I was asked to give a lecture at Deepspot (the deep pool in Poland), about a subject of my choosing and as I was flying there I opened a blank powerpoint file and tried to write down a presentation. I have a deep love for this subject and I taught it several times during my depth workshops, and I constantly talk about this with the freedivers I coach, so all I needed to do was to write some keywords down in the order I wanted to stick to. How hard would it be to write down like 50 words over 5 slides? 2 hours later, the airplane pilot announced we were landing, and the text on my slides was so thick that I could hardly read it from 50cm away. Conciseness is definitely not my area of expertise.
So with no presentation ready and a rambly essay in my hands I figured that either I’ll send it to the recycle bin or I’ll throw it here in the blog, and I’m cutting it down (by a lot) because I dont wish you to fall asleep and drool all over your laptop while you are reading.
What is motivation?
Why do YOU do this thing called freediving and what does it give YOU?
You will all have different answers to that. Does your life or sense of self-worth depends on it, or you do it for fun, love of the sea, sense of community and you don’t care about progression? Or are you somewhere in between? This distinction will make a huge difference in how you will approach training and how hard you have to work to keep your motivation alive and steadily high.
I think of it as the difference between caring for a new-born puppy versus having the neighbor’s cat coming visit you sometimes.
The puppy needs to be fed, sheltered, protected; he couldn’t survive without your care. You must constantly understand what he needs, is he crying because he’s hungry, or he’s afraid of a slamming door, or he’s cold, or he’s thirsty? He can’t speak, so you always need to be vigilant and aware of what’s going or he’ll die.
The neighbor’s cat is not nearly as demanding, you can play with him when he shows up and let him purr on your chest for a while, but you are not responsible for his needs and aren’t bothered or worried by his absence when he isn’t there. If your motivation is like the cat, then freediving will not ever make you miserable but it won’t give your life purpose either.
My own freediving is like the puppy, it’s demanding but I can’t let him die because I feel instantly guilty and depressed if I ignore it even for a day.
It may sound overly dramatic, but I see the same feelings (in various degrees) in most people I have been coaching and training buddies. Probably they wouldn’t put it in these same words but in reality just about 20% of the talking I do with someone I coach is about actual training, numbers, technical explanations. The great majority of our talks always fall back to their insecurities, frustrations, fears of failing and the tendency to judge themselves negatively: in one word my job is mostly about keeping their motivation alive. Most of which they don’t even realize is happening.
But I love that, and I can see the same things going on in my own head too and how my coach Bub (God bless him) is doing the same pretending of speaking about training while in fact he’s giving me another motivational therapy session.
In (not so) short, if you stop feeling rewarded for your effort or you are not achieving the goals you set for yourself your interest and focus will fade and you will lose your motivation.
This may happen when you have had a string of bad days at the pool, for example you couldn’t complete your workout or you got contractions earlier than normal, or your legs started burning like hell 50m before they should, it’s so easy to get frustrated and feel that you are going backwards instead of progressing. And maybe on top of that other stuff is happening at work, at home, annoying distractions and urgent things that need to be dealt with, and then sometimes you will get sick on top of it and your next training is going to feel even harder and you think “what the hell am I doing here”, “why am I doing this to myself” (I heard these 2 sentences SO. MANY. TIMES).
This is when it feels too easy to skip training 1 day or 1 week or 1 month. And your motivation is gone, and it can be hard to re-kindle it.
So how do you keep your motivation alive and healthy?
STEP BACK BUT DONT STEP OFF.
You struggle doing 100m DYN reps? Then do75’s, or 50’ies, or whatever is doable THAT particular day. But show up and do something, even if it’s a fraction of the intensity or only for 10 minutes. It may not increase you breath hold ability but it keeps the puppy alive.
When I have these bleh moments, I go to my training session with a plan A and plan B workouts, if I can’t do the real one then I’ll do the feel-good B choice.
In fact even if everything would always perfect (it’s not!), you can’t always keep the pressure up, you have to de-load sometimes, so these bleh days are good opportunities to de-load and be kind to yourself (which is not the same things as being lazy and self-indulgent).
Remember that you need to have some introspection and be honest with yourself if you want to be aware of all that’s happening in your head and put a patch on it before it’s too late. That means you need to address these signs that things aren’t right, which manifest as those unpleasant feelings I mentioned earlier (frustration, sense of failure, feeling of regressing, mental fatigue, lack of enthusiasm etc.).
We all go through this as some points as we are made of feelings as much as we are made of flesh (yes, including the very big and very hairy manly men) (with the exception of my coach Bub, as he’s made of steel). The secret is not to push them away and out of your mind, but to recognised that this is what they are, feelings and not reality, but also you need to understand where your unsatisfaction comes from and fix it.
We all go through this as some points as we are made of feelings as much as we are made of flesh (yes, including the very big and very hairy manly men) (with the exception of my coach Bub, as he’s made of steel). The secret is not to push them away and out of your mind, but to recognised that this is what they are, feelings and not reality, but also you need to understand where your unsatisfaction comes from and fix it.
