A great training mindset combines a tremendous belief in oneself with a high degree of openness and humility. Great trainees tend to be people who can over time can maintain a general attitude of “I can do and learn anything and I know nothing.” This is a beginner mindset that we can probably all relate to from when we first started learning something that we love. The better we become at maintaining it over time, the more we can learn and continue to progress through previous limitations.
The paradoxical nature of this mindset can be very difficult to manage. We can become imbalanced in our training mindset in many different ways, depending on our personality and temperament. Some of us are more prone to slipping into closed off arrogance and denial and others are more prone to self-defeating lack of confidence or perfectionism. Both imbalanced states will limit our training progression. For continued progression, it’s critical to continue to apply conscious attention into maintaining a beginner mindset and opening our minds to greater challenges, new lessons, weaknesses to address, and things to relearn.
One of the most empowering aspects of this mindset is that we can learn to manage and maintain it in certain areas of our lives and then start applying it to other areas of our lives where we struggle more. We often manage the paradoxical energies of training and learning differently in different circumstances. We may have a great beginner mindset in some areas of our lives and in others we might be held back either by a lack of belief in our ability to learn or by an attachment to certain beliefs or behaviors that are blocking deeper development. This dynamic changes over time as we invest energy in certain areas and develop certain identities or certain beliefs. It can be helpful to remind ourselves that, however well our identities and beliefs might work for certain circumstances and levels of challenge, all of these identities and beliefs are just temporary fictions in our minds until we replace them with ones that work better for us.
Here are a few tips on maintaining good training mindset:
Each time we train we can focus on a skill that we want to improve or practice. This is far more effective than just going through the motions and accomplishing prescribed outputs.
It is important to remind ourselves regularly to focus attention on areas where we are weak. This is one area where coaching or training partners can really help us, because it can be difficult to be honest with ourselves about this. When we spot weakness this is actually something to celebrate because these weaknesses represent our greatest opportunity to improve. No matter how much we try to divide our lives and ourselves into parts, we operate as a whole and addressing weaknesses is generally critical to breakthrough. Addressing weaknesses is humbling and often not something we like to do but when we catch ourselves thinking about a weakness in resistant ways we can often shift our perspective and substantially boost our motivation.
We can consider areas where we are good at learning and where we are enjoying getting stronger and compare them with areas where we struggle. There are often different mindsets being played out in these different areas. When we recognize this, we can put some attention into how we are thinking differently in the areas where we are progressing and start expanding that thinking into other areas of our lives.
Training as outdoor athletes, it can be comforting to remember that managing this paradox well is largely a matter of aligning with reality. A point that has been repeatedly stressed in this blog is that strength and outdoor capability is a natural birthright for humans. Hence, the empowering aspect of our training mindset is a matter of seeing beyond the limiting athletic beliefs of our culture and aligning with our deeper underlying reality. This allows us to be as ambitious as we want in building our athletic visions. However, in order to realize our awesome potential we’ll need to accept the humbling realities of our current state of development, become open to exploring our weaknesses, and embrace the humbling nature of the training process itself. Doing this will force us to expand beyond a collective mentality of hubris, denial, and complacency that substantially characterizes current American culture (and which thus heavily influences and shapes much of our individual thinking). Although the United States has been extremely successful in building on its initial strengths, it has a more troubling record in confronting its challenging realities and addressing its weaknesses, and today appears quite blocked from continuing to upgrade itself. History doesn’t tend to treat this sort of hubris well. We’ll see how we can manage this as a country but in the meantime we can do better in our own lives by working to upgrade our mindsets.
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