In the last two weeks, my life has been engulfed by stories of grandeur, expertise and work ethic of individuals doing extraordinary things. We’ve watched Free Solo, Alex Honnold’s Ted Talk, the Alpinist, talked about Ben Saunders North Pole expedition and discussed the group of women that rowed across the Pacific. I also read American Victory recently and am about half-way through Dan Gable’s, A Wrestling Life. This compilation is full of goodness.
I think all of these things surfaced some thoughts about setting and going after big goals, and it reminded me of the struggle and paralysis that sometimes shows up when we try to take on something so large. I’ve got some firsthand experience with it. I didn’t actually start Transition Wrestling until I stopped thinking so big about what it could be, the end product, and started just doing things in the right direction. That end product only became a glimpse of reality once I started. Worthwhile things require slow builds.
On top of that, language on social media is a really strange thing to navigate. I used to see a lot of big inspiration and motivation posts (it’s stressful for me so I unfollowed). But motivation and inspiration don’t really have anything to do with commitment and dedication. They might serve as a catalyst, but without a process that fits the greater objective there’s not going to be much fuel in the tank to know what to commit to when your back is against the wall. And the other crazy thing is that sometimes it’s impossible to see what you even need to commit to until you just start going. You have to trust that you can take it on and you’ll find your way. Stops are required to evaluate, but once you’re in it there will be moments of clarity. In those moments is when you build objectives and small pieces that fit the path. A mentor of mine was coaching a practice one day and called on me: “What do you do when your back is against the wall?” Me: “You come forward.”
As much as I was experiencing a bit of this in my first pursuit trying to build a business, I also observed it happening to some of my students when I worked in college athletics. I had a core group that wanted to reach higher, but we found they would experience that flood of anxious overwhelm when we’d open the conversation for their big athletic goals and even when we looked at academics in a semester-long view. The liberty of that age group, however, is that they receive more guidance in a pretty controlled environment. There’s a great balance of trust and engagement. But as you graduate and move out into the uncharted waters of life there’s a lot more to own.
Anyways, I was in my masters degree program at that time and came across an idea in one of my organizational change theory texts. The context was for business, but it totally applies to people. Assuming you’ve mitigated resistance and you have a group of people who are ready to make a change, there’s still the task of implementation. And, that process of implementation needs to be clearly defined so that it’s a smooth transition and people know what they need to do. The idea defined the gap between reality and the desired state as stress. That made a lot of sense to me for how to work toward goals and objectives.
I tried this idea on in my life—I built habit trackers and other touchstones that eased that tension of managing a number of broader objectives and it was insane the amount of “lost” it relieved. So, we talked about it. We outlined my athlete’s big goals and identified a process to get there.
The stress, or the gap, really boiled down to looking at the end goal with an undefined process. We can’t wrap our brains around the entire jump from A to B, but we can commit to the daily structure that leads us along the path toward achieving it, and who we become along the way. Our goals and objectives should be very much integrated into our lives as patterns of who we are.
Good coaches and leaders help team members and athletes engineer appropriate processes. If we can’t do that, the path from A to B seems untenable. There is some blank space and definite trust required, but the process should be a partnership between coach and athlete, leader and follower, self to self.
Here are some examples of where I’ve seen/heard this.
Ben Bergeron, a high level CrossFit coach posits that after we establish a long term outcome goal that we need to put it on a shelf and then focus on process and character. I tribute the title of this blog to that because it’s honestly the simplest way I’ve heard it explained. He talks about this on the Chasing Excellence podcast episode about mental toughness. Process and character are what lead us and it’s about who we become in pursuit. Bergeron expertly identifies that the difference between top-level athletes and the best of the best at the CrossFit Games is what’s between the ears. It’s the mental game.
I get to witness this right in house at Victory School of Wrestling. The intentionality and rigor that goes into the process and character development behind the scenes of the Olympic dream is striking. It’s why I believe so much in what we’re doing. Body, mind and soul. That’s what it takes. We can do all of the physical stuff as wrestlers, but the mental and heart training leads people to new levels. If I could only pick one thing I’ve heard Coach Kevin Black say that represents this the best right now I would pick: “If you’re not enough without the medal you’ll never be enough with it.” Body, mind and soul—character—knowing where our value, purpose and significance comes from (that makes it two from a Coach Kevin teaching). While said in the context of winning an Olympic gold medal, its not sport specific at all. If everything we have right now is stripped away, would we know who we are? It’s a life principle.
The third and final example I’ll offer that addresses this gap and leans on the mini-steps and process is from Nike’s Global Running Head Coach Chris Bennett. In one of the guided runs I did this summer he spoke about coaching to the person we are right now. He shared that our past should provide information and our future should guide us, but it’s the person we have right now that does the work to bridge the gap. If our level of fitness is a 1, we need to work with fitness level 1, not fitness level 10. This frames a really loving way of coaching others, or ourselves, and allows us to dig into exactly what we need to dig into to make progress.
None of this is a cop-out for not dreaming big and having larger than life audacious goals. This should get us to dream bigger and more freely, but to approach it backwards. We need those little slices and soul training so that we know that we can step into the next right thing. And again, into the next right thing.
I think sometimes we get so caught up in the inspiration of achieving something or being someone so fast that we overlook the daily that goes into making it a reality. The experience of the ups of having a motivated moment is great, but in the process and in the journey of building whole heartedness we really take to the next level of becoming and what matters most.
We get to prepare, maybe for a lifetime, or the lifetime of an opportunity, for a window to reach for that outcome freely because we’re ready.
Paralysis through analysis, stress, and overwhelm when it comes to goal setting and big dreams feels like the result of looking to that bright spot in the future and missing all of the right now we have in us. Plans change; futures shift, and the end rarely looks like what we imagined. I think it we get it right, our mission and values shine through the transformed output as we’ve fully embraced all that we create and use all of the bumps along the way to fail forward. Coincidentally, this daily blog is me working on the right now to create a path of clarity for a big dream. It takes work.
Much love my friends.
GLK
