This is fascinating advice:
“Whether I spend 80 hours a week working on business or I’m on vacation and give 100 percent of myself to my reflection and refueling, my experience of both are pretty much the same. I make it my priority to narrate the story of what I’m doing, how I’m feeling, and how I’m spending my time in a way that makes me feel good and balanced. The story I tell myself is what keeps me thriving.” -Alexia Vernon, Catalyst for ActionYou see how this applies, right? You might be practicing five days a week, or you might not have skated for almost four weeks because you're healing a hip pointer injury. I think it helps to talk yourself through these things. I mean, obviously, hinc illa blog.
The hugest thing to understand is that no stories are absolutely true, therefore all stories are relatively true. I think the thing that trips up most people is thinking that their stories are true, and truth just is. But it isn't, and you can do something about it. If you make up a story for yourself, do you think that makes it not true? That you made it up? Tch, start thinking that you can make up truth. Then look at the stories you tell yourself, and ask yourself if these stories are working for you. And if not, tell yourself a story that works.
I mean, do you get that? It's not about whether your story is true or not, we took care of that; it's true enough. It's about whether your story works or not.
(I am excluding outright pathological lies, like the dude I worked with in the coffee shop who told me that he was a Romanov; that was no skin off my nose, but he also said that he knew how to bake. I came in and the case was filled with beautiful scones, and then I tapped one of them, they were all frozen solid. To this day the picture in my head next to the definition of insanity is that case filled with beautiful frozen scones.)
I honestly don't have access to a complainy story about having to practice too much, I like practice. It's the other thing I have a problem with, not enough. This blog might actually go back to the time, right after I was drafted, when I bruised my rib and didn't want to miss my first team practices and prolonged those bruised ribs for six months. Whereas before break last month I bruised my hipbone, on a Monday, I almost said to myself that I'd see how I felt Wednesday to decide if I would scrimmage Thursday, and like it was so bad that I took off my skates at Monday's practice because I didn't think I could control my leg enough to safely stand in my skates. Instead I said to myself, what world in the universe ends if you don't scrimmage on Thursday? Does your carriage turn into a pumpkin? Do you forget how to play roller derby if you miss one week out of two hundred and eight weeks of practice? Which of those things happen, none of them happen. What happens is, you give your hip the time it needs to heal. Which is the only thing it needs, it will heal if it gets that. And won't if it doesn't. I actually took two weeks off practice and scrimmage, and that led right into league break—so just about four weeks off, the longest break I have taken since I started skating in 2007. Results? First of all, I have a kind of Munchauseny fascination with how the body heals; it's amazing to witness when you let it happen. And when I got back, was I totally out of shape? Nope! I was full of energy, felt better than ever.
And the point of this is not even that it's true that taking some time off will do you a world of good. Because how do you think I would have been if I had been telling myself that I was getting fat and slow for four weeks. Man, I spent that time telling myself that I have some kind of luck of the Irish to get the best bang for my healing buck: buy two and get two free! In fact I highly recommend that story, that you're a lucky duck. I don't think it changes your luck at all, but it changes how you see your luck. Or rather it changes you, so that you can see all the luck in your life. I'm just saying, you go through the world differently when you think of yourself as a lucky person. Objectively you can see that your leg does not work going down stairs and you almost pass out laughing, coughing, or sneezing, and then you get a cold, and you're still thinking, perfect timing!
