Who cares what other people think? If you stick to what you believe and you stay true to your vision, why would it matter what anyone says about you, your lifting, your business, your school, your team, or anything else? If you find yourself caring what other people think, you may not be staying true to your vision. Instead, it’s possible that you need the reassurance and respect of others to get what you need.
I’ll put this into perspective. Let’s say your goal is to have the best business in the world in your field. For this example, it doesn’t matter what field we’re talking about. As you’re building your business, you start hearing rumors. Some of these rumors are positive and truthful, but others are somewhat negative. Others are outright lies and personal attacks.
Now, most people I know will get all pissed off about this and think about retaliation:
“How dare someone say I suck?
How dare they say my business sucks?
What gives them the right?”
You spend the rest of the day with these rumors floating around in your head. You even lose sleep over them because your mind is occupied with planning and strategizing your counter-attack. You figure you can call them, send them an email, see them in person, or post something on social media. You may even consider pulling someone else into the fray, telling a friend something that will find its way back to the source.
Two days later, you start to relax. Maybe you retaliated. Maybe you didn’t. Either way, things are back to normal, and you’re finally concentrating on your life again.
I want to know what happened to the two days you lost because you were all pissed off and planning your attack.
Where did they go?
They’re gone forever.
Don’t you think you could have used this time a lot more productively by working toward your original goals?
Couldn’t you have used this time to think about your business plan?
Your training plan?
Your life plan?
What about all the sleep you lost?
Wouldn’t your training have been better without having all this crap on your mind all day?
Even if you didn’t do anything to get back at this person, you’ve still lost the battle. And this other person didn’t just win, either. They did something much, much worse: they derailed you from your original purpose.
You may only have lost one day but one day, one minute, or even one second but these can make a hell of a difference in your life. How many times a year does this happen?
Apply the same idea to your training. The proliferation of social media has made it easy to interact with other lifters and see what they are doing (almost possible to ignore). Someone is shit talking your programming and lifts online. Are you going to get into day-long verbal sparring match where no one wins and you just look like petty assholes who have too much spare time? It’s one thing to talk training online, another to get sucked into a catfight with a 13 year old who uses a bar pad to squat. What did you gain from this interaction? Insight or an altercation?
You don’t even need other people to suck yourself into a cycle of distraction and derailment. You can inflict it on yourself. It’s hard to ignore what numbers other people are putting up and start comparing yourself to them. It’s good to want to push yourself and have numbers to shoot for but what if you use their numbers to talk yourself out of doing a meet? Use better lifters as something to aspire to, not talk yourself out of competing or take away from your current progress.
You have a choice. You can either choose to follow your own path, or you can choose to follow someone else’s path. Other people can’t control how we feel. We get to decide that for ourselves. We decide what our reactions are going to be for any given stimulus. We choose how to react. You can either blow things off or let them get to you, but nobody has this power but you.
One of the most challenging aspects of competitive powerlifting (and any competitive sport for that matter) is the mental component. There will be obstacles and challenges that are sometimes beyond your control- a bad training cycle, bad meet. Maybe you were overworked, underfed, missed some lifts. You may not always be able to control the variables or go back in time and change what happened but you can control your response. You have 100% control over how you respond to any event. And sometimes your response is more important than the obstacle itself.
Say you’re at a meet and you just missed a squat you think you should have smoked. Your form was off and you forgot all the cues you had been working on. You can spend the next 12 minutes between attempts berating yourself for fucking up or you can accept that you made a mistake and think about how to change it going forward. You can waste the entire time mentally exhausting yourself- but for what? Will anything positive come from making yourself feel shittier than you already do? We shouldn’t ignore our mistakes if we can learn from them but we shouldn’t dwell on them either. I’m not saying you should get off the platform and find some high-fives just because you tried. But you should avoid letting your molehill of mistakes turn into a mountain of mistakes and negatively affect the rest of the meet. Like the previous example, you can control how you react. You can make the most of it and move forward or choose to be derailed. The winner of a meet could come down to who let themselves get mentally off-track.
The same goes for a training day. You get stapled by a bench that you’ve nailed a dozen times before. What do you do? Do you ask your training partners what might have gone wrong or do you throw a little gym tantrum and sulk? Not only do you not benefit from your gym tantrum but you’re being a shitty training partner too. You’re bringing everyone else down. It’s good to get mad. It means you care. But there’s a fine line between using your pissed-off state to push yourself and using it to sulk in the corner and waste the rest of the day. Resiliency and self-control: no one can write that into your program but it can help take your success to the next level.
I used to have a manager who was great at turning situations around in record time. Working with him was a tremendous learning experience. He was a phenomenal listener. If I bitched to him about a junior staff member, he heard me out, asked some probing questions, and did his best to understand the entire situation. He would then repeat the story back to me in his words and then ask me if he had said everything right. I either confirmed this for him or filled in whatever gaps he’d missed. If I had to fill in the gaps, he’d repeat the process, telling me the entire story again and asking if he’d lost anything.
Every time we did this, he’d ask me the same question: “So, what are you going to do about it and when will it be completed?” I was responsible for fixing the problem. Often, I didn’t want to fix anything at all, so he’d ask me another question: “Why are you so upset about it?” He taught me that I was accountable for fixing my problems. If I didn’t want to be part of the solution, I needed to shut up and live with it.
We all get fired up from time to time. I damned sure know I do. It’s just a matter of remembering where we’re going and understanding whether this behavior will help us get there or not.
Most the times it will not so it's a self-created distraction keeping you away from doing what you really need to be doing.
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