How to quit mental gymnastics
When I was eight years old, I was a gymnast. I loved it. I practiced three times a week, 3-4 hours a night and never complained. We had high-level coaches who expected us to perform. I was so flexible that thinking about it now makes me cringe. My coach made us wear homemade elastic belts around our waists and he would snap them when we weren’t sucking in our stomachs enough. It hurt, and it worked. We pushed our pre-pubescent bodies to the point of injury, and excellence. My hands were calloused and ripped up from the bars. My ankle was perpetually sprained, leaving me with two permanently torn tendons. My joints hyperextended, I wore a brace on one ankle and tape on the other, and, in my mind, I couldn’t be skinny enough. But I was also strong and I was skilled.
The summer before second grade, I went to a gymnastics camp where we rode horses and got trained by some of the top coaches in the province. It was next level from what I was used to. We were expected to do giants on the uneven bars (starting in a handstand on the top bar and doing a full rotation with your body completely straight). That was new for me and it was scary, but I did it. I was also expected to do a back handspring on the high beam, which wasn’t so simple. I could do back walkovers in my sleep. They were slow and controlled, but a back handspring meant you jumped backwards in the air, praying your hands landed on the beam in the right way, and the rest of your body followed. I could do it on the floor no problem, so the physics wasn’t the issue, it was the faith that your hands would find the narrow beam. Thinking about the consequence of failure makes my hands sweat even now. I was afraid and I told the coach, who proceeded to berate me for it. She told me I was already older than I should be (at eight) and that I couldn’t afford to waste any more time. The memory has faded a lot over time, so I don’t remember her exact words. All I know is that I was devastated. I cried in the bathroom and never did gymnastics again.
I don’t believe that coach was particularly mean and I believe on some level she had my best interests at heart. She was trying to motivate me, to break me out of my fear, but it only amplified it and motivated me to quit doing something I loved. At eight, I decided that because I didn’t have what it took to go to the Olympics, there was no point in continuing to practice. There was no option in my mind of being a gymnast for the fun of it. It was either be the best, or don’t bother. There was no value of recreation or desire to simply be my best. When I think of an eight-year-old now, it boggles my mind that I could have taken life so seriously. In part, it’s what pushed me to excel, and in part it’s what pushed me to quit when I felt I wasn’t good enough. That coach made me feel like I wasn’t good enough and rather than face it and prove her wrong, I believed her and gave up on my dream. But this isn’t about the coach or what constitutes abuse, this is about mindset and what gets in our way even more than our perceived enemies.
What was worse than quitting an activity I loved, was that I fortified a belief that the answer to adversity is skipping town. I could have reacted any number of ways. I could have sucked it up and done the back handspring. I could have gotten mad at coach, and looked for another club. I could have shrugged it off, and continued on my own terms. If it were in our current climate, I probably could have filed some sort of complaint. I don’t think I even told my mom what happened at the time. In part, I was ashamed of my own failings, and not altogether self-aware of what was motivating me. All I know is that after I quit, every time I saw gymnastics on television or heard about my friends at school going to competitions, my stomach sank. I felt a mix of sadness and regret.
As a teenager and young adult, I continued to make that same regrettable decision over and over. When things got “too” hard, when an authority didn’t encourage me, when I feared I might fail, I bailed. I went to four different colleges looking for the “right” degree. What I didn’t realize at the time is I was looking for what was easy for me. I was seeking affirmation more than education, and I was smart enough to fool myself into thinking I was bored. It wasn’t until I built the self-awareness to see my pattern and what was truly underneath it that I pro-actively sought to overcome it. But even then, knowing isn’t the same as doing, and the compulsion to give up or stick to what I’m good at was strong. How do you stop doing what you’ve always done? How do you choose discomfort and uncertainty when you’ve trained your whole life to do the opposite?
For me, the only solution was to raise the stakes. Because I had lived a privileged life that meant I never feared being homeless or entirely alone, the stakes were never high enough for me to push beyond my comfort zone. I was able to be "successful" without truly challenging myself, and I used my intellect to come up with the best excuses on the planet. On top of that, I had an acting career that, to any outside observer, should have been satisfactory. But deep down, I was unsatisfied because I knew I had so much more in me. I knew that my desire to be excellent wasn’t entirely delusional, I just didn’t have the persistence or the drive.
When I started taking courses with Executive Success Programs, it gave me the language and the conceptual understanding to see my struggle more objectively. Without the judgment of my short-sighted decision-making, I was able to see what I was afraid of and what it would take to overcome it. The reality is that it came down to one thing: commitment. My impulsive, comfort-driven mind cried out, “But I don’t know what I want! I can’t commit to something unless I know for sure blah blah blah!” But my higher intellect knew it was an excuse. I could have committed to a job at McDonald’s and it would have changed my life for the better. The content really doesn’t matter as much as the act of sticking to something you commit to. It took me years of fighting with myself to finally have a breakthrough, though. Sometimes knowing what you should be doing without the strength to do it is its own type of torture.
In 2014, I started a company with a few friends. We came up with analytics to rate news articles on how objective they were, and how much they slanted the story in one direction or another. We also created a metric for illogical conclusions to show how journalists were not only offering information, but conclusions also, and often in ways that were invisible to the untrained eye. I loved the creative stage — the preparation. We spent hours upon hours and many sleepless nights trying to systematize the analysis and, eventually, be able to teach it to others and streamline it using AI. The study, the debates, the intellectual training was easy for me, even when it was hard. It was when we were about to train others and launch the company that it got real, and I wanted to bail.
Around 30 people had traveled to spend four weeks with us and learn the process we had developed. It was a course in critical thinking and technical analysis, but it was also the budding stages of an innovative startup. It was very exciting and I was absolutely terrified. Who was I to teach these things? What if no one understood? What if I couldn’t explain what was in my head? What if everyone thought I was crazy? What if? Everything in my body and mind wanted to quit. My thoughts, well-trained, told me this wasn’t what I really wanted to do with my life. After all, I felt miserable, clearly that was a sign that I should move on, no? No. Quite the opposite. When your mind and body throw a tantrum, that is precisely when you need to teach them who’s in charge. Still, I fought. The only difference was, I was in too deep. People were depending on me. The consequences of quitting were no longer just my own psyche or having to pay for a course I didn’t finish, but it would directly impact others, and I just couldn’t do it. I felt paralyzed, but the fear of letting so many people down and having to live with that propelled me to put one foot in front of the other. Finally, I did what I was never able to do before: I stepped into the abyss.
Was I perfect? No. Did I make mistakes? Of course. Did I learn and grow in the process? You better believe it. And, most shockingly to me, were people understanding of the fact that I didn’t have everything figured out yet? They were, and it was truly humbling. I recognize that the ability to quit when things get hard is a luxury not everyone has, but sometimes it works on an internal level too. We may still show up for work, but we stop pushing or trying to be better. We pretend like we’re satisfied with what we have instead of vying for a promotion or pursuing a new venture. We focus on what’s practical rather than what we’re passionate about. Since that training, I have stepped into the abyss in other areas and done things I never imagined possible: stand-up comedy, opening a bar, standing up to the federal government, to name a few. I now have a belief in myself that no matter what happens, the chances are decent I can figure it out and, in some cases, the scarier and messier, the better. Venturing into the unknown is what helps us feel alive. But rarely is this something we can do entirely on our own. We need people who believe in us, people who are willing to be honest with us, people who rely on us and won’t let us off the hook. We need the stakes to be too high to fail by giving up. Otherwise, we are haunted by what could have been, which is far worse than falling off a balance beam.
