 Nerves and anxiety can get to the best of us, particularly when that all important grading is coming up or that crucial, must win competition is in a few days time. Claire Moore discusses her perfect strategy on dealing with stress and champions the idea of tackling everything in small, bitesized chunks. Sometimes when we try to approach a task it seems too big to manage, unobtainable from where we are standing, beyond our limits. For me, in relation to my sport (taekwondo) there are two areas where this happens regularly. One is at gradings and the other at competitions. For many of you these present no problem at all. The martial arts are renowned for building confidence, but we also know how many people drop out of training along the way and though reasons of time or cost are often cited I wonder how many simply find the thought of a grading or a competition too overwhelming?
This is a problem I’ve encountered myself and still do. I am (hopefully!) a few weeks away from my black belt grading and the enormity of the task is weighing on my mind and has been for some time. Over my last few years of training and competing however, I have found a way of dealing with this issue that I term “sneaking under the wire”. By this I mean getting to the point where I find myself in the midst of the situation whilst tricking my mind that nothing too important is really happening, not letting my mind think too much. Too much thinking brings me to a panicked standstill and a desire to shift into reverse gear. “No, I really do think I need six more months training before I grade.”
So, how do I manage this? I start with two things. First I simply show up and train, regularly. This is just for me and I refuse to connect it to gradings or competitions even though I know that without it I cannot do either. Training is just that, practice, a single evening of working at my techniques and fitness. Secondly, I take these big, scary tasks and break them down into little pieces. As a friend of mine says, “how do you eat an elephant? One piece at a time.” So currently I’m not thinking about my black belt grading, I’m thinking about my mock grading in a couple of weeks. Mock gradings I’ve done before. I’ll be in familiar surroundings with fellow students and only my instructor will be testing me. Not too difficult, I can manage that. I don’t think further than that until I know I’ve passed. Then I will focus on the first black belt training session. This is new! New environment, people I don’t know, different format. The unfamiliar. But I tell myself that I’m going with fellow students; friends and we will support each other. After that there are two more sessions each a little less intimidating, though I don’t imagine any less work! And then? And then I find the grading upon me. It just snuck up on me whilst I wasn’t looking, wasn’t paying attention to it because I was busy with the other, small stuff. Now though, I can focus my attention on it, because I’ve managed the other tasks I had to complete first and completing those successfully makes the last part a little less daunting.
A German psychologist called Heckhausen developed a model for the process of behaviour change called the Rubicon Model. One of the problems psychologists repeatedly experience when working with people to change their behaviours is that whilst they can effectively change a person’s attitudes, it is incredibly difficult to then get them to take the action required to alter their behaviour. Heckhausen calls the point where the attitude is transformed into action the “irrevocable step” or the point of no return. I think for some people who want to train in martial arts but are not blessed with an abundance of confidence, sneaking the tasks under the wire may help them to continue and develop their training, to find themselves taking that irrevocable step, hopefully to the point where confidence takes over and they no longer need to do this, or they simply apply this tool to add new and bigger challenges into their lives. For any of you with challenges coming up I hope this gives you one way of approaching them.
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Philosophy and Opinion 
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