Jenny, 12 years old, had been eagerly waiting for her favorite race, the 100 breaststroke. She has done great in the past in this event (she feels it’s her best race) and wanted to do very well in her last race of the year.
As she dove, her goggles flipped and filled up with water. She nonetheless kept going and had a good race but not an exceptional race.
As she approached to debrief her race, I asked her what had happened. She answered in a nonchalant manner as she kept moving away from me that it was just her goggles that had filled up with water.
I asked her to stop and said: “I know that, but what really happened?” And I looked at her in the eyes waiting for her to answer.
Her eyes were telling me that she had hoped I wouldn’t ask her to go deeper and that I would just leave it at the goggles.
After a long silence, I asked her to tell me what sentence she had heard at the moment when her goggles filled up with water. (Swimmers are regularly asked to replay their internal dialogue verbatim, so that we can inspect how it influenced the performance.)
Her eyes shifted to the side for a moment and when she looked at me again, tears were starting to form in her eyes. I gave her a big hug as I knew, she knew exactly what had really happened. And she also knew, I knew.
She wanted to leave it at this but I explained to her that although she knew what the voice had said to her, she nonetheless needed to say it out loud.
“It was a very expensive lesson for you so the best you can do now is to extract the gift of power it contained. You can do that by saying out loud, even if you don’t like it, the sentence you heard.”
She summoned her courage and finally said: “the voice said
“it’s all over”
and she started sobbing some more.
Another hug and I said: “Well done, it wasn’t easy for you to say it, but now that it’s out, can you tell me what made it difficult to say it?”
“It’s because I know now that it wasn’t over, I had not even started the race really.” She said with a touch of anger.
“I understand how maddening it is when we realize the voice of our little devil has just tricked us (see The story of the comfort zone and of its alarm system), but it’s best not to stay mad too long because it’s not how often we fall for the tricks of the little devil that prevent us from being Champions, but rather how often we win at resisting that defines us as Champions.” I said encouragingly.
“This race gave you a chance to learn how subtle the little devil on your shoulder’s voice can be. And it gave you a chance to see clearly how it is when we agree with the little devil that his tricks work on us. If you had not agreed with the sentence: “It’s all over” would the race have been the same?”
She didn’t need to think about it much before answering:
“It would have been totally different.”
“So now it’s a matter of continuing paying attention to your sentences, thoughts, internal dialogue to develop your ability to recognize when it is a sentence meant to trick you into choosing the easy way.”
We high fived each other and off she went.
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