Stopping the Noise in Your Head: The New Way to Overcome Anxiety and Worry by Reid Wilson

Author:Reid Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: self help, mental health
Publisher: HCI
Published: 2016-05-03T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

An Olympic Attitude

Like so many Americans at the time, I spent the evening of August 18, 2004, glued to the television during the gymnastics portion of the Olympic Games. The men were competing in the all-around, and I’m passionately rooting for this kid from Wisconsin named Paul Hamm. After three of six rotations, he is in first place, and now he’s sprinting toward the vault. He has never missed a vault landing in competition. He executes two and a half twists in a split second. Then he doesn’t just miss the landing, he falls into the judges’ table!

I am devastated. I’m thinking, This is going to be too painful to watch. How can anyone bring his attention back after such a disappointment? And I turn off the TV. I didn’t wait for the three or four replays of the event, the analysis of the imperfect landing, or the explanation of how he subsequently tumbled off the mat and onto the judges themselves. I didn’t even stick around for the scoring, the 9.137 that plummeted him from his first place position to twelfth.

I drummed up the willingness to turn on the TV twenty minutes later, and at that moment Hamm sticks his landing after the high bar, and with that he wins the gold medal in the all-around. Now I am shocked and amazed. “How in the world . . . ?” What could have occurred in those twenty minutes, not only on the floor, but also in his mind? How could he physically and mentally recover from such a devastating blow—a blow so disturbing to me that my only response was to walk away from the television?

Thankfully, David Letterman posed that very question when Paul appeared on The Late Show after returning from Athens.

“How do you put something like that out of your mind?” he asked.

Now Paul reveals a tactic that shows him to be the masterful athlete he is, and I am in awe of his presence of mind in this most stressfully competitive environment. “It was tough,” Paul said modestly. “At that point in time I was kind of upset. I thought I had cost myself any chance at a medal. And I just said to myself, ‘I’m gonna go after the bronze.’” Hamm, who had been training for this specific competition for a decade and who was on the road to gold or at the very least a silver medal, chose to lower his expectations to what he believed was a more realistic goal. Had he maintained his original mind-set, he probably would have been too distraught to perform. Entering the fifth and sixth events in the all-around and setting his sights now on the bronze, Paul performed to his utmost and made what Letterman heralded “an unheard-of recovery.”

“I had one of the best parallel bar performances in my life right after that, and I saw myself in fourth place,” Hamm recalls, “and I was like, ‘Well, I’m in fourth place now, why don’t I go after the gold?’ And I came up with the best high bar performance of my life.

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