Sunday Story...The Thrill and The Agony

Many years ago there was a program on Television called ABC’s Wide World of Sports. The program promised “The Thrill of Victory and the Agony of Defeat”. The introduction to the show showed a horrendous downhill skiing accident. I’m sure there was more but that is what I remember.

But Victory always comes in many flavors. It isn’t just the one who stands on the podium at the end of the event. Often Victory is achieved when we face our fear and go ahead anyway (oh that again). As most of you know I do Crossfit. And for Crossfitters the Crossfit Games are our Olympics…the place where the fittest on earth are crowned. But sometimes the Victory is won by someone who didn’t get to the podium, didn’t take home the check, and didn’t hit the tape first. Sometimes the Victory is won by sucking it up and diving in.

Today’s post is coming to you from Crossfit Lisbeth. Her blog can be found here: http://crossfitlisbeth.com/ and here is the link to this specific post: http://crossfitlisbeth.com/2012/07/18/swimming-over-her-fears/ .

Swimming Over Her Fears

The woman in the elevator seemed like she needed a hug. I didn’t know her, but I could feel her anxiety: it was almost palpable. So, as the elevator doors closed, I stepped forward and introduced myself to this beautiful, fit, frightened athlete. There were only two of us in that little metal box, descending in the Manhattan Beach Marriot. Her eyes looked moist, but she tried to smile.

“Are you in a good place with what’s going to happen tomorrow?” I asked.

Deb Cordner Carson looked me in the eye and shook her head. “No, not at all.”

About 30 minutes prior, CrossFit had briefed the Games athletes on the details of the mountain triathlon that would start the 2012 CrossFit Games. It was a surprise workout, and many of the athletes were still wrapping their heads around the concept. Most were nervous, but with an electric energy. I had just spoken with Elisabeth Akinwale and, while she seemed a tad apprehensive, Akinwale buzzed with positivity — the excitement totally lighting up her face. Deb Cordner Carson, however, was definitely not glowing.

Deb was struggling, because the ocean swim of the 2011 Games had knocked her out of the competition. She had a fear of the water; but, for a year, she had been trying to work through it.

As we continued our descent in that elevator, her words tumbled out rapidly. Deb talked of how she wasn’t sure she would compete, of how she was going to speak with her husband and her doctor that evening, and make a decision. She spoke of her medical condition (lymphedema) and how it might factor into her decision. It was almost as if she needed to get all those words and fears out right then, before the elevator doors opened again. As if she could leave some of that burden right there, in that little metal box.

I didn’t know what to say. Somehow, I knew my words were unimportant anyhow. Instead, my ears were important. I was here to listen. Deb was here to talk.
As she finished her story, the doors opened again. We were at the lobby. I said some totally inadequate words (“Good luck with your decision”) and I left her with her fears. I had been no help. Deb Cordner Carson was alone with her fears, and her choices.

The next morning, when I saw her on the beach at Camp Pendleton, she looked even more scared — here, in front of the surf she feared. She was walking with Dave Castro (C0-Director of the CrossFit Games) and others, who seemed to almost form a shell around her, like they could protect her from the ocean. But nobody could protect Deb from her fears. She had to face them alone. Quite honestly, I didn’t expect her to step into the ocean. I expected to see one lone athlete sitting on the beach as the others plunged into the surf.

Deb Cordner Carson would prove me wrong.

She stepped into the ocean. She stepped into her fears, let them totally surround her, pulse against her body … and she fought. She swam. She kept going.
And then she emerged out of the water, onto the beach. I saw her as she was buckling her helmet, about to jump onto her mountain bike. Most of the competitors were already well on the trail. But it didn’t matter what time Deb Cordner Carson came out of the water. What mattered was that she came out on her own, victorious over the ocean. Victorious over her fear.

“SHE MADE IT!” I yelled to the people next to me — a couple of Marines in desert cammies, here to help us with the course. I jumped up and down like it was one of my kids heading towards us. “She was so scared to swim, but she did it!”

The Marines started cheering with me and whooping, a handful of people on a lonely patch of ground, bearing witness to the courage of the human heart. The Marines certainly knew about courage, and they respected it.

I snapped Deb’s photo as best I could on my iPhone as she started off — and then I tweeted it: “Deb Cordner Carson overcame her fears and conquered the swim!”
That was all that needed to be said. Her smile said the rest.

Over the course of the next four days, Deb Cordner Carson would grab two first-place finishes (in the Sprint and “Elizabeth”) and finish 13th overall at the 2012 CrossFit Games. I would learn how my co-workers — Angel Forbes and Dave Castro — had helped convince Deb again and again to at least try the swim. How a swimmer on a paddleboard was assigned to her, to watch over her and make her feel safe. I would learn about the tears on the beach and the hugs. I would learn so much about the human heart, and our connection to each other.

For her incredible heart, Deb Cordner Carson was awarded the 2012 “Spirit of the Games” award. When she accepted that award on the stadium floor, she glowed with positive energy. She had turned her fears into triumph … and became a role model for us all.










The Thrill of Victory. Thanks Deb Cordner Carson for your heart and spirit. And Thanks To Lisbeth Darsh for writing about it so beautifully.



Namaste
John
“Teaching Focus, Inspiring Transformation”
www.martialartsnevada.com

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Sunday Story...Indomitable Spirit II

Sunday Story...Indomitable Spirit II

Face your fear and go ahead anyway.

Fear is prevalent. We can find fear anywhere we look, it isn't hard to find it. The question is: what are you going to do about it, with it?

You can let the fear own you. Let it control your life, dominate you and you will always be in fear of the fear coming back. Or...

You can take a look at your fear and decide if it is a real fear...or you can decide it is false fear...False Evidence Appearing Real. And what, you may ask, is the difference? The difference is very clear...real Fear happens when a bear is standing up on her hind legs and baring her teeth...that is a time to be afraid...False fear is when the biggest kid in school calls you stupid in the classroom. The first one is very very real...that bear is going to EAT you. The second fear arises when you anticipate and create all kinds of outcomes from being called stupid.

We are masters at creating meaning in our lives. Especially bad meanings. I can't pay this bill or that bill therefore I am a bad person. I got rejected therefore I am unlovable. Blah blah blah blah and on and on ad infinitum.

We often see this patterning happening very early...The English language is very difficult on this point...We say “I'm bad” or “I'm Hungry” when the fact are much different...I am feeling hungry or I think my behavior is not right or incorrect. But is has nothing to do with my being.

I'm afraid. But usually I am afraid of what might happen or what is going to happen. Way too often false fear is ruling our lives. I can be afraid of picking up a weight but the problem isn't in me or in the weight. It is all the stuff I create around not lifting that weight...its going to hurt, people will think I am weak, I am afraid to fail.

It is these false fears that paralyze us. They are the ones we anticipate, the monsters living under the bed or in the closet. These fears are the ones we create. As some of those kids were standing 20 or 40 feet up in the air I have no doubt they were afraid...afraid of falling, afraid of what would happen if they did fall...yet they were all secured by ropes so the danger of falling was miniscule and the danger of being hurt while falling was smaller still. Once they made up their minds and went ahead anyway the fear disappeared and confidence took its place in the place of fear. The transformation was obvious and palpable. Several years ago I was part of the Ultimate Black Belt Test. We traveled to the big island of Hawaii and swam on the black sand beach of Waipio. Our intrepid leader, Tom Callos, warned us of sharks being prevalent in the water...I made a joke about the self defense against sharks and really didn't take him seriously. I then swam 500 or 600 hundreds yards off shore. When Tom saw that he freaked out...tried to get guys to grab a boat, started wondering how he was going to explain this to my mother and the death blow to his business, writing my obituary! He was scared. I was not scared. I was enjoying a beautiful swim in a beautiful ocean under paradise skies. When I came in he was all over me like white on rice. I told you, there's sharks, you could’ve been killed and on and on. None of that happened.


Most of the fear we face in this world is self induced and false. We won't die. We can recover from almost anything save death. We can overcome obstacles and road blocks but only if we act in the face of our
False
Evidence
Appearing
Real

Fear its whats for breakfast!


Namaste

John
“Teaching Focus, Inspiring Transformation”
www.martialartsnevada.com

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Sunday Story...Indomitable Spirit

This week I took 10 children to Project Discovery (www.projectdiscovery.com ). The point of our training at Project Discovery was to learn how to work as a team, how to lead, how to believe in yourself, face your fears and go ahead anyway.

Here at Relentless Martial Arts we live and practice the tenets of TaeKwon-Do as put forth by General Choi: courtesy, integrity, perseverance, self control, and indomitable spirit. The tenets or rules form the basis of what we do and how we live. They inform our decision making process.

Now you might imagine that getting your child to understand those concepts can be a little challenging. We usually distill these concepts down to one short easy to understand sentence.
Courtesy is “be nice and have good manners”
Integrity is “be honest, tell the truth, play by the rules, and keep your promises”
Perseverance is “don’t quit”
Self control is “I am in charge of what I think say and do”
Indomitable Spirit is “face your fear and go ahead anyway”
These simple sentences seem to get the idea across. But how do we teach indomitable spirit? Teaching courtesy is pretty simple. The same with integrity, perseverance, and self control. Those things come into play almost daily. Examples are everywhere and are easy to point out in each of us. But indomitable spirit? Courage in the face of adversity? Bravery with honor? Much harder to get into your being.

At project discovery we found indomitable spirit. We certainly found teamwork doing the object pass and the cable walk. Those two things required the group to work together and fashion solutions to the problem and then execute the solutions. We found leaders who could do this in a helpful cooperative way. We found teamwork and leadership and perseverance in the 10’ wall climb. You can imagine it is a little daunting for a 6 year old to climb a 10’ wall without help. With help, though, it is a piece of cake. Of course there were rules to make it more “interesting” but it got done. Indomitable spirit came up when we did the climbing towers with the requisite walk across a cable or log. One tower was set at 20’ and the other 40’ above the ground. In order to get to the platform you had to climb a tree and a ladder and get to the platform so THEN you could walk out across a cable or a log.

Needless to say this was scary. Imagine looking way up 40 feet and seeing a suspended log that you are going to walk across, then looking at the combination of the ladder and tree climb you need to climb up to get there. Just a little daunting (hardly noticeable), I would say. The interesting part of this is that in this group ranging in age from 7 to 15 no one said I am not doing this. Every one of them picked a platform to climb up to, even though a number of them professed to a fear of heights earlier in the day. Each of them started without prompting or fear.

And each of them found their fear. Some found it part way up the climb. Some found it on the platform. Some found it on the walk out on the log or cable and some found it when letting go and trusting their team to bring them back to the ground. But everyone had to face their fear; everyone had to work through the fear to a successful completion of the journey and everyone completed their task.

It was a thing of beauty to behold. Some cried (o.k. most), some froze up, some tried to “game face” it but at the end, at the return to the ground, each of them returned victorious, transformed into something new. It was simply amazing to witness. The transformation from I can’t, I’m scared, I want to turn back to I did it! The confidence and infusion of self belief was something that you can’t put a price on.

I am often asked why I do some of the things I do …things like skydiving, helicopter snowboarding, fire walking, or glass walking. And the answer is pretty simple (now that I have observed these 10 children): fear only exists in your mind. It has no basis in reality. If you want to really move forward in the face of adversity you must learn to put your fear aside and go ahead anyway. You must look out of that plane and take that first step into the unknown, trusting that you can land on your feet when the experience is over. Or looking out over a 12’ long bed of 1200 degree coals, the heat furnacing up into your face with your mind setting off klaxon horns of warning as you take that first step onto the fire. We build confidence and belief when we do things we previously thought impossible. It is a way of training ourselves into believing that we are powerful beyond measure, that we have the ability to do anything we can imagine doing.

What are you afraid of? And what are you doing about it? Are you cowering before that first step, content with being afraid? Are you sitting on the sidelines, convinced you can’t get up and even attempt the task? I am here to tell you that you can take that step, you can get in the game, you can be powerful and extraordinary if you just set aside your fear and go ahead anyway.

Fear…it’s what’s for breakfast.
Indomitable spirit…go get some today.

Namaste
John
“Teaching Focus, Inspiring Transformation”
www.martialartsnevada.com

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Sunday Story...The Moment

It happens in a moment…you are driving down the street and BOOM a truck t-bones your car and you are dead, paralyzed or badly injured. Just like that…in a split second your life is different.
Or you are talking to your parent/friend/love and tomorrow they have a stroke and land in the hospital never to be the same and you are making decisions no one ever wants to be faced with.
Or you are 27 or 38, or 49 or whatever age and your life is going well and you are doing all the things you want to be doing and then you are diagnosed with stage 4 cancer and your doctors give you 6 months or less to live.
Or you are looking across a crowded room and you see the person that will change your life forever. In that moment you find the love of your life and nothing is ever the same again.
All it takes is a moment and everything changes. Your whole life is no longer what you thought it would be. That single moment where everything shifts for you.

You see, what we think is important may be important today but in the face of life changing events it may not be important for the reasons we think. In those moments where all our plans are in the toilet, in those moments where life knocks us down and out for the count, in those moments if we have trained ourselves to do it, if we have exercised that little known muscle of fortitude, courage and indomitable spirit we will pick ourselves up and do what it takes to rebuild, to enjoy what we can to shift and dodge and juke in the ways we must to get back on the road again. Even if that road is going to end soon.

This moment right here, right now is what is important, is what counts. It is how you act, how you do in this moment that counts. How much kindness can you find and give. How far do you have to dig to find enough love, enough compassion, and enough strength to get up, to persevere, and to persist in the face of devastation, in the face of sadness, in the face of cruelty? This is what matters, this is the moment that matters when you dig down and find whatever you need to find to get up after being crushed, broken in two or three or more pieces, when your heart is shattered like a broken glass on a tile floor. This is what is important. This is what matters. This is the moment when you get to define your life.

So get up. Again and again and again. Every time you get knocked down, you get up. Not because you want to but because we need you to. The world needs you to get up, pick up whatever pieces you can and start moving again. We want to be inspired. We want to know that it is possible to see the elephant and live. We need to know that whatever it was that happened isn’t the end of the world. Because whatever happened to you can happen to me in the next moment. I need you to get up and tell me about through your deeds, your words, and your thoughts.

What I think is important right now won’t be important after the moment when everything changes. But what is important is training me to be able to shift and change. To be able to get through what I thought was impossible yesterday or last year or 10 years ago. We do this in the gym every day, every workout…more weight, heavier, faster in ways never done before. These small little challenges, done daily condition our minds, bodies, and souls to be able to accept any challenge and make it doable or bearable or suffer-through-able.

I know the reason you go to the gym is for your health and fitness but maybe it is really about facing the impossible, the insurmountable, the devastating, the out of your control stuff that happens in a moment. Maybe that is the real reason you are training.

So get out there and do it. Do the work. But keep things in perspective. Know that at any moment things could all change. At any moment your life could look so much different as to be unrecognizable to that which came before that moment. Hug more now. Love more now. Smile more now. Have more gratitude now.

Your moment is coming. My moment is coming. What you do in that moment is an opportunity to show us, to teach us, to inspire us into what true heroism really looks like.
3, 2, 1, GO

Namaste
John
“Teaching Focus, Inspiring Transformation”
www.martialartsnevada.com

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Sunday Story...The Choice

The other day one of my students returned after spending the last 7 months undergoing treatment for cancer. She has done it all…chemo, surgery, and next radiation. Her spirit is amazingly strong. She is now returning to the mat, albeit slowly, but she is back. She could’ve gone any number of directions. Self-pity, denial, anger all come to my mind. And maybe she went through all of those. Then she made a choice of how she was going to deal with this challenge.

Hopefully most of you never have to face a choice of this magnitude. This fact is simple: Life is going to happen. What is important is not what happens but what you do with what happens. You never know what is going to be thrown at you next, this road is not marked very well and there are lots of things that just happen.

In spite of our best laid plans, in spite of our proactive approaches, in spite of our positive mental outlook and visualizations stuff is going to happen that may, on the surface, derail those plans. You are going to get injured…especially if you are going hard. The harder you train, the more you push your body to the limit the more likely it is to start breaking down and then you are going to get hurt. Then you get to decide…you can work around the injury,, keep going and do what you can based on the limitation placed in front of you. Or you can sit on the couch, eat bad food, and get fat. Your choice.

The same problem applies to other situations. When my friend got her diagnosis she decided on a course of treatment and followed it. She did what she could based upon the limitations placed upon her. Then she went to work on a work around to maintain her fitness and health.

Your life has been a series of choices and it is going to continue that way. Every day you are making choices that will affect you in profound ways years and years from now. The food you eat, the beverages you drink, the exercise you do (or don’t do) are all choices. The sad thing is that the information is readily available to you now to make a sound decision. Take smoking for instance…did anyone not get the memo about smoking? Bad for your health, even the package it comes in says so. Yet people choose every day to smoke…the excuses are myriad and lame. The same is true…I don’t want to give up_____, I just want to enjoy myself, I really need to have a soda to keep going. All choice statements.

When I get injured I get the best advice possible, decide on a course of action and get to work. I have never been face with cancer in my life but the course of action would be the same. Get the best information, make a plan, work the plan and then get going.

Who you are is the sum of all your injuries, your challenges, and your decisions of what to do about them Cancer doesn’t get to define you, a blown knee doesn’t get to define you, the loss of a loved one, the loss of a limb, a catastrophic event…these things are not you. They are just the things that happen to you. Who you are is your decisions to live a life of purpose and meaning. Who you are is all the choices you made leading up to this moment. The choices to keep going, to keep fighting, to do whatever it took to get back.

These are not easy choices. If they were easy everyone would make them. It is hard to go to the gym injured. It is hard to walk back on the mat after 7 months and take that first step back to the life you had. It is easy to sit on your butt and do nothing. And guess what? The older we are the harder the choice is to make. You already know what it took and now you are going to climb that mountain again, and again, and again. The older we are the longer and more painful the rehab is going to be. And the comeback is so much more rewarding because you are facing longer odds and in our world everyone is willing to cut you some slack “at your age.”

It isn’t easy. It is worth it. Now go out and make what happens to you mean something really important, really special by showing the world who you are deep inside.
In the words of Winston Churchill…”Never Give up”

Join me in welcoming Wendy Tustin back. I always knew you would be back. Thanks for being my hero.

Namaste
John
“Teaching Focus, Inspiring Transformation”
www.martialartsnevada.com

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