Welcome to 2021! The events of 2020 have been a great reminder that if we allow external events to affect how we think and feel, then we are travelling a rocky road. This blog is all about taking back control of our mind to serve our health, wellbeing, and deeper sense of peace and happiness. I hope it is useful given the uncertainty many of us are experiencing, and our focus on past, present and future in a pandemic world: how it ‘was’, how it ‘is’ and how it ‘might be’.
UNCERTAINTY has been a theme of the year and looks set to continue. Any sense of certainty we used to believe we had is starting to feel like an illusion. Uncertainty is simply the gap between where we are and where we aspire to be. If we accept that we are where we are, with what is, then we are less focused on the GAP that we perceive exists between present and future. A sense of peace arrives. With that we can embrace curiosity and excitement about the journey ahead, instead of anxiety and stress about things not working out the way we might want them to.
Here is a practical example of what I mean. I have just finished my first hard training session of the year on the bike. All of my training sessions are set to power targets for certain intervals of time. A bike computer informs me of how many watts I am producing and for how long. That means that my brain is being fed constant information about ‘the GAP’: that is the difference between my performance and my desired performance. The mechanistic, numbers-focused approach takes my attention to the gap between what is happening and what I ideally want to be happening. Often this means I am under the target power, because in a focused session like this, any good training programme will most often be stretching you to the limits of current capacity. The effect of this is that I feeding my thoughts a message that I am ‘never enough’: one of the underlying constructs of most human mindsets which I believe leads to a lot of the dis-ease that so many of us feel. This leads to a sense of stress and creates an iterative cycle of focusing again on ‘the gap’ between where or who I am, and where or who I want to be.
How messed up is that?! Surely the things we choose to spend so much time on should be more fun. Surely riding a bike should be a wonderful thing for our health, not messing with our stress response in an unhealthy way.
So, how do we change these habits? One of my key motivations to train for the Tokyo 2021 Paralympics is that whilst I won Gold in Rio, I struggled my way there through various health problems, surgeries and injuries. So, my journey towards Tokyo 2021 is experiential, playing with my own mind at a deeper level than I have before: designing my mindset to optimize my potential through a healthier relationship with myself and with time. This was my ‘WIBA 2020’ (Wouldn’t It Be Amazing…) now shifted to 2021.
Relationship with TIME is one of the areas I am exploring: kind of interesting given my main event – the time trial – is a race against time! I have often felt pressured by time, sensing there is never enough of it, or that the clock ticks too fast. Here is an example of how I played with that in today’s training session that I’ve already begun describing. I had to repeat the same sequence twice. The first sequence felt hard. I struggled to hold powers, and I definitely didn’t enjoy the effort. In the second sequence, I shifted my focus. Instead of looking at the computer screen intensely focused on the watts and how I was struggling to hold them, I let go. I imagined myself to be beneath Mt Fuji instead of in a cold car park in Europe. I loosely had my eyes on the power, but my focus was bigger and wider, far and beyond. In my mind I was watching the incredible firework display above Mt Fuji to celebrate the Olympics – as the original 2020 Olympic fireworks would be out of date in summer 2021, a wonderful New Year display was given which you can watch here . I imagined feeling part of something truly special, connected to the strength of human spirit, to ‘spirit in motion’ (the Paralympic motto), to the mountains, the sky, the infinity of life and everything beyond. I changed my relationship with time. Instead of Tokyo 2021 being in the future, with a huge hurdle between me and it, I imagined being there enjoying the moment. I hit the powers, and I enjoyed myself in the process.
How beautiful is that? The simple fact that we can imagine ourselves somewhere else instantly eases suffering and pain, and brings a sense of peace and joy. It reminds me of a technique that helped me when I was first paralysed. I would look up at mountains and feel sadness and pain that I could not be there. Memories of walking and being in them would haunt me. A friend suggested that I imagine myself with a giant’s hand, and that I could run that giant hand across the mountains, feeling all of the crags and valleys, textures of rocks, grass and heather. Incredibly, I felt to be there, in the mountains, and the heart-ache and pain dissolved.
A simple shift in perception can change our experience, take us from suffering to freedom, from pain to ease. Whatever you aspire to in 2021, I hope that you can travel the journey with a greater sense of freedom and ease than ever before. Perhaps that is a gift of Covid: to remind us that we are all more flexible, adaptable and creative than we may have previously realised. We can design our mind to embrace uncertainty, delete the gaps, and imagine ourselves already where we want to be.
I will be running a MIND DESIGN workshop in February 2021. If you’d like to release more of your potential, feel more peace and less internal conflict and dis-ease, then I would love to help you on that journey.
Much love and have a wonderful year x