Turn your Pain into Performance

Tolerance is a coping strategy.

What do you do with pain? Do you expand or do you contract?

Simple questions.

Do you get bigger in the discomfort, or smaller?

Do you grow balls, or shrink and wilt?

Pain is inevitable in athletic performance. The question is not whether you will experience it, but what relationship you develop with it.

There is a mindset that allows the body to open and accept pain rather than immediately resisting it.

Intuition is so underrated.

Don’t overthink. Be practical, tactical and tactile. Spidey senses, not negative thoughts. Use your brain like a rudder.

Decisions, not conditions, determine who the athlete is at any given moment.

When I think about my own coaching career, particularly working with professional athletes, I’m aware that many of the most important coaching decisions I made on behalf of others were not arrived at through some elaborate intellectual process.

They came from gut. Instinct. A sense of direction. A feeling.

I felt it directly in that group.

We overcompensate for pain.

We try to escape it, control it, negotiate with it, fight it or simply make it disappear. So I had to think about a strategy that would make pain a friend rather than an enemy.

And that is what I learned on the coaching coalface that can help you now:

Just be with how it is. Not how you want it to be.

We always think we have to do more. It’s a major impediment.

More effort. More force. More tension. More trying.

But sometimes the most profound act is to simply let go. Stop forcing.

Stop creating unnecessary tension in the effort.

I’d rather you did more with less than less with more.

Because there is a huge difference between working hard and fighting yourself.

You can’t overcome pain. All you can do is accept it.

And here is the difficult part.

You don’t want to listen to your body because it fucking hurts.

So you get stuck grappling with it in your head, desperately seeking an escape route.

And that is seriously disempowering.

The body is the reserve bank of intelligence.

What’s between your ears is the local branch.

Your body is constantly giving you information, but the moment pain arrives, the mind often takes over and starts shouting instructions.

Push harder. Back off. Something is wrong. Keep going. Stop. You’re failing. You’re going to blow up.

The noise gets louder and your connection to what is actually happening in the body gets quieter.

So stop trying to bargain your way out of pain.

Instead, teach your brain to become sensitive to the body’s opening.

There is a difference between pain and the story you create around pain.

There is also a difference between being overwhelmed by discomfort and developing the capacity to stay present with it.

Use your brain like a rudder.

Not to override the body, but to help navigate what the body is telling you.

Use your attention to pry open a pathway that allows pain to touch you deeply without immediately turning it into a threat.

Stay with the sensation. Stay curious. Stay connected. Let the unnecessary tension melt.

Make micro-adjustments.

Become tactile. Become intimate with the experience rather than immediately trying to escape it.

Because somewhere inside that instinctual response is information.

And that information can become one of the greatest teachers you will ever have. Pain doesn’t have to be the thing that stops your performance.

Learn how to stay with it.

And you might discover that the very thing you were trying to escape was the doorway to your next level.

Gilesy 😄