Unbecoming to become

“This is what being broken feels like. It feels like none of your body is connected. It feels like there’s emptiness all over; holes and voids. But instead of being empty, these crevices are seared with pain, with misery, with heartache. You appear whole, but these cracks are filled with poison. Slowly, these cracks deteriorate; they decay. Slowly your body withers and inwardly decomposes. This is your heart breaking. This is the necessary process needed to recreate and regenerate yourself. But first, you must die. First you must self-destruct into nothingness. And it is from there that you must rebuild yourself. From nothing.”

I wrote this on May 23rd of last year. This was the day that I found out my ex was indeed dating the girl that I had suspicions about throughout the duration of our relationship. And ironically, it was the date of our not-to-be one year anniversary. I found out this news on Tumblr when I checked in on (stalked in modern terms) my ex. I did so only because I had an overwhelmingly strong, nauseating, and gut-wrenching feeling in my stomach – it was as though my subconscious knew something was amiss.

And so I held a metaphorical funeral. I immediately called up my friend and we went to the beach with nothing but some matches and a book. The book was titled This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz. The only reason I was reading this book was because it was one of my ex’s favourites and I wanted to understand her. I wanted to love her. I wanted to learn her. All in hope that I might be able to keep her. Still. Even after she left me two months prior. I suppose I still had hope that we would one day get back together…

But in that moment, she fucked me over. And I wanted absolutely nothing to do with her or anything that remotely reminded me of her. I wanted to lose her. My heart wasn’t just broken, it was crushed. Livid. Shattered. Destroyed. My biggest fear was a reality. And worse? I knew it all along. So I decided to burn the book. I burnt it to ashes, to nothingness. And then I buried it in the sand to forget. And then I jumped all over it to ensure that it was indeed dead. And buried. And forgotten. This book was a metaphor for my heart and what she did to it. She took my heart and she crushed it into tiny little shards until it became unrecognisable. And then, she buried it. She abandoned me. Forgot about me. Ignored me. Cut me out of her life. It was as though I never meant anything to her. And to finish it all off, she gloated in victory with her new girlfriend. She destroyed whatever remnants of my heart that I had left. And so there I was. On the beach in the darkness with nothing but the memory of what was. And it was from there that I found a sense of stillness. It was there that I realised I must rebuild myself. From nothing.

After recently finishing Love Warrior by Glennon Doyle Melton, the one thing that resonated with me profoundly was this concept of “unbecoming to become”. We often believe that figuring out who we are is a process that consists of continuously figuring out who we are not and building on whoever we are presently. But who are we presently? Who are we when everything is taken away? When we have nothing to grasp onto? No one to hold onto? Nothing to hide behind? Who are we in the complete darkness of our soul? Who are we when we are staring death in the face? As Pema Chödrön eloquently states, “Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.” For some, this is when they find God. For others, this is when they find themselves.

On February 15th when I stared death in the face and contemplated taking my life, I had nothing. No one. I was completely alone. Nothing to grasp onto. Nowhere to hide. It was just me. Me and my complete and utter brokenness. My rock bottom. And this is where I found myself. But it wasn’t until the 23rd of May when my heart had been completely annihilated that I began to rebuild. I began to fill myself with nothing but love. I became strong. Empowered. Confident. Everything that I was becoming was my authentic, wholesome self. I was the hero of my own damn story and no one could take that away from me. But first, I had to die. I had to die to be born. I had to be lost to be found. I had to be empty to be complete. I had to unbecome to become.

Invariably when you come across a strong, confident individual who knows who they are, it is because they have lived the path of the spiritual warrior. The path of letting go. Of annihilation. Of pain. Of heartbreak. Of destruction. The path of awakening. The path of cool loneliness. The path of stillness, compassion, bravery. Spiritual warriors sit in the stillness of discomfort not grasping, not hiding, just letting go. When we can let go, that is when we will learn ourselves. This is known as the process of unbecoming. And it is from there that we become. It is there that we discover who we were always meant to be: a warrior and the hero of our own damn story.

Deliberate practice

This is the most valuable piece of advice I can give anyone who is wanting to succeed at anything and the piece of advice I wish I had discovered long, long ago. So what is deliberate practice? Deliberate practice is very intentional practice. Powell, Honey, and Symbaluk (2013) define it as, “Practice that is not inherently enjoyable and does not involve mere repetition; it instead involves intense concentration and considerable effort with a view towards improving one’s performance.” It’s practice that is done by yourself, away from teammates, away from others, away from any kind of recognition or praise. It’s training with a purpose. It’s training with 100% focus and attention. And it’s training that cannot be amounted for by any other kind of supplemental training. There is no short cut to success, only deliberate practice.

I want to copy an excerpt from my collegiate Learning and Behavior textbook that discusses this concept. Each season, I scan and highlight this article and give it to the kids that I coach as “homework” to read. I try to reinforce this idea of deliberate practice every training session because it really is the most valuable piece of advice I can offer.

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Deliberate Practice and Expert Performance

Watson’s emphasis on the importance of nurture over nature in determining human behavior is often viewed with a great deal of skepticism. This is especially the case when it comes to behaviors that are indicative of exceptional ability. Most people, including many psychologists (e.g., Gardner, 1993), assume that, unless a person is born with a certain amount of talent, there are limits in how far he or she will be able to progress in a particular endeavor. Indeed, the notion that a Babe Ruth, Albert Einstein, or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is to a large extent born, and not made, is part of the mystique surrounding these individuals.

But consider the following:

• Expert performers in almost all fields of endeavor, ranging from music to athletics to chess, require a minimum of 10 years of intensive training before achieving a high level of performance. Even Mozart, who started composing at age 4, did not compose world-class music until his late teens. Mozart’s father was also a professional musician who published the first book on violin instruction and provided his children with intensive musical training from an early age. (Mozart’s reputation has also benefitted from dubious claims: for example, the notion that Mozart could compose entire works in memory and then write them down with little or no editing is based on a single passage in a supposed letter of his that is now believed to be a forgery [Colvin, 2008]).

• As an experiment, a Hungarian educator, Polgar, set out to systematically train his daughters to become expert chess players. All three daughters have achieved high rankings in international chess, and one daughter, Judit, at one point held the record for becoming the youngest grand master ever, at 15 years of age.

• The superlative abilities shown by experts are almost always specific to their field of endeavor. For example, chess experts have the ability to memorize the exact positions of all the chess pieces in a game after only a few seconds’ glance at the chessboard. But they perform no better than non-chess players at memorizing chess pieces randomly distributed around the board in a non-game pattern. As well, their performance on standard memory tests is typically no better than that of the average person.

• Almost all of the remarkable feats displayed by savants - individuals of low intellectual ability who nevertheless possess some remarkable skill – have been taught to normal individuals. For example, the ability of some savants to name the day of the week for any arbitrary date (e.g., “What day of the week was June 30, 1854”) has been duplicated by ordinary college students after only a few weeks of training.

• Excellent musicians often have perfect pitch, which many people assume is something a person is born with. Researchers, however, have been able to systematically train this ability in some adults. More importantly, people who display perfect pitch have almost always had considerable exposure to music at an early age. This suggests that, as with language development, there may be a critical period in early childhood during which perfect pitch can be more readily acquired.

Based on findings such as these, Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Römer (1993; see also Ericsson & Charness, 1994) argued that the most critical factor in determining expert performance is not innate ability but deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is practice that is not inherently enjoyable and does not involve mere repetition; it instead involves intense concentration and considerable effort with a view toward improving one’s performance. More than any other variable, the accumulated amount of deliberate practice in an activity is strongly predictive of an individual’s level of performance.

For example, Ericsson et al. (1993) compared student violinists who were the “best” with those who were merely “good” and with those who were in training to become music teachers. The best students had accumulated about 7400 hours of deliberate practice by the age of 18, compared to 5300 hours for the good students and 3400 hours for the teachers-in-training. Such differences account for why elite performers so often report having begun their training at an early age. An early start enables one to accumulate the huge number of practice hours needed to outperform others. Those who begin at a later age are simply unable to catch up.

Because deliberate practice is so effortful, the amount that can be tolerated each day is necessarily limited. For this reason, elite performers often practice about 4 hours per day. Ericsson et al. (1993), for example, found that the best violin students engaged in solitary practice (which was judged to be the most important type of practice) for approximately 3.5 hours per day, spread out across two to three sessions, each session lasting an average of 80 minutes. Note that this did not include time spent receiving instruction, giving performances, or playing for enjoyment. The students also devoted about 3.5 hours a day to rest and recreation and obtained more than average amounts of sleep.

Top-level performers in intellectual pursuits display similar characteristics. Novelists typically write for about 3 to 4 hours each day, usually in the morning. Eminent scientists likewise write for a few hours each morning – the writing of articles arguable being the most important activity determining their success – and then devote the rest of the day to other duties.

B.F. Skinner is especially instructive in this regard. In his later life, he would rise at midnight and write for 1 hour, then rise again at 5:00 A.M. and write for another 2 hours. The remainder of the morning was devoted to correspondence and other professional tasks, while much of the afternoon was devoted to leisure activities such as tinkering in his workshop and listening to music. He deliberately resisted any urge to engage in serious writing at other times of the day, feeling that this often resulted in poor-quality writing the next morning. However, the limited amount of writing he did each day was more than compensated for by the consistency with which he wrote, resulting in a steady stream of influential articles and books throughout his career (Bjork, 1993). Skinner (1987) recommended that students adopt a similar approach to improve the quality of their writing. Congruent with this, effective college students are more likely to describe themselves as utilizing a balanced approach to studying, involving regular study sessions with frequent breaks, than a driven approach, involving few breaks and studying to the point of exhaustion (Bouvier & Powell, 2008).

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Wow. Powerful stuff right? So why is this so valuable? It’s valuable because it confronts the nature / nurture debate and provides ample evidence that elite performers are made, not born. This is powerful because it means that we are all capable of becoming elite in whatever it is we desire. The only pre-requisite? Deliberate practice.

Every week I give the kids that I coach homework. Their homework is typically to go home and juggle. Every. Single. Day. Why do I make them juggle? For numerous reasons. Firstly, it’s easily measurable. Once a week at practice I give the girls 5 minutes to juggle to reach their highest score which they report to me and I record in a journal. I believe children love to see their progress and this is an objective way to achieve that. Secondly, juggling improves their first touch. Thirdly, juggling requires nothing but space and a ball. And lastly, it’s less about juggling and more about adopting this mentality of deliberate practice. Recording their juggles makes it very clear to me as a coach which players have this mentality and consequently, the players I am more likely to invest in. I have been doing this specific training with most of these girls for a year now and one of my players, who started off with just 6 juggles, is now reaching over 500. How often does she juggle? Every day for 30-45 minutes. Does she have schoolwork? Absolutely. But she prioritises juggling because she wants to succeed in soccer. And with this mentality, she will.

I explain to my kids that the role of a coach is to provide their players with the resources to become better players, but we can’t do the work for them. Much like in school, if students wish to learn, they have to invest time in studying and doing homework. Sport is no different. Team practices are like school. I am a teacher. I provide the girls with the resources and the feedback to become better players, but the improvement comes outside of practice. Or, as I like to say, champions are made when the stands are empty. In other words, elite players become elite because of what they do when no one is watching. They have integrity. They have commitment. And they have focus.

Let me clarify what I mean by commitment – showing up to team practice, despite what my college teammates believed, is not commitment. That’s the bare minimum. As mentioned in the article, “Elite performers often practiced for 4 hours per day…this did NOT include time spent receiving instruction, giving performances, or playing for enjoyment.” Showing up to team practices will not make you elite. It will make you average. Will you improve? Yes. But gradually. And very, very slowly. When you practice by yourself though, that is when you see significant improvements. That is when you accomplish big milestones. That is when you become elite.

I often share two personal stories with my girls about this. When I was around 12 years old, I couldn’t chip the ball in the air and I really wanted to be able to. There was no way that I was going to learn at team practice when I could only attempt it maybe 10 times at most. So I went out on my tennis court and I would kick hundreds of balls. And I failed. Boy did I fail. Over and over again. But that is why I succeeded. I eventually kicked it in the air. But, I didn’t stop there. I kept trying until I wasn’t just competent with my right foot, but with my left foot too. Now I can play long balls with almost pin point accuracy.

And then there were national camps. At 14, I went to my first Australian camp. The coaches asked us all to juggle for ten or so minutes, which seems like a seemingly simple task for a 14 year old attending a national camp right? Not for me. I couldn’t even get the ball in the air let alone juggle 10 times. Meanwhile, all the other girls were juggling well into the hundreds. I felt so embarrassed. I was humiliated. I SUCKED! I was way out of my league. I wanted to cry. And I wanted to get on the first flight back to Adelaide. But I didn’t. I endured the humiliation. And I survived…just. When I returned home, I vouched to never feel like that again. I went out every morning for 15 minutes and taught myself how to juggle. I started juggling on my thighs just to get the rhythm of left leg, right leg, left leg, right leg, then I progressed to using my feet – both feet – by kicking it in the air once and catching it. Then twice and catching it. And I did this until I could comfortably juggle with both feet well into the hundreds.

Would I have achieved either of these milestones had I not practiced by myself? Probably not. How much time at practice can one actually devote to learning a new skill? As a coach I can tell you, it’s not much. In practice, you might touch the ball what, 200, 300 times, but by yourself, you can accumulate 5-10 times that amount in the same duration. In college, I used to love summer when we didn’t train with the team, why? Because that’s when I actually saw myself improve. When you think about it logically, deliberate practice isn’t just the right way to improve, it’s the only way.

I have written exclusively about soccer in this post, but this concept applies to every aspect of your life that you wish to improve upon. Take love and relationships for example. Most of us believe that we will become better at relationships by being in them. And yes, there is some truth in that. But being in a relationship is like showing up for a team practice – the coach, your partner in this instance, is providing you with the resources to become better, things you can work on. But, much like in sport, your improvement will happen outside of your relationship. So long as you never intentionally invest in yourself outside of your relationships, your relationships will only gradually get better. If you wish to see significant improvements or accomplish milestones in your love life and your relationships, then you must obtain this mentality of deliberate practice with yourself. And I’m not just talking about being “single” for a few months. I’m talking about investing significant time and effort in getting to know who you are. For whatever reason, we think that love and relationships are exempt from this kind of mentality that anything good in life we have to work for. Much like elite athletes don’t magically stumble upon playing professionally without working for it, we cannot magically stumble upon exceptional, intimate, and authentic love. We too, have to work for it. Want somewhere to start? Check out www.authenticlovecoaching.com. And if you aren’t willing to intentionally invest in yourself, you will never experience “elite” kind of love.

Elite athletes and elite performers and elite musicians are not born with exceptional abilities. We are all born with a plastic brain that is capable of learning and becoming whatever it is that we desire, but only through intentional, focused, and effortful practice. Learning this, accepting this, and implementing this mentality will change your life. Previous seemingly unrealistic dreams are now realistically obtainable through this method and belief that nurture trumps nature. So if excellence is what you seek, deliberate practice is your answer.

Be the author of your life

In life we have two options: be an author, or be a victim. We can hold ourselves accountable, or we can be unaccountable. We can be the drivers, or we can be the passengers. We can allow life to happen for us, or to us. We can look internally for the solutions, or we can externalise and never find a solution. We can actively write our future, or we can passively read it as it happens. If excellence is what you seek, being a victim will never suffice.

I’ve been a victim. Shit, my entire life I’ve been a victim. Life always happened to me. People always left me. Bad things followed me. Injuries cursed me. Partners always betrayed me. Whenever something bad happened in my life, I was always a victim. I found excuses, not a solution. Worse though, the people I was surrounded around encouraged this mentality. They allowed me to ruminate, externalise, and blame. They empathised with me. Cried with me. But what they didn’t do, was challenge me. And that’s because they saw themselves in me.

We readily take and accept this passive approach in life. We believe that when a friend is struggling, they are going to come to us if they need anything. But if you recall in my second post, The Power of Vulnerability, I challenged individuals to take an active approach in vulnerability. Actively create an environment in which someone feels comfortable and safe to be vulnerable. Better yet, invest your time. Time is the most valuable gift because you can’t get a refund on it. To me, it’s the best way for someone to communicate they care.

In regards to life, take control of it. We have this unrealistic belief that we are going to magically stumble upon the job that is perfect for us. Does it happen? Sure, but rarely. Do you think elite athletes become elite by choosing the passive approach? By choosing to be a victim? Or do they choose to write their destiny? Willing not only to do their best, but to do whatever it takes, even if that means something that is unnatural for them?

I read something in The One Thing by Gary Keller the other day that really resonated with me. “If we tackle something with all “E” and then hit a ceiling of achievement, we simply bounce up against it, over and over and over. This continues until we just can’t take the disappointment anymore, become resigned to this being the only outcome we can ever have, and eventually seek out greener pastures elsewhere.” The “E” that he is referring to in this paragraph is the entrepreneurial approach; it’s our natural approach that has a ceiling of achievement. This paragraph spoke to me with specific regards to my injuries. No matter what I seemed to do or how many breaks I gave my body, or how well I seemingly looked after my body, I would always get injured just when I was reaching my peak performance. Each injury a setback and an increasingly heartbreaking disappointment. So much so that I considered never playing soccer again and just coaching for the rest of my life. But soccer is my passion and I cannot envision a future without playing it. So how do I overcome this seemingly endless cycle of repeating “misfortunes”? Well, if I want a different result, I have to take a different approach. And that starts with my beliefs.

I have to believe that my body loves me and is actually working with me. So long as I believe that my body hates me and that I’m essentially a victim, I will continue looking for reasons to affirm that belief. I will essentially create an energy that ensures this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In other words, I have to choose to be an author. Next, I must find an alternative method. And I think I’ve found it. I’m currently working with one of my highly qualified chiropractic friends on retraining my neurological wiring and firing. These exercises are definitely not glorified. They suck. And they’re hard. They also don’t directly create that aesthetically pleasing body that has been disproportionally important to me over the years. But, they serve a purpose. And that purpose is to create a strong foundational basis of movement patterns that will ultimately decrease the likelihood of injury and increase functionality. In a few weeks, I plan on investing in my friend’s 12 week gold training program to give myself the best opportunity at performing and sustaining my excellence. What I love about this approach is that it’s holistic. Typical trainers and physical therapists focus solely on the injury that they neglect to consider the neurological movement patterns that contributed to the injury. I think my friend is onto something big here. And if you’re interested in her programs (she has three; bronze, silver, and gold; 4, 8, and 12 week programs respectively), please check out her website http://www.sportsfxn.com/ .

Many of us can agree that in order to find the “perfect” job we have to create it for ourselves. Whether that’s by obtaining a degree, or gaining experience through subsequent jobs, we must take an active approach. Purpose does not “fall into our lap”, we must actively discover it. And love is no different. Many of us have this “lottery ticket” mentality. We believe, because of how we’ve been conditioned through movies, books, social media, and peoples’ desire to portray highlight-reel realities of themselves, that we can all be passive princes and princesses and love will find us. How many people though, do you really know that are in a relationship and truly happy? Chances are, not many. The reason? The majority of us take a passive approach when it comes to love. In order to find the love that we want, we must first create it. And we create it by getting to know ourselves. Once we know ourselves to our deepest, authentic core, we will then start attracting what we are.

If we want to be good at anything, we have to work for it. Love and relationships are not an exception. But as Gary Keller said, if we keep doing what we’re doing, we’re going to do what we’ve always done. Our relationship cycles and what we experience and attract will never change. We will reach a ceiling of achievement, of intimacy, of satisfaction. In order to go beyond these limits, we must change our approach. And that is what I am presently doing with Kaleb Bollen’s Authentic Love Coaching course. He has just created a very affordable 7 day Transform your love life course that will help you experience more intimate and authentic relationships. If you’re interested, please check out his website www.authenticlovecoaching.com .

So I challenge you all to be authors. Write your destiny. Do not succumb to the contagious victim mentality that surrounds you. Own what happens to you. Be accountable. Be active. Be free. Excellence awaits you. So too do intimacy and authenticity. Create and design the life and love that you want. Do not let life define you. You are strong. You are resilient. You are empowered. So go forth and write the best damn story the universe has ever told.