Ask Cael: Hey Cael, I have a question..How do you stay consistant, this season I lost about 12 times, I feel I should\’ve only lost maybe 4 tops. I have a really hard time focusing, In Practise I feel like I can out wrestle the best, but when I get on the mat, I freeze, bad position, Bad Technique, and intiminated…

Story Published Sunday, June 14th, 2009

Question: Hey Cael, I have a question..How do you stay consistant, this season I lost about 12 times, I feel I should\’ve only lost maybe 4 tops. I have a really hard time focusing, In Practise I feel like I can out wrestle the best, but when I get on the mat, I freeze, bad position, Bad Technique, and intiminated. This Year at nationals, I couldn\’t focus my first match. I threw a beautiful over under, but didnt rotate my hips well enough. At fila trails, I had to wrestle a who won his weight in Cadet and won Pam-ams and so on. I wrestled horribly. And then at Canada Games trails, I bet this guy before, I couldn\’t focus. First Round, I was up 3-1, 8 seconds left, He finished a double, next round I was up 2-1, 9 seconds left, I was very dissapointed in myself, I practised defence for doubles, I dont know what it is..

If you just read your question you will see that it is just a matter of you overthinking and putting pressure on yourself to win. When you put pressure on yourself to win instead of simply focusing on your best effort it changes everything. You tighten up, you worry about making mistakes, you don’t react, you worry about things that you can’t control, and it’s no fun. Everyone wants to win. But is really winning? Winning isn’t necessarily who has their arm raised at the end of the match. At least not in the big picture. We really have a talent of complicating things. The deep down truth is that winning is doing everything in your power to succeed, not having your hand raised. When you go to heaven, God isn’t going to ask you how many wrestling matches you won. Life is only a test. Wrestling is only a question on the test and the question isn’t whether you won or lost. The question with eternal implications is how you play the game not whether you won or lost. Are you a good sport? Did you play within the rules? Etc. did you give your best effort in training and in competition? Those are the important questions. The world we live in judges us by wins and losses but that doesn’t mean anything. That just makes it more special to think like God wants us to think. It is not a good thing to be of “this world.” So the point is, step out on the mat and fight with your best effort. Don’t waste your time and energy focusing on the wrong things. Putting pressure on yourself to win instead of fighting makes it more difficult to reach your goals and it doesn’t work anyways. Keep it simple, know that the real goal is to fight and go see what you can do. If you don’t win, it’s not the end of the world. It’s an opportunity to learn from your loss and move forward. my recent blog talks a little about this same topic.

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