During Yoga practice, I was doing a headstand and I tumbled ever so gracefully out of it, in other words I fell. Reflecting on what happened the first thing that came to mind is that I learned what not to do but in further reflection I found out what may have aided my hasty decent. During the headstand a thought kept coming up that I was going to fall. Self-fulling prophecy, as the old saying goes; “if you think you can or can’t, you’re right”. Proved that one once again.
The people I coach ask me all the time, “how do I get better?” Looking for the secret or short cut to this elusive path. I tend to loosely state “one stroke at a time”. It isn’t so much about what you do, necessarily, but what your attitude is about your actions. So, what does this have to do with my “failed” headstand? It wasn’t a failure, it was play, it was an attempt, and each attempt is a step forward, it was practice.
"Practice is everything. This is often misquoted as Practice makes perfect." ~ Periander
Improvement involves the three P’s;
- Perseverance- keep doing something despite of difficulty or delay in achieving success.
- Patience- is the calm acceptance that things can happen in a different order than the one you have in mind.
- Practice
Everything you do is practice. If you look at it any other way, you are not only setting unreasonable expectations of yourself, but you are assuming you can predict an unpredictable outcome. When a hit song tops the charts, a book becomes a best-seller, an athlete does something no one has done before, it’s easy to see the occurrence in an instant and ignore everything that preceded it.
"Success comes through rapidly fixing our mistakes rather than getting things right the first time." ~ Tim Harford, author of Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure
How do you get better? Just like you learned how to walk, talk, put food in your mouth without missing. One fall, mumble, messy face at a time. You have been doing it your whole life and look at you now. We endlessly experiment, play and learn. The faster we learn to look for ways to fall the less falling will happen because we will finally realize that we are continuously falling, we just don’t know it because it looks like standing or for the purpose of this article, success.
What are you practicing today? You know my answer, everything!
BLUE WAVE ON 3…BLUE WAVE ON 3…1...2…3
GO BLUE WAVE!
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