Most of us hate mundane, hard things. For example, doing cardio training, working on targets, doing footwork exercises. Despite all of the goal setting and resolutions, we tend to drop them sooner or later. 

Rather than consign ourselves to the fate of always having to struggle, I wanted to find some practical advice on how to change habits, replacing them with new habits and a new set of behaviors. 

What it really feels like vs. your imagination

The imagination is an incredibly powerful tool. 

For example, let’s imagine what it would be like to eat an ice cream cone on a hot summer afternoon. Close your eyes and think about that. The coldness, the sweet taste. There’s the creamy texture and the bits of sprinkles that dance around on the tip of your tongue. Maybe you have to lean over and catch a drip. You can imagine the warm sun on your face and the little bit of a breeze that’s blowing across your now slightly melting ice cream cone. 

That imaginary picture of an ice cream cone is pretty wonderful, but it’s not the end all, be all. In the real world, that ice cream cone didn’t just appear out of nowhere. Someone had to scoop it out of the bucket and place it in a cone. Someone had to wash the scoop afterwards. Even the buyer of the cone had to wait in line outside of the ice cream place to purchase the ice cream. The sun was probably hot on their face and they were frustrated with how long the line was. The money to pay for the ice cream cone came from someone working, and whatever that work was wasn’t totally pleasant. 

Whatever we create in our imaginations is not real. It’s missing all of the details of the real world, all of the nuance. It’s missing the negative things that went into the process. All that you’re imagining when you imagine an ice cream cone are those few minutes of rosy pleasure that are right at the pinnacle.

It’s the same thing with fencing. When we think about how great it would be to be an Olympic fencer, we aren’t really imagining what that would feel like. Usually, what we are thinking about is what it would feel like to have that praise and to have that accomplishment, but those aren’t the real feelings that an Olympic fencer would have. Not even in the moment that they win the gold medal. 

There’s all of the pressure that led up to the end result, the time and the long days. The sweat and the tears. Most of the time, by far, that a champion fencer is engaged in fencing, they are doing training that most people would dread. It isn’t all ice cream cones. 

The constantly moving target

Let’s take this out of the realm of just imagining yourself as some gold medalist at the Olympics and bring it into the real world of what it’s like to just be you. When you set goals in your fencing and are looking ahead towards them, you are also creating an idealized version of yourself. 

“I’ll feel like this or that when I finally am able to level up in this part or that part of my fencing.”

This is a little better than imagining yourself as someone else. Or is it? Does this really solve the problem that you have of never being enough and never becoming that version of yourself that you want to be?

The issue here is that you’ll have a constantly moving target. You’ll never actually get to the point that your imaginary self is at, and so you’ll always have that empty space inside of you. You’ll always be looking for something else, some other goal. When you get to that

In fact, if you stop having that empty space and you stop looking for something, that’s when you stagnate and that’s not a good thing for you either. You need to always have a next thing and a next thing to keep going for. 

The goal is the compass

We talk all the time about how important it is to set fencing goals. We’ve written blogs about it, we’ve shared memes about it, we’ve practiced it personally. Goals are important, and they can be a big thing that propels you far forward in your fencing career. 

Goals aren’t useful if they are the only thing that’s in your mind. You have to rethink what you’re doing in the day-to-day rather than constantly focusing on the thing in front of you. 

A goal is the compass that guides you in the right direction. It can tell you which way to go, but it can’t get you there. What gets you there are your two feet, taking step after step through the forest until you reach that hidden lake in the middle of the enchanted forest. You won’t ever get there if you just sit down on a rock and stare at the compass. 

Move from a restrictive mindset to an identity mindset

To teach yourself to do hard things, you have to start off with a mental shift. You have to move from a restrictive mindset to an identity mindset. This mental change is how you get started in doing those hard things. 

“I need to become a great fencer” 

This is a restrictive mindset, pulling you back. It implies that you aren’t a great fencer right now, and that makes it a negative thought. Of course you aren’t the best fencer in the world at this moment, but there’s only one person who’s the best fencer in the world right now anyway, and even that is very questionable, as if such fencers really exist. Emphasizing that you are lacking is only going to tear you down and make it even harder for you to find motivation. 

Rather than go over and over than in your mind, you want to think about it totally differently. 

“I am an athletic, active fencer.”

When you think this way, you’re focused on the doing of the thing rather than the end goal. You’re affirming that you have value and a positive identity. There’s no judgment here, no value assigned to the identity. It’s simply a part of who you are. 

If you’re an athletic, active, fencer, then you’re engaged with the sport. You’re going to practice because it’s just what you do. You’re competing, you’re training, you’re working with your coach because it’s part of your identity. Notice that there is no goal implied here. It is what it is. A fact.

You aren’t even training in fencing, you’re just doing the thing. Training implies that there is some end goal that you’re trying to achieve. With this mindset, there is no goal. It’s just you doing you, going about your day. By switching to this mindset, you’re less bogged down by negativity. There’s no negative here and there’s no positive. There just is. 

With this mindset, you can enjoy fencing without feeling totally tied to the outcome of your next competition. Sure, it would be great for you to have a great showing at the next competition, but that’s not the reason you’re training. The reason you’re going to fencing class is because you’re an active, athletic fencer. The competition is just another activity among your fencing activities, and its result is just a bonus.

Give your brain choices

So much of this is about figuring out your mental payoffs and how to make those shifts. 

Choices are a great tool when you’re a parent and you want your child to do something. For instance, when you tell your toddler “You have to put on these blue shoes,” odds are you’re going to get a temper tantrum from that three year old. No shoes are going to be put on and you’re going to end up late for whatever place it is you’re going, not to mention you’ll get a lovely headache from the stress of the whole interaction. 

Toddlers don’t like being told what to do. Instead, if you say “Do you want to wear the blue shoes or the black shoes,” your toddler is going to give you a positive response. The odds are that they’ll pick the blue shoes anyway, and either way you won’t get yourself in a tantrum situation. 

Treat your brain the same – give yourself some choices. 

“Ok brain, would you rather go for a run this morning to build your cardio for fencing, or would you rather get winded halfway through the DEs at the regional competition next month?”

The odds here are that you’re going to end up feeling stronger to go for that run because you’ve given yourself a choice. You’ve given yourself a powerful incentive to make the right choice.  

Create micro-goals

Coming back around to goal setting, let’s talk about a different way to look at goals. We tend to think of them as the long term ideas of where we want to be, but that’s not the only way to set goals. Micro-goal are another way to look at goal setting, especially if you’re struggling with doing something.

How do you feel when you sit down and just scroll through social media? Or how about when you zone into a sports game and just while away the hours? It’s much easier to do those things than it is to go practice your footwork for an hour or to dig in and do that cardio training for a half hour. 

Part of what makes social media and sports so engaging to watch is that there are lots of small pieces. Our brains can make sense of what we’re seeing in these little chunks, so much so that it’s highly pleasurable to watch. Social media breaks information up into little posts that are easy to digest. Sports breaks a game up into quarters or periods. In American football, we’re focused on the next ten yards – not the overall score of the game.

Even this blog is broken down into parts that are easy to digest. There are headings every few hundred words so that you don’t get overwhelmed when you read these several thousand words. Those breaks make it easy to engage with what you’re reading so you don’t feel overwhelmed by a huge block of text (well, I admit I’m not very disciplined in that as a writer).

Some examples of micro-goals in fencing:

• A dozen footwork drills
• Target practice drills for 10 minutes
• Reading one blog post/chapter in a book about fencing
• Doing 15 minutes of yoga/pilates
• One fencing lesson
• DIscussion your coach with that question you’ve been meaning to ask
• Making in-depth video analysis of your own or someone else bout

When you break down your fencing training into micro-goals, you’re making it so much easier for your mind to make sense of it. By doing this, you’re giving your brain a consistent reward. 

Once you accomplish the goal, that’s when the reward comes in. It should be something really simple that is easy to do in conjunction with that goal. Here are some ideas:

• 10 minutes of social media time
• Marking the accomplishment off your list (yes, this works! This is one of my personal favorites as nothing pleases my eye more that stroke-out line from an infinite To-Do list)
• Cuddling with your dog/cat/favorite stuffed animal

You don’t need to give yourself a huge thing to motivate you. In fact, by breaking things down into smaller chunks, you’ll find that you need to give yourself fewer of those carrots. Sometimes, the best thing that you can do is that simple thing of marking things off the list and taking a few minutes to reflect on the good job that you’ve done. 

Listen to the right music

Music is a highly powerful tool to help you get your brain in the right place. It taps into something deep in our brains that unlocks our motivation. It’s a great way to improve concentration and to click you into the right mindset. You’re conditioning yourself to do something, so your brain goes “Ok, it’s time to get it done!”

For example, Cardio is an important support for fencer, but it’s hard to get rolling with it sometimes.  You can create a playlist that’s fifteen minutes long to listen to when you go for a run or hop on the bike. Make songs that are going with the pace that you need to keep up with, and make it a genre that you really enjoy. The average song is a little over three minutes long, so you can easily put together a playlist of five songs to get you through. It’s so much easier to bop along to those five songs than it is to count down the seconds on a bike when you don’t feel like riding.

Wireless earbuds or airpods that you pop in when you’re doing something challenging can totally change the game. As long as you’re not sparring, you can even wear them if you’re doing some solo fencing practice. 

You can use this in conjunction with a lot of the other techniques that we’ve listed in this post. Using music is a way to amp up your productivity and give yourself that boost when you’re tackling something that is really challenging for you.  

Habit bunching

When you put things that you like together with things that you like less, you’re more likely to get in the groove of doing the thing you don’t want to do. 

For instance, if you don’t like doing target work but you do like sparring, then you could pair the two together. Set a time to go to open fencing, but only allow yourself to sign up and do bouting if you first go over and run your targeting drills. This way, you’re pairing something that you don’t want to do with something that you really like doing.

After a while, this will improve the way that you think about those things that you don’t want to do. You might even get to the point where you don’t need to prompt yourself with the good feelings of bouting in order to get yourself to do the target practice because it’s become so ingrained in you. 

This is a technique that works with anything. If you need to drink more water because you’re constantly finding yourself dehydrated, you can pair that with another habit that you don’t find so distasteful. For example, you might say that you have to have a glass of water every time you pull open your Facebook or your Instagram. By pairing the habit of drinking water, which you don’t like to do, with social media, which you do like to do, then you’ll eventually learn to enjoy drinking water. 

Continue to look for inspiration

I want to note here that the inspiration for this post came from a wonderful video from Better Ideas called “How I Tricked My Brain into Doing Hard Things.” I highly recommend that you watch it. It’s ten minutes that will really pay off. Some of the ideas here are spun off of that piece, which is really about working out. 

When you find yourself stuck and without the motivation to get something done that you want to do, you can almost always convince yourself to click over and read a post or watch a video that will contribute to your positive mindset. It’s an easy gateway into getting things done that won’t overload your brain. 

All of this is gearing you up to find a happy place in the work that you’re doing. The day to day training in fencing is where growth and success happens, not in tournaments and not on the podium. Rather than look for the imaginary possibilities, look for the joy in the everyday fencing!