Thursday, October 13, 2005

attitude

Attitude. You've been beaten down so much and told so often to get rid of attitude. But the funny thing is, sometimes attitude is a good thing. It's just a question of what kind of attitude.

Part of endurance sports--and part of sports in general, is the need to develop and maintain mental skills necessary to achieve your goals. Without them, your training and your race day experience will suffer. Poor mental acuities will cause you to consistently underachieve, fail to reach target objectives, and set inferior standards. Good mental ability will allow you to fulfill potential, complete target objectives, and encourage an ambition for superior standards. The Navy SEALs have a maxim: you are capable of 4x as much physical output as you believe possible. To unlock the potential for such output, you have to engage the proper attitude.

So what is the proper attitude? Positivity. The constant belief that you can do anything you want to do--you just have to go out and do it. In your mind, there may be a struggle between a "Mr./Ms. Positive" telling you "you can", and a "Mr./Ms. Negative" telling you "you can't." Negative is going to sit your shoulder and climb on your back and become a 900-lb. bear clawing at your insides, and go from whispering all kinds of excuses for laziness, underachievement, and failure to roaring a stream of denials and impossibilities. Positive is going to tap you on the head, throw you a smile, and point you forward--and make everything a crystal clear landscape of choices and consequences and options and rewards, with the seemingly impossible and unrepentantly intimidating nothing more than illusions that dissolve like 1...2...3... Which one you listen to is up to you.

It's like the song goes: You have to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative. And don't mess with Mr. In-between.