I have never been in the position of defending a title. In every sport I’ve always been one of the top performers, but it wasn’t until last year that I won a championship. And I got to do it in the best way possible: Matt Gary picked a number that would be a PR for me in deadlift and sent me out to pull for the win. It was a close competition — I won by only 2.5kg, the slimmest margin possible without setting a record — and it couldn’t have been a better competitive experience. 

The moment was magical.

Heading into Nationals last year, I didn’t know I would be in that position. I suspected I’d be in the mix for a top position, as I had been earlier in my athletic career, but being able to contend for the win was just a bit of fantasy.

This year is different. I won last year. The title is mine. But can I keep it?

And this year, Mystique will be there. She competed last year, but at the time of the competition she was still in the open class, so she wasn’t on my radar, and frankly wouldn’t have been even if she’d already aged into the masters category, because I wasn’t thinking about winning. I was thinking about competing well and getting PRs, and then maybe being on the podium.

My ideation is different this year. I want to win again. In the moment of competition, I want to perform and execute in a way that brings me to the top. It’s a different type of challenge than other years and other athletic events. It will take PRs, but it will also take a certain amount of assurance of hitting certain numbers. I’ll need to go nine for nine to pull this off.

Going into Nationals, Mystique’s total is just 2.5kg greater than mine. She got hers in June and I got mine in August, which means she will have had more time to train and improve her total.

I’m really pumped about this. When I was younger, it would have been too much pressure for me, largely because I would have been extremely attached to the outcome. Don’t get me wrong — I want to win. But I now understand better that I have only so much control over the outcome, and the experience of trying to win is what I’m invested in and where the real joy comes from. It’s the trying; the process of trying to achieve that goal that makes it fun.

I’ve heard a lot of podcasts devoted to encouraging lifters to not think so much about winning. Research has shown that being too attached to external goals actually decreases your motivation over time. After all, once you win, what’s next? This is valid research and does need to be heeded.

However, in response to this research, the podcasts seem to suggest that we all just forget about placing and winning so that we maintain intrinsic motivation: We all just need to be zen and explore our own process of growth, our internal satisfaction, and the harmony with the bar.

Screw that.

Competition is fun. It’s the difference between going to the gym by yourself and tracking your PRs year after year, and actually going to a meet. There’s a reason we have competitions everywhere in our culture and in the world: Testing yourself against others is thrilling. Having to perform on a certain day and coping with the uncertainty of whether or not you will be able to maintain your focus, execute your lifts, and just plain old have a little luck is exciting. It’s fun to have a tangible goal, and it can be highly motivating. It is 100 percent true that if you become overly focused on winning alone that your intrinsic motivation will take a nosedive, but competition and external goals can provide a tremendous amount of motivation and joy.

I especially resent the idea that women shouldn’t focus on competition and external outcomes. Women don’t need to stop competing. We need to learn how to do it healthfully. Imagine if we extended this “don’t focus on external rewards and goals” advice to our jobs. We still have many, many glass ceilings to break. Many industries have very few women in the top level of leadership. Should we now sit back and tell ourselves that making partner at a consulting firm isn’t really important? Should we sit back and say, “It’s OK that there’s only one woman on the board of directors at my company and even fewer in the c-suite”? Should we accept that women are massively underrepresented in Congress because setting external goals and achieving them might in the long run diminish our intrinsic motivation?

Screw that. 

Women don’t need to stop competing or setting extrinsic goals. We need to learn how to do it right, by embracing competition and uncertainty and disappointment, and by focusing on the joy in the process of achieving our goals. Working toward extrinsic goals like qualifying for Nationals or getting on the podium can amplify motivation and enhance the process or getting there.

Now, don’t get me wrong. When we start focusing exclusively on an extrinsic goal, and especially if we tie our self-worth to achieving that goal, problems can and will arise. As I mentioned, when I was younger, having to defend a title would have made me lose my shit. I would have been overly invested in the outcome, and I would have cycled in and out of having low confidence, engaging in destructive self-talk, and wanting to completely check out of competing for that outcome because I would have created too much pressure on myself to achieve it. The extrinsic goal would have taken over, and I would have developed an increasingly strong fear of failure.

These are important things to guard against, and it is where intrinsic goals and taking pleasure in the process are critical. Right now, I’m able to enjoy the motivation of pursuing the extrinsic goal of winning and the flutter of excitement stemming from the uncertainty of whether or not I’ll be successful. Winning isn’t very fun if it’s guaranteed. The wonder and excitement help me make all my reps at the gym even if I’m tired, and imagining the adrenaline that I’ll feel when it comes down to the final deadlift attempts to see who comes out on top — this is fun! The older we get, the fewer opportunities we have for experiences like this, where we want to achieve an outcome but there are, frankly, no actual negative consequences of losing. Yes, I’ll be disappointed. But that is not the worst thing in the world. Nothing actually bad happens to me if I don’t achieve my goal.

When I was younger, I would have gotten so emotionally invested in the outcome that any joy in the process of getting there would have diminished, and I would have felt like there were some horrible consequences of not achieving my goal. I might have talked myself into believing that I was worth less, that I was proven to be of diminished value, had I not achieved the outcome I sought. None of that is true. None of this truly matters. No one loses a job, no one goes hungry, no one is forced to foreclose on their home if I don’t win. I just have the opportunity to test myself in a high-pressure sports situation — to see if I can put together the mental focus and physical execution that could put me on top of the podium, and to enjoy the competition, all of the moments leading up to competition, and the experience of meet day. I can’t quite explain the fun and joy and excitement that I feel about trying to do this.

While it might be time for our male colleagues to learn how to get more zen and focus on intrinsic experiences, women, I think this is the time for us to learn how to compete and chase after extrinsic goals in a healthy and joyful way. I do not believe that allowing extrinsic rewards to come to us in the universe’s time will help us to become CEOs or to be on boards of directors or shift the gender balance of Congress. (Let’s not even talk about the presidency.) I think we need to learn how to set extrinsic goals and celebrate what we learned and how we grew in working to achieve them whether or not we get them.

Nationals is a venue in which I get to practice that. And I’m enjoying the process of getting there.