by Olivier Poirier-Leroy. The following is a sample email from his weekly motivational newsletter for swimmers. You can join for free by clicking here.
It is inevitable. Like gravity. Or a trip to the bathroom after a night of all-you-can-eat undercooked chicken.
No matter how pumped you are when you write out those majestic goals at the beginning of the season, no matter how iron-willed you may be when September rolls around, eventually it will happen.
The drop off.
Yes, it will even happen to you my most motivated of broheims. It will happen to you, to me, to your teammate, and even those fancy-pant swimmers that grace the podium on the international stage.
The unavoidable lapse in motivation.
In reality, it’s entirely predictable. Our seasons as swimmers are ridiculously long. For some the days off between the end of championship season and September count in the teens. Compared to most other sports and their 3-6 month seasons, us swimmers represent year round. And as a result, it’s inescapable that we will experience those dips in motivation.
It’s okay. It’s alright. Beating yourself up over it, or thinking that you are a less committed athlete because of it is silly.
What matters is what you do next.
“How we do anything is how we do everything.”
Allow me to explain what that quote has to do with your motivation belly flopping off the 10m tower.
Think back to the last time you were feeling de-motivated. Nothing was going right. Everything and everyone was stressing you out, your stroke felt off, coach was getting on your nerves, and most importantly, the enormity of the goals you had laid out for the season loomed a massive and demoralizing shadow over you and your swimming.
With your swimming seemingly in the toilet, and those big goals staring at you dead-eyed from across the calendar, it was difficult not to feel even more discouraged. More bummed. More choked that you seemed to be now making backward progress.
And so you start taking a long view to your swimming. Because you feel off today you are not going to achieve your goals 7 months from now. Because you had a bad couple workouts this week the whole cycle is wasted. Because you had a bad workout today you worry that your swimming took some weird step backward.
To get back on track you need to forget tomorrow. Forget your goals. And forget yesterday too while you are at it.
To get back on track you need to do one thing, no matter how small, and to do it well.
The way we do anything is how we do everything.
Here’s a challenge: Go to the messiest room in the house. Clean one corner of the room. Just one corner. But clean the bejesus out of it. Once you are done, you’ll find something tugging at the back of your brain, that feeling of incompleteness, that the job isn’t done. Your brain will want you to clean the area beside the original corner. And then the area beside that one. And soon enough, the whole room is done.
You can apply this same, bizarro brain hack to your swimming.
When you are struggling to find motivation to swim to your utmost, pick one thing to do obscenely well.
Just one.
No more, and certainly no less.
Choose to have absolutely perfect streamlines off each wall. Decide that you are going to nail your catch on every stroke. Or that you going to tuck your knees in like a boss on each turn.
Soon enough the excellence devoted to that one menial task will spread to the rest of your swimming.
Sounds overly simple, right? Sometimes the things that work are deceptively simple. Complicated sounds good, but it is almost always the A-B answers that work best.
Try it out at your next practice, and let me know how it goes for you.
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