Alps (both German and Swiss), I had to get up there to do that…and that is the beginning of where my mind was not my friend.
If you have been following these tips for a while, you may recall that I am not fond of heights (read Tip #116 HERE and Tip #14 HERE) and you don’t get much higher than where I was headed.
Getting to the top of the Alps in Germany and Switzerland required riding a gondola (a car full of people that hangs from cables that lead to a peak THOUSANDS of feet above sea level!).
GREAT!
The worst part is, I found this out the day before so I had all kinds of time to think about it…and add MORE ON to what the experience would be like (Remember adding MORE ON?...making things bigger than they are and allowing our MORE ON to affect our performance?)
It came down to this. Ride the gondola with my family or sit at the bottom of the mountain for hours waiting to hear about their amazing stories!
GREAT! Time to practice what I preach.
As I took some time to practice my philological sighs, it was time to go through the ABCs…or in this case, Dr. Martin Seligman’s ABCDE practice of disputation (Click HERE for a Facing Your Fears worksheet) along with a host of other mental performance tools.
The ACTIVATING EVENT? Riding on a cable car dangling 9000+ feet above sea level, obviously 😊!
I thought about why my BELIEFS related to heights – to be truthful, I don’t get it. I used to the do dumbest things off high dives, high slides and anything else we could run and jump, dive or flip off of!
I thought about the CONSEQUENCES of those beliefs, the most prevalent being that I would miss out on watching my son have the experiences of his life.
I then thought about (and talked about) the evidence I had that DISPUTED what I feared. As my civil engineer brother-in-law said, “Trust the engineering!”
Then came the ENERGY and up I went. Clutching onto the handles as my son stood over the glass bottom to watch the Alps below as we went up…and up…and up!
AND IT WAS AWESOME! Beauty surrounded us and I got to watch my son take it all in!
Then on to the Swiss Alps and a smaller gondola…then a hike to the peak!
I love a good hike. I am not so fond of hikes on paths that have drop-offs on the side of the trail, but what the heck?
This whole experience, from the smaller gondola to the hike to the peak (passing roaming cows on the trail along the way…yes…huge cows on the small trails) also allowed me to utilize Ted Lasso and Treavor Mowad’s questions adjusted for the situation at hand… "what do I need to do RIGHT NOW, and I mean in THIS MOMENT ONLY to get to the top of this mountain?” “What’s important now?”
It was time to take my mind from the four places it likes to travel to the PRESENT step, the present breath, and the present view.
It was time to manage moments…and it worked. Thinking too far ahead on a rocky trail doesn’t allow you to see what is right in front of you that may trip you up. It also keeps you from taking in the beauty of that moment…one you will never have again.
Thinking of all the things that can go wrong robs you of your ability to be agile and to use your athleticism or intellect. It also tends to project on others and rob them of the moment to be what they need to be to get where they want to go.
We made it to the top…not the tippy top. That entailed a REALLY skinny trail with STEEP drops but the view was majestic…and I recorded this tip there with pride of my accomplishments for the week.
THEN…came the storm!
There we were WAY up in the Alps and before we knew it, we couldn’t see ANYTHING around us. Oh boy!
The back down to the gondola (which shut down, of course) was truly a test of my mental methods…managing moments…one step at a time in the rain and wind…look too far ahead and you are catching yourself from a nasty slip or trip!
This experience was a perfect training ground to see how mental performance changes our experience. It was a reminder that I had a choice, every second and every step to manage my fear or allow my fear to manage me. Every moment was manageable one way or another.
It was my choice. Would I wait at the bottom or find what is on the other side of fear? In this case, it was immense beauty and moments I am so glad I didn’t miss.
As we look toward the new academic year, these fear-facing tools may come in handy for those you lead. Encourage them to use the ABCDEs and ask questions to help them stay present.
Neither is our nature, but as with any skill, we can all get better at managing fear so it doesn't manage us!
Manage the moments!
Julie
P.S. It’s time to get your mental game plan in order. Let me help you build one that works for your team. Shoot me an email at juliej@ssbperformance.com and let’s get started before 2023-24 program pricing increase begin!
Julie Jones
Mental Performance Coach
SSB Performance
www.ssbperformance.com
juliej@ssbperformance.com • 234-206-0946
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