The Art of Mental Training - a Guide to Performance Excellence (Classic Edition) by D. C. Gonzalez Read Free Book Online Page B

myself. Coach Leo listened quietly on
the phone, so much so that I began to wonder if he’d wandered off or hung up.
    “Come tomorrow,” he told me,
and that ended our conversation.
    When the next day came, I
almost didn’t go.  I kept asking myself; why did I call this coach?  I was
looking for a reason to miss our appointment.  But before I knew it (and
despite my best efforts to talk myself out of it) I wound up knocking on his
door and then there he was.  A medium-sized, elderly, rather stoic figure, his
face calm and genuine.
    “Danielsan,” he said, and
paused.
    “Daniel what?”
    "Danielsan.  You look very
much like your older brother, please come in."  He said.
    “You knew my brother?” I
asked.  Then suddenly I realized that I had indeed heard of Coach Leo before! 
Only I had never heard him called that because my brother had always called him
Leo-tai . . . As far back as I can remember, Leo-tai had always taught my older
brother how to fight.  My brother was teaching me when he was drafted and sent
to Vietnam. After we lost him in the war, as I grew up I’d often found myself
wondering about Leo-tai.  And now, as fate would have it, so many years later,
here he was in front of me, my brother’s old instructor.  Was this a
coincidence?  Head spinning, I stepped inside.  I looked around.  He appeared
to live as simply as a monk.
    Somehow I found it easy to be
honest with him, knowing how my brother had loved him.  After some tea, and
having brought him up to date with the narrative of my tournament loss, I
finished.  He smiled and then spoke.
    "This loss—you must let it
go.  True champions keep such a loss in perspective."  He said.  "You
must look at it long enough to learn from it—but then you must let it go."
    Easier said than done I
thought, but what a powerful idea just the same.  "Let it go."  I let
his advice sink in.
    Let it go, I told myself, and I
slowly began to allow the weight of the loss to get lifted from my shoulders.
    Learn from it—and let it go. 
What could be simpler, or more healing, than that?
    But he wasn’t finished with me
yet.  He leaned forward as if to make sure I was paying attention.
    “Remember that champions never
play the blame game.  They pick themselves up and start working on what’s
coming up next.  They hold their heads high, even when that isn’t easy to do. 
They push themselves to move forward.  They know that this is how it has to be
. . . They never forget that if you don’t fail sometimes, then you probably
aren’t challenging yourself at a high enough level.”
    At the door, he said with a
smile, “I want you to pick yourself up Danielsan; I want you to persist.  Once
you are ready to do so, then come back.”
    And that was the beginning of
my friendship with Leo-tai.
    I remember leaving his simple
home that night and thinking of how glad I was at having found my brother’s
teacher so many years later.  I was still only a teenager; and I knew that I
was just at the beginning—but I’ll never forget the feeling I had as I walked
back the way that I had come, the feeling of knowing somehow that my life had
just taken an unexpected and most interesting turn.
     
    Remember:  Champions focus
on what they can control.  They know that while they can’t always control what
takes place during an event, they can always control how they respond to an
event.  Within every setback lies the hidden opportunity for a great comeback.
     
    The
Art of Mental Training

Chapter 12:  Fear of Failure
     
    Ask yourself this: what type of
competitor are you?  Are you the kind who likes to play it safe and just do
alright?  Or are you the kind who’s willing to take a chance on possibly
failing in order to accomplish something amazing?  More than anything else,
it’s a fear of failure that keeps people from achieving their full potential in
sports, in life, in business—in everything.
    Fearing failure is more than
just a bad thing.