Biggest Struggle: Focus and Self-confidence

Perhaps one of the biggest challenges of my training is losing focus and gaining confidence. Why is my confidence low? And why do I lose focus? Needless to say, these two issues are related. If my confidence is low, my mind wonders and worries about issues I have no control over and so my focus on the things I can control is lost. There are different aspects to my confidence:

1. Confidence on skills:

I seem to have no problem being confident in individual skills, especially while I am learning them. Learning a new skill comes easy for me. I trust Scott’s ability to take me through the necessary progressions and I trust his calls in whether or not I am ready to perform something by myself. When I begin to lose confidence is when I face the transition of having a skill and performing it consistently. The moment the skill begins to fail (has a one bad day) I, unconsciously, get discourage and immediately begin to over thinking the ways in which I could fix it. That makes me lose both focus, and as the skill performance deteriorates my confidence level drops significantly. This recently happened with my layout ginger. Learning the skill was not a problem in less than a month I was throwing and catching it with Scott light spotting on a p-block. Based on my consistency catching the release, Scott steped down the p-block, and I began throwing the skill by myself. For a couple of days the skill was improving being closer and closer to catch. Within a week I had my first catch and I was consistently tapping the bar in every single one. I continued trying to make the skill more consistent but frustration began to build after weeks of not catching, from then on the skill began to deteriorate. Without realizing I found myself thinking too much about the skill –thinking about every single body position in the skill, worrying about not getting my toes all the way up and my tap being not strong enough, my letting go one-two being messed up, my sitting being too slow to reach the bar... etc… too many directions for my head. With no doubt, Scott (who was getting really frustrated) and I came to the realization that I had changed my technique of my skill, ever since then the ginger has become very inconsistent.

So the question is, at what point and why did I lose my confidence? I proved both to Scott and to myself that I am capable of performing the skill. Fear is not really the issue here. I think the issue is my mind. I lost the focus, the ability of my conscious mind to allow my muscle memory to take over my body and perform a movement it knows how to do. Perhaps it was the fear, what helped my conscious mind be distracted enough to allow my body to perform, the moment fear and uncertainty where taken out of the equation my mind didn’t know what to think about and focusing on the theory behind the skill did nothing else but confuse my cerebellum from taking over the way it was doing. I am not sure about what the solution for this problem may be, my ginger is on vacation at the moment. I guess Scott’s plans is to go over the drills again and basically re-learn it to remind my body how it feels, however my fear of misplacing (you never lose a skill you miss-place it as Jason will say) it again the moment I have to be consistent worries me. However my strategy this time around, will entail attempting to find focus in my mind as I re-learn the skill. I’ll will push my conscious mind to think of key words as I go through the move, instead of letting subconscious feeling/thoughts such as fear and uncertainty drive my moves, this way when I am working on consistency I can make sure that my mind doesn’t wonder elsewhere and it focuses on what its being trained to think about while the body perform this specific move.

2. Big picture confidence:

This is a very broad aspect of my confidence, being the reason why perhaps, it is the one that I struggle with the most. Most of my energy is drained worrying about the future, worrying about things I have no control over. Common questions in my head are: Do I have what it takes?, am I good enough? Am I wasting Scott’s and I time? Where am I going to train once Scott graduates? What if, I want to continue training beyond my one year deferral and find myself without a coach and without the possibility to take another year? Am I going to get injure and lose everything I have worked for?

I can go on and on with more what if’s that wonder my mind every day. My point is that these kinds of thoughts are useless and are a burden for my focus and my confidence. It is really easy for my mind to find reasons to prove that I am not good enough (I just have to watch videos in youtube and compare my own videos to other elite gymnasts). I can and in fact have wondered while trying to sleep about all those what if questions, torturing my mind with the most negative of situations. Gymnastics is a sport of calculated uncertainty, we never know when bad things are going to happen all we can do is train and trust that our training will prevent or prepare us for facing problematic situations. Such is life right? So the big word is trust! Which in this case = confidence. Once again losing focus (letting my mind wonder on what if’s) equates with low confidence and low confidence drives my mind to wonder and lose focus, a never ending cycle.

I am 23 years old and I should be able to deal with the uncertainty, at least so I want to believe. It is true that recognizing the problem is always a good first step, but fixing it is a different beast, one I haven’t been able to quite kill. The answer to defeating this problem is in the ability to find strong internal drive. Today I was watching gymnastike, again as a morning ritual to subconsciously lower my confidence (watching for reasons to show that I am not at all competitive with other elites, under the pretence that I am learning new skills by watching them which is true but a bit more complicated). However, today I attempted to consciously change my focus and watch these videos not to compare myself but to see how other athletes deal with elite level training and see what I could learn and internalize from them. As I was watching different training videos, I was reminded of the importance of having a goal and making every workout count. It is obvious right? We all are told at some point the same thing –“show up to the gym with a goal and make sure you accomplish it by the end of practice”-. I know that this is the only route to success, so the video reminded me of what I knew but beyond that it made me to critically assess my own workouts. I realized that more often than not I find myself in the gym with no short term goal or direction. Even though I had a goal and a direction as I was sitting in front of my computer at work, for some reason again probably lose of my focus, I forget about it when I am at the gym. Then when skills don’t work I get frustrated and drive my thoughts into proving how bad of a gymnast I am. This is a total mess, and not what I should be doing.

This of course doesn’t happen every day because if it will I would not be at the level that I am at right now in such short period of time, however these moments do happen and I need to put an end to them. I have to find my inner drive stick to it and keep my eyes on my goals (short term goals preferably so that I do not overwhelm myself with future tense) while I become understanding of the fact that bad days happen. KEEP IT POSITIVE. I have to gain mental toughness, which is accomplished by setting well defined short term goals to which I hold myself accountable, that way as I accomplish them I can prove to myself that I am a good gymnast one wordy of Scott’s and I time and energy.