www
mariosantos
com
Mental Training for Skydiving and Life
Let the Training Begin
________________________________
You can map
out a fight plan or a life plan, but when the action starts, it may not go the
way you planned, and you’re down to your reflexes – which means your training.
That’s where your roadwork shows. If you’ve cheated on that in the dark of
morning – well, you’re getting found out now, under the bright lights.
Joe Frazier
Training of any kind must have three components in order to be
successful:
A goal;
A plan to reach the goal;
A commitment to follow the plan.
The Goal
A road map is of little value unless you know your destination. Most
people, in fact, have little difficulty achieving their goals but a great deal
of difficulty in setting them. To formulate a realistic goal two questions need
to be asked: “What do I want to accomplish?” and “How will I know when I’ve
accomplished it?” While this may sound overly simplistic, most people go astray
at precisely this point. Their goal is too general and undefined, and
consequently they have a difficult time creating a plan to reach it.
A goal needs to be clear, specific, and measurable. If you
decided you wanted to make a lot of money, you’d first have to determine an
amount before you could figure out a way to make it. If
the amount you arrived at was $75,000 a year, for instance, that would be
clear, specific and measurable. You’d know by your accounting if your plan was
working, when you reached your goal, or how far you still had to go. You’d also be able to make
necessary adjustments or modifications to the plan to get back on track.
Let’s say you want to be a really good skydiver. To design your
training you first must decide what being a “really good skydiver” looks like
to you. The term as it stands provides little information about the direction
your training should take because it’s too vague and means different things to
different people. Begin by creating some specific, measurable criteria. For
instance, you might consider yourself really good if you were able to do one or
more of the following:
Fall flat and stable and perform tight center
turns, outfacing moves, side slides, forward/backward and up/down movements;
Get invited on large formation loads;
Perform a certain number of points in time;
Participate on a competitive team;
Enter and maintain a head down or sit fly position,
etc.
A second way to formulate a goal is through visualization. Be a movie
director and create a scene that depicts your goal being accomplished. What
does that scene look like? How does the script read? What specifically are you
doing in the movie that demonstrates your goal being achieved?
Regardless of the method, don’t rush this process. Your training
program rests entirely on the clarity of your goal. Define it carefully. Spend
as much time as you need answering your goal-defining questions. My own method
of goal setting usually takes five to ten drafts before I have a crystal-clear
objective in mind.
I begin by sitting down and visualizing a general picture of what I
wish to accomplish and then writing down everything that comes to mind. This
process works best if it goes uncensored at first. I “free associate” and list
my thoughts no matter how simple or absurd they may sound. At this stage I
don’t evaluate whether a thought is appropriate or not – I just write it down.
Once the thoughts stop coming, I examine my list and keep any ideas that are
clear, specific, and measurable. I eliminate everything else. I then write the
list over and review it every day for about a week, adding and deleting ideas as
I go. If a new thought comes to mind I put it down. If something doesn’t seem
to fit, I delete it. I revise until it looks and feels just right. If doubts
persist, I share my list with friends to get their opinions. Once I arrive at
an ambitious but realistic goal – one that I feel passionately about – I move
on to the next step and construct a plan to make it happen.
The Plan
Keep the plan as simple as possible. Decide what specific actions you
need to take to achieve your goal, and determine their order of importance. Be
practical and don’t demand an investment of level of effort that is
unreasonable or un-maintainable. Most diets and physical fitness programs
self-destruct here due to unrealistic expectations that result in fatigue,
burnout, or disgust. Human beings are strange animals. We either do little or
nothing to reach our goals, or we create overly ambitious programs and fail to
follow through. The result in either case is that we get nowhere.
I once heard a motivational speaker talk about the hundreds of
thousands of home exercise machines sold each year that become dust collectors
or clothing racks after a month or so. He said that we buy them with the best
of intentions and then commit to an unrealistic training schedule.
We begin full steam with promises of daily exercise and within a few
weeks our training regimen is down to nearly nothing. As we fail to live up to
our high expectations we become discouraged and disappointed. Self-disgusts sets in; it’s just one more time that we let ourselves
down and failed to follow through on a plan. Paradoxically, instead of increasing our
efforts to succeed, we begin to do less and less and eventually give up.
His solution to this problem
is to create exercise plans that are ridiculously simple and require little to
no effort. Instead
of making a major commitment, make an easy on that you can reach with no
difficulty. Work out five minutes a day, three days a week. Anyone can do that.
It’s enough to make you laugh, but not too much to make you fail. And probably
after five minutes of exercise you’ll want to do more because it feels good.
And the more it feels good the more you’ll want to do. You’ll become successful
at exercising, and this feeling will reinforce itself.
While I don’t necessarily suggest this approach to most of my clients,
the point made is valuable. My experience with peak performance training at all
levels is that most of us tend to set unrealistic goals. In our rush for
success we make extravagant promises and commitments to training that require
an effort above and beyond our ability, investment, or motivation level.
So, take care to construct a plan that’s realistic. As you design your
plan, continually ask yourself if it matches your commitment and level of
motivation, and if it’s practical for you at this time in your life. If you can
see yourself still doing it in two months, you probably have a good plan. If
you can’t, make modifications now to avoid failure in the future. Either decrease
the intensity of the plan or make alterations in your life to accommodate the
regimen you’ve created. As a rule of thumb it’s always better to start
conservatively – and remember, keep it simple.
The Commitment
Once the plan has been constructed, what remains is to follow through
with every resource available to you. If your goal is extremely important, then
nothing (barring a tragedy of crisis of major proportions) should get in your
way. Never allow your changing moods to alter your plan. If you don’t “feel”
like working your plan, work it anyway. You need to be firm and unyielding in
your commitment. Remember: you created this plan, and for good reason. It’s
designed to take you to your goal. If your goal is of minor importance, your
plan should reflect this and not be too demanding. If it’s of major importance,
then there are very few things that can get in your way.
Most of us, either consciously or unconsciously, begin to look for
shortcuts once we put our plan into action. We search for easier/softer ways to
accomplish our task. We may begin with a fierce determination, but as we get
tired, bored, or outside our physical or psychological comfort level, we start
to re-evaluate our program and cut corners. This is especially true in mental
training because it often disturbs our equilibrium by taking us into uncharted
territory. Most of us aren’t used to these techniques and prefer to return to
more familiar methods. We start finding reasons to modify our training and
begin making excuses for not completing assignments.
Keep in mind that the plan is your vehicle to reach your
goal. Therein lies its value and power. The goal is the prize – the thing of
value. The plan is simply your method to attain it and may not be a whole lot
of fun at times. It might sometimes seem dull, monotonous, exhausting,
annoying, or discouraging. Occasionally, it may feel like a total waste of
time. “Little voices” in your head might start telling you that it’s just not
worth all the effort, that you’re expending far too much energy, that this is
not as important as you once thought it was, that regardless of how hard you
try you’ll never reach it anyway so why continue… and so on. It’s your job to
squelch those voices and stick with your plan.
Humans hate to feel discomfort for extended periods, especially mental
discomfort, and go to extreme measures to avoid it. If you doubt what I’m
saying take a look at your own life to see how many times you’ve given up on a
goal, or a dream, or the pursuit of a relationship, hobby, career, etc. Be
honest. How many times have you quit because things got too uncomfortable or
the outcome became too uncertain? I’m not necessarily referring to physical
discomfort. For most of us, emotional and mental
discomforts are far more difficult to bear than any physical pain.
I know lots of superb athletes who can’t tolerate the thought of having
to meditate or sit quietly and do nothing. They’ll do anything to avoid being
still or getting in touch with their feelings and emotions. They’d rather be
involved in torturous physical exertion than experience the effects of silence.
Give them something else, anything else, to do. Fix a car, paint a wall, fold
the laundry, even wash the dishes, but NOT the dreaded mental training.
PEAK PERFORMANCE IS:
COMMITMENT
GOALS
PASSION
VISION
DISCIPLINE
CONVICTION
PEAK PERFORMANCE IS NOT:
MOODS
DESIRES
WANTS
THOUGHTS
CRAVINGS
WHIMS
________________________________________
wwwmariosantoscom
ã 2000 – John J. DeRosalia – All Rights Reserved
________________________________________