COPING

 

How do you handle a bad result?  How do you view it?  Do you look at it as a failure?  Now guys you may be thinking to yourselves, oh no he’s on his soap box again, but rest assured I’m not.  I’ve been thinking about this all week and it stems from a couple of sets we were doing where fins were optional.  

As we watched you work through these sets, we noticed that some of you were struggling towards the end and we asked you to put on your fins.  A couple responses were but I don’t want to because than I fail.  First off, no you didn’t fail.  The sets and interval were designed for the upper end of our group in the hopes that the others would be able to follow for as long as they could, and the entire group was great 👍. Our coping mechanism in this scene were the fins, and next time maybe we can go longer without them.

Instead of looking at a bad result in anything you do as a bad result, ask yourself what you can do the next time out to produce a better result and the first thing you need to do is get back up.  Yes, I know sometimes it's hard but to move forward sometimes you get knocked down, but you need to get back up.

Now down to the nuts and bolts of coping.  It goes without saying that every

swimmer wants to do well every time out whether its winning your heat or event, a personal best time, or achieving a next meet cut.  All of you make sacrifices and put in a lot of work in order to achieve success in your races and meets. Unfortunately sometimes things don't go as planned and when that happens it's easy to make excuses and indulge with negative emotions, maybe even anger.  Your brain is like a giant computer in your head that you can program and control with your thoughts and emotions.

Let's look at this statement I hear way too often,  "I'm tired" or "I felt slow", and there are many others to be sure but these are the two biggies that I hear most often.  When you feed your brain with these kind of thoughts or statements you have already begun the day sabotaging your chance of success.  The more that you condition your brain to those negative feelings, thoughts and anger the more you hard wire your brain in making them become a habit.  Now don't get disappointment and anger confused because there is a difference.   We have already talked about how it is ok to be disappointed in a result as long as you can gather yourself quickly and move forward to the next race or event.  "Anger and frustration are the extreme, poisonous versions of disappointment when taken too far."

If you can learn to cope with both your good and bad swims and how to calmly move beyond both the better swimmer you will become and on the way to the results your searching for as long as they are goals that are both reasonable and attainable.

Next UP:  A bad result does not define you.