Two Cs
Two Cs
Some time ago I wrote a post called Five Frogs Sitting on a Log. 
You might want to re-read it now. I wrote about the difference between deciding to do something and actually doing something and that they are different. I trust that it made sense to you. The next step is the Two Cs: Commitment and Conviction. I want to start by telling you about an athlete.
About a year and a half ago I got a call from the mother of a gymnast. Her daughter was a junior in high school. She had been a gymnast since she was like 5. She wanted to be on a gymnastics team in college (@ an Ivy League School no less). She had been to Nationals the last several years, but now she was unable to do her release on the uneven bars. That’s a reverse double somersault She needed to do well at State to make Regional’s, and then Regional’s to go on to National’s. Failure at any stage would impact her competing in college at the level and school she wanted. There were college coaches who wanted to see her at Nationals. She was on their radar. Could I help her daughter? Oh and by the way State Championships are tomorrow!
So I went to the gym and watched her be stuck. We talked, she got unstuck. Then we worked on keeping her at a level where she could perform. End of story is the young woman is at an Ivy League College and she is on the Gymnastics Team.
She was just missing a small thing that was keeping her from success. It wasn’t magic. She was under pressure to perform. She had seen a bad injury. Her thoughts were on that and not on her commitment to doing the routine. She was not focused on the NOW, but in the past and future.
With regards to her routine she was focused on the result. She was committed to landing her dismount. This is what I noticed. She was not committed to her routine. It was slow and out of rhythm. It threw her timing off to the point that she could not let go of the bar and do her release. So we talked about being committed from the start.
Being committed from the start does two things (something soccer players should note). 1) It gets you going from the beginning of the event. How many soccer players start of slow? Are you one of them? Make a commitment to bring it from the get go and you will start faster. 2) Commitment is the resolve to be who you want to be and do what you want to do. Commitments are hard. All you need do is look around you to figure that out. So when you make a real commitment, things that were once a problem don’t seem to stand in the way any longer.
The next part is conviction. Don’t get this confused with arrogance. Believing you are right has to be measured. And level doesn’t seem to matter. If you do something well, have the conviction to believe you can do it. In her case she had been doing double back flip releases for years. She just let other images get in her way. It came down to her belief. When she had conviction, her release was easy.
In soccer and other sports I see the same thing all the time. Great players, even if they do things a bit different from everyone else have the conviction that they can be successful playing a certain way. In a team sport of course this better fit the team and coaches style, but you can make it work.
If you have the two Cs you are a lot closer to success than you realize. If you don’t, well it’s just a matter of adding the third C: Convincing yourself that the other two will get you there. Give these two Cs some thought the next time you head to practice or your game.
Is there something in your life that has you stuck?