I Could Never…
As the Winter Olympics are in full swing, many of us are watching in awe of the grace, strength, speed, and courage of these athletes. Many of us are also saying to ourselves, I could never [fill in the blank with the amazing feat of athleticism] … What we don’t see is the years of training and hard work these athletes have put in to prepare themselves for these games.
Take Olympic gold medalists Nathan Chen, who dazzled with his figure skating. He started skating at age 3 in Salt Lake City. He was competing in national championships at 16. Nathan Chen spends 4-5 hours a day training to be able to perform those gravity defying quadruple axels . And while a quadruple axel may be out of reach for most people, learning to ice skate is not.
When you catch yourself saying, “I could never…” to something – a job, an activity, an accomplishment of any kind, you are limiting your ability to dream and to achieve something that is possible simply because the path to the big goal is unclear. What if instead of telling yourself you could never, you asked yourself, “how could I get one step closer?”
James Clear, author of “Atomic Habits” talks about continuous improvement. The highlight of this approach is that the most effective way to work towards a goal is to make choices that allow you to get 1% better each day. Hoping to increase your flexibility? Commit to 10 minutes of stretching a few times a week before jumping into that hour-long hot yoga class. Do you want to work some mediation into your regular routine? Start with setting a 1-minute timer or use a short, guided audio meditation a few times a week. Want to read more? Carve out 5-10 minutes a few times a week to sit down with a book or listen to an audio book while you are in the car or walking.
The importance of choosing to take these smaller actions is to help you break away from all or nothing thinking, a cognitive distortion that causes you to evaluate yourself in extreme terms (e.g. if I can’t read a book a week, I’m a total failure). Instead, by breaking your bigger goal into smaller tasks that are achievable in the short term (with a healthy dose of self-compassion), you can work to get 1% better each day. Over the course of a year, that would be 37 times better than when you started! And while it might not get you to land a triple Lutz, it would get you cruising around the ice with more speed and skill than if you never started at all.
So what is something you want to get 1% better at?
