by Coach Mike

When I was at a swim meet the other day, I saw a team’s shirt with an ancient Greek word άρετή, (Arete’) which means excellence or virtue; being the best one can be. My college coach loved this word for its philosophy and it sparked an idea to symbolize our team’s core covenants of FAMILY – DEDICATION – MENTAL TOUGHNESS. As the old saying goes a “symbol” speaks a thousand words.

Kaizen – Change Is Good

The Japanese word Kaizen came to mind to symbolize our core covenant of mental toughness. Mental toughness means so many things but at its core is the concept of adapting to change with no loss of enthusiasm. Kaizen is all about change, the practice of continuous improvement. One of the most notable features of kaizen is that big results come from many small changes accumulated over time. It is about aiming to find small changes or actions you can make starting today. This is the foundation for making habits stick.

Kaizen can be applied to almost anything we want to be better at in our lives. It goes from day to day actions, work/school environment, social relationship, and sports. It is about becoming a better version of you over time. Change in order to be more capable, efficient and successful in the things you do. This requires discipline, concentration, knowing your strengths and your weaknesses. Getting better at the sport you play requires following the kaizen philosophy and to be patient with yourself.

“Be patient with yourself. Self-growth is tender, it’s holy ground. There’s no greater investment.” -Stephen Covey.

Kaizen teaches you to embrace the process of becoming an improved version of ourselves. The reason to this is motivation. Motivation comes:

• When you realize you can become better at what you do.
• When you are able to detect what you are doing wrong and identify what you need to do in order to fix it.
• When you start seeing the results and your body reacts differently to the same stimuli.

The good thing of kaizen in sports is that it allows motivation to stay because we are not perfect; we are all a work in progress. James Clear explains, “We place unnecessary stress on ourselves to lose weight or to succeed in business or to write a best selling novel. Instead, you can keep things simple and reduce stress by focusing on the daily process and sticking to your schedule, rather than worrying about the big, life changing goals. When you focus on the practice instead of the performance, you can enjoy the present moment and improve at the same time.”

There is no final destination on this journey, there is just improvement.

“You will never change your life until you change something you do daily.” -Mike Murdock

We are lifelong learners who always have room for improvement. Embracing kaizen in your life it will never go away. It joins you through your training, diet, practices and everything you do. It becomes a dynamic part of your life because you will have it ingrained in your mind.

The general idea is to focus on consistent improvements in your life, every day, no matter how small the step you take to be a better you than you were yesterday. Kaizen is an amazing practice that yields extraordinary results with virtually no effort at all!

Why Kaizen Works

John Wooden stated “When you improve a little each day, eventually big things occur. When you improve conditioning a little each day, eventually you have a big improvement in conditioning. Not tomorrow, not the next day, but eventually a big gain is made. Don’t look for the big, quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That’s the only way it happens — and when it happens, it lasts.” 

Think of the smallest step you can take every day that would move you incrementally towards your goal. This is a simple, practical way to achieve big goals but it feels less intimidating and more manageable. It might feel less exciting than chasing huge wins, but its results will be stronger and more sustainable.

A kaizen mindset turns a problem into an opportunity - we learn and become better. By focusing on continual improvement, we form a habit of asking why something didn’t work which leads us to discovering the root cause. When we reach out to others and seek their wisdom, we relinquish our pride and make greater gains of improvement. Taking critique is no longer personal but an opportunity for growth.

Keep your eyes out for the next one as I delve deeper into the symbols for FAMILY & DEDICATION.

The most important skill nobody taught you

Written by Zat Rana This post was originally published on Medium.

Before dying at the age of 39, Blaise Pascal made huge contributions to both physics and mathematics, notably in fluids, geometry, and probability.

This work, however, would influence more than just the realm of the natural sciences. Many fields that we now classify under the heading of social science did, in fact, also grow out of the foundation he helped lay.

Interestingly enough, much of this was done in his teen years, with some of it coming in his twenties. As an adult, inspired by a religious experience, he actually started to move towards philosophy and theology.

Right before his death, he was hashing out fragments of private thoughts that would later be released as a collection by the name of Pensées.

While the book is mostly a mathematician’s case for choosing a life of faith and belief, the more curious thing about it is its clear and lucid ruminations on what it means to be human. It’s a blueprint of our psychology long before psychology was deemed a formal discipline.

There is enough thought-provoking material in it to quote, and it attacks human nature from a variety of different angles, but one of its most famous thoughts aptly sums up the core of his argument:

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

According to Pascal, we fear the silence of existence, we dread boredom and instead choose aimless distraction, and we can’t help but run from the problems of our emotions into the false comforts of the mind.

The issue at the root, essentially, is that we never learn the art of solitude.

The perils of being connected

Today, more than ever, Pascal’s message rings true. If there is one word to describe the progress made in the last 100 years, it’s connectedness.

Information technologies have dominated our cultural direction. From the telephone to the radio to the TV to the internet, we have found ways to bring us all closer together, enabling constant worldly access.

I can sit in my office in Canada and transport myself to practically anywhere I want through Skype. I can be on the other side of the world and still know what is going on at home with a quick browse.

I don’t think I need to highlight the benefits of all this. But the downsides are also beginning to show. Beyond the current talk about privacy and data collection, there is perhaps an even more detrimental side-effect here.

We now live in a world where we’re connected to everything except ourselves.

If Pascal’s observation about our inability to sit quietly in a room by ourselves is true of the human condition in general, then the issue has certainly been augmented by an order of magnitude due to the options available today.

The logic is, of course, seductive. Why be alone when you never have to?

Well, the answer is that never being alone is not the same thing as never feeling alone. Worse yet, the less comfortable you are with solitude, the more likely it is that you won’t know yourself. And then, you’ll spend even more time avoiding it to focus elsewhere. In the process, you’ll become addicted to the same technologies that were meant to set you free.

Just because we can use the noise of the world to block out the discomfort of dealing with ourselves doesn’t mean that this discomfort goes away.

Almost everybody thinks of themselves as self-aware. They think they know how they feel and what they want and what their problems are. But the truth is that very few people really do. And those that do will be the first to tell how fickle self-awareness is and how much alone time it takes to get there.

In today’s world, people can go their whole lives without truly digging beyond the surface-level masks they wear; in fact, many do.

We are increasingly out of touch with who we are, and that’s a problem.

Boredom as a mode of stimulation

If we take it back to the fundamentals—and this is something Pascal touches on, too—our aversion to solitude is really an aversion to boredom.

At its core, it’s not necessarily that we are addicted to a TV set because there is something uniquely satisfying about it, just like we are not addicted to most stimulants because the benefits outweigh the downsides. Rather, what we are really addicted to is a state of not-being-bored.

Almost anything else that controls our life in an unhealthy way finds its root in our realization that we dread the nothingness of nothing. We can’t imagine just being rather than doing. And therefore, we look for entertainment, we seek company, and if those fail, we chase even higher highs.

We ignore the fact that never facing this nothingness is the same as never facing ourselves. And never facing ourselves is why we feel lonely and anxious in spite of being so intimately connected to everything else around us.

Fortunately, there is a solution. The only way to avoid being ruined by this fear—like any fear—is to face it. It’s to let the boredom take you where it wants so you can deal with whatever it is that is really going on with your sense of self. That’s when you’ll hear yourself think, and that’s when you’ll learn to engage the parts of you that are masked by distraction.

The beauty of this is that, once you cross that initial barrier, you realize that being alone isn’t so bad. Boredom can provide its own stimulation.

When you surround yourself with moments of solitude and stillness, you become intimately familiar with your environment in a way that forced stimulation doesn’t allow. The world becomes richer, the layers start to peel back, and you see things for what they really are, in all their wholeness, in all their contradictions, and in all their unfamiliarity.

You learn that there are other things you are capable of paying attention to than just what makes the most noise on the surface. Just because a quiet room doesn’t scream with excitement like the idea of immersing yourself in a movie or a TV show doesn’t mean that there isn’t depth to explore there.

Sometimes, the direction that this solitude leads you in can be unpleasant, especially when it comes to introspection—your thoughts and your feelings, your doubts and your hopes—but in the long-term, it’s far more pleasant than running away from it all without even realizing that you are.

Embracing boredom allows you to discover novelty in things you didn’t know were novel; it’s like being an unconditioned child seeing the world for the first time. It also resolves the majority of internal conflicts.

The takeaway

The more the world advances, the more stimulation it will provide as an incentive for us to get outside of our own mind to engage with it.

While Pascal’s generalization that a lack of comfort with solitude is the root of all our problems may be an exaggeration, it’s isn’t an entirely unmerited one.

Everything that has done so much to connect us has simultaneously isolated us. We are so busy being distracted that we are forgetting to tend to ourselves, which is consequently making us feel more and more alone.

Interestingly, the main culprit isn’t our obsession with any particular worldly stimulation. It’s the fear of nothingness—our addiction to a state of not-being-bored. We have an instinctive aversion to simply being.

Without realizing the value of solitude, we are overlooking the fact that, once the fear of boredom is faced, it can actually provide its own stimulation. And the only way to face it is to make time, whether every day or every week, to just sit—with our thoughts, our feelings, with a moment of stillness.

The oldest philosophical wisdom in the world has one piece of advice for us: know yourself. And there is a good reason why that is.

Without knowing ourselves, it’s almost impossible to find a healthy way to interact with the world around us. Without taking time to figure it out, we don’t have a foundation to built the rest of our lives on.

Being alone and connecting inwardly is a skill nobody ever teaches us. That’s ironic because it’s more important than most of the ones they do.

Solitude may not be the solution to everything, but it certainly is a start.

Want to think and live smarter? Zat Rana publishes a free weekly newsletter for 30,000+ readers at Design Luck.

This post was originally published on Medium.

WHEN YOU WORK HARD BUT AREN’T SWIMMING FASTER

by Olivier Poirier-Leroy. Join his weekly motivational newsletter for competitive swimmers by clicking here.

Reposted from swimswam.com

---

I work hard every day at practice but don’t seem to be getting faster. How do I stay motivated when this happens?

---

Sound familiar?

I bet it does.

I’ve experienced it, continue to experience it, and judging by the number of emails I get from swimmers frustrated with this exact thing, a whole chlorinated bunch of you do as well.

The dreaded plateau.

We all experience it. For those of us who have been around the block a few times we might even know that it’s coming, but this doesn’t make it any easier when it does happen.

• Am I doing this all wrong?
• Have I maxed out my abilities and talent in the water?
• Will I never get any faster than I am right now?
• What if I keep working hard in the water and nothing ever gets better?

There are about a thousand different reasons that things have flat-lined for you in the pool.

But there are a handful that I see pop up over and over again both with other swimmers and in my own travels around the black line.

Here are some of the more common reasons your hard work doesn’t appear to be paying off:

THE ILLUSION OF THE CLOCK.

The way we judge our swimming, both in practice and in competition, is usually based completely on the scoreboard and pace clock.

Best time? Great success.

Slower than our PB? Booooo.

Using the clock as the only marker for whether a swim was good or not is a problem because the clock isn’t the only marker of improvement in the water.

Not even close.

The time on the clock doesn’t lie, but it doesn’t tell the whole truth. If we base how feel about our swimming completely and totally on what we see on the clock, then we are ignoring the millions of other things that are happening in the water.

Improvement in the water isn’t always reflected by the clock.

When you think about it, becoming a faster swimmer is a transformation—your body is literally adapting and learning to move through the water with less effort.

Not all of the changes you want to happen are going to happen at exactly the same time, and they don’t happen at the same rate.

Read that again, because it’s important to understand. Change and improvement doesn’t happen uniformly.

That being said, even though the clock might not be telling us what we wanna hear that day in the water, what are you doing to improve today?

Are your turns improving? Is your breakout getting better? Are you getting better at holding the breathing patterns? Are you being mindful of your stroke rate on every lap? Are you crushing the high elbow pull? Not rolling your head too much to breathe?

See where I am going with this?

The clock is just one measure of getting better in the water.

Being “faster” means doing countless things better. Just because your overall rate of improvement isn’t there today doesn’t mean you can’t hammer away at those other little aspects of your training.

The most powerful side-effect of this mindset change is realizing that there are always things you can control and focus on during workouts when you feel like your hands are slopping through Jello.

We can’t always control how we feel in the water, or what the results are, but we can choose to work on something today that has nothing to do with either of those things.

And of course, the fact that there are so many things you can be working on means that there are countless ways for you to take control of your swimming (and consequently, feel motivated again).

THE FASTER YOU GET, THE SLOWER YOU IMPROVE.

This is one of the less-talked about aspects of high-performance swimming—when we first commit to getting better we improve quickly. Everything is gravy during this phase.

But as we master it (whether it’s a skill, a conditioning level, or a higher elbow catch), and those first few waves of adaptation pass us by, improvement starts to slow down. It might even completely stall out.

Even though we are still working super hard and doing everything right.

It’s just the nature of improvement.

The top swimmers in the world know this better than most. Think about all of the training and practices they do just in the hopes of matching or slightly improving their best times.

When we first start something the rate of improvement is hilarious—just don’t expect it to last forever.

Which transitions well into…

YOU ARE WORKING HARD AT DOING THE THINGS YOU ARE COMFORTABLE DOING.

Progress comes from doing new things.

By “new” I don’t mean suddenly switching coach and club mid-week—but by doing a new interval, a lower stroke count, or more dolphin kicks off the wall.

“Working hard” is a really subjective thing to say and just about every swimmer in the water can find a way to justify saying it.

For example, I can say that I went and swam 2,000m really hard, but that certainly doesn’t mean I swam well or even in a way that is going help me become a better swimmer.

If you are working hard at doing the same things you’ve always done you are just gonna get really good at swimming the same speeds you always have.

Effort isn’t enough.

Your effort needs to be focused at swimming better in all respects, and not just “hard.”

Those times where you experience violent bursts of improvement come from when you are swimming harder and better.

ACCUMULATED FATIGUE.

One of the biggest crises in confidence I experienced in my competitive days was around a month out from big meets.

This was usually when training was at its hardest.

The volume was high, the intensity was cranked, and I would find myself frustrated with a lack of speed in the water.

Because I was showing up and working hard every day at practice I was carrying around some serious work fatigue that had built up over the weeks and months of training.

Contrast this with other swimmers in the group who had missed a fair chunk of training. To my chagrin and frustration, they’d crush me in practice because they were essentially tapered.

It felt hilariously unfair to be getting dusted by swimmers who were barely showing up to practices.

The harder you train, the more fatigue you are going to carry around with you.

The effects of yesterday’s hard workout don’t just disappear after a night of sleep. Now imagine the stockpile of fatigue that comes from weeks and months of hard training.

This is the burden of being the swimmer who shows up and kicks butt every day.

The good news?

Have faith in the program and when you get your chance to fully rest up and recover you’ll discover a new gear in the pool you never thought possible.

YOU AREN’T GIVING YOURSELF A CHANCE TO RECOVER.

Speaking of fatigue, how hard do you work at the recovery aspect of your training? How serious are you about getting to bed early each night? How well are you eating before, during and after your swim practices?

Along the same vein as accumulated fatigue, if you aren’t giving yourself a chance to recover properly between thrashings in the water you aren’t giving yourself space to adapt to the training.

Think of your body as a big old battery. If you don’t let it charge overnight, how much battery are you left with in the morning? If you aren’t giving it sporadic charges over the course of the day how much charge does it have left by the end of the day?

With 25% juice left you are scrambling for ways to get a quick charge over the course of the day (coffee, pre-workouts, etc).

Working hard is awesome, but you should be recovering just as hard.

Think of all those recovery activities as ways to recharge your personal battery.

Stretching and foam rolling after practice. Staying hydrated over the course of the day. Doing some form of mindfulness work to help keep stress at bay. Getting all the sleep you can get your hands on.

Recover as hard as you are working in the pool.

THE HARDEST PART OF ALL… KEEP SHOWING UP.

I’ll never forget the first time I swam a :27 long course for a 50 free in practice.

I’ll never forget it because I didn’t expect it.

It came on a Saturday afternoon after a bruising week of training. It was my tenth session of the week, and it was around the 51,550’th meter that I’d swum during that span. At the tail end of a race pace set I dropped a :27 high.

Immediately buoyed by this and wanting to make sure this wasn’t a one-off or a fluke, I was able to repeat this result on the next rep.

Ka-boom. Massive breakthrough.

I certainly hadn’t planned on it that morning. But I’d shown up, done everything right in training, and gave myself the best possible chance that day for improvement to burst through.

That’s what you can do each day. Show up, give your best, and good things will happen.

Those breakthroughs won’t happen every day, and you can rarely predict the exact moment they will happen, but you exponentially increase the likelihood of those huge new jolts of improvement by showing up.

That breakthrough you want might not happen today.

Maybe not tomorrow.

But it’s coming in hot as long as you keep showing up.

---

ABOUT OLIVIER POIRIER-LEROY

Olivier Poirier-Leroy is a former national level swimmer. He’s the publisher of YourSwimBook, a ten-month log book for competitive swimmers.

He’s also the author of the recently published mental training workbook for competitive swimmers, Conquer the Pool: The Swimmer’s Ultimate Guide to a High Performance Mindset.

It combines sport psychology research, worksheets, and anecdotes and examples of Olympians past and present to give swimmers everything they need to conquer the mental side of the sport.

Ready to take your mindset to the next level?

Click here to learn more about Conquer the Pool.

COACHES: Yuppers–we do team orders of “Conquer the Pool” which include a team discount as well as complimentary branding (your club logo on the cover of the book) at no additional charge.

Want more details? Click here for a free estimate on a team order of CTP.