By Cat Rivera
I am livid. I’m standing in front of 33inches of hurdle and I am paralyzed and mentally unable to fling myself over it. I have carried 55lb sandbags, carried a 9 foot slosh pipe 50 yards, crawled like a bear 100 yards, done countless agility and pylometric activities, pulled a weighted sled and pushed a weighted prowler and these 33 inches are mocking me. “I cannot do this.” I utter. With those words my mind has decided defeat for my body.
“O.K., we are done with this,” Rob calmly says as he walks over to the stadium stairs and starts vertically leaping them three at a time. “Jump these,” he says. I do. I jump those stairs despite my pouting and inner grumblings about my own self defeat. The hurdles are not mentioned throughout the rest of the training session. He knows I am angry and that my anger alone is bad but paired with stubbornness and pride has me in a “bad head”.
As I leave to go home Combat Trainer simply says, “Don’t ever say you cannot do something because I would never tell you that you can’t do anything.” I am toast! Right then and there I fire myself as my internal coach and let him in as my new and improved internal coach. I learned this day that sometimes it is necessary to deafen the things you have been saying to yourself because they just don’t work for you anymore. Fear and the cannots have no use here anymore. I admit that having unwavering confidence and trust in another person’s view of your capabilities makes hiring a new internal trainer easier.
When I finally crawl into bed, hours after training had ended and what felt like a lifetime of doing other things though out the day, there was that damn hurdle again. My eyes closed I lay there with a head full of hurdles and saw myself jumping them, my newly hired internal coach with quiet confidence pushing me forward. I went to bed knowing that “Hurdle, your ass is mine!”.
I am urging you to go and hire an internal coach. Find someone who sees you in a way you always wanted to be seen, as a warrior, a competitor, an athlete, a doer, a light, a person who matters, whatever it is you need to stomp out fear and get you on your way to greatness. Find that person and make their words your new internal dialogue. It will help you jump hurdles and not just the 33 inch kind. I think that if you look hard enough, your life has a few good internal coaches, they may not be ourselves, but in time they should be.
My internal coach will be with me on the Metro Dash and that will only be its first of many things it will drive me over, under and through.
