My next competition is about eight weeks away, and as it has gotten closer I’ve felt my mid-season blahs start to fade. I’m looking forward to this meet because it will be larger than a local meet, and since it is part of a larger strength expo I think it will be noisy and chaotic — environments that in the past would have raised my anxiety and threatened my ability to perform successfully. I also have numbers in mind this year in a way that I haven’t previously. That type of specific external goal is a great concrete thing to strive for but it also comes with more risk in that I could create a lot of pressure to achieve those numbers at this specific meet. What if I miss a lift? Will I be able to recover from knowing that I won’t hit my target goal, or will I be resilient, able to shake it off and refocus on the next lift?

I’m actively choosing to create external challenges that could take me out of the right mental space to perform effectively. Why in the world would I do that?

One of the things that motivates me as a 46-year-old is feeling like I am developing new mental and emotional abilities to cope with novel and more challenging situations and still achieve my peak performance. This is something I’ve done at work as well, and as I reflect back on some of the choices I’ve made about my career, they have involved stepping into uncomfortable and new situations that create risk that I might not be mentally strong enough to navigate.

Here’s an example: Public speaking scared me a lot in high school, but somewhere in my brain I knew it was a fundamental skill I needed to get good at. So I joined the speech and debate team. Early in my career, my anxiety about public speaking remained, but I had learned that instrumental coping would always ensure I gave a great performance. I would take as much time as I needed to prepare my notes and practice, including giving the speech out loud to ensure that my thoughts would reliably flow into the right words, intonation, and pacing.

As my career progressed, I came to recognize that my speaking performances were reliably good, but there were other skills I needed to develop. I needed to spend less time preparing for speaking engagements and more time on other activities. It made speaking uncomfortable again, but I knew I needed to push myself to rely on the skills I had developed over the years to continue to perform well. And it worked. It’s not that I never prepared, but I began allotting myself much less time for speaking prep and used that time on other aspects of my work. Learning to perform while not feeling fully comfortable — and not allowing the nerves it creates to negatively impact my performance — has been an important transition.

In powerlifting, I’m getting a re-do of being a competitive athlete. I get to pick up where I left off at the end of college, which opens the possibility of taking on new mental challenges that would have been overwhelming in the past. In college I was slowly acclimating to environments like big meets. I knew the experience of competing at regionals or a giant invitational would make it easier the next time, but I may not have been able to say why. I don’t think I could have explained that I needed to get used to all the different stimulus — crowds, noise, a deeper field of competitors, a greater chance that other athletes would be faster than me. But perhaps most importantly, these venues heightened feelings I had regarding fear of failure. With a deeper field, it was more likely that I’d get my ass handed to me in a race, and I knew that. I might finish last and well behind the rest of the pack. The prospect of finishing so badly in front of a lot of people created a great deal of anxiety for me — enough to put my performance at risk.

Experience competing at venues like regionals and nationals helped me acclimate to the visual and auditory stimulus so my anxiety and activation level stayed more moderated over time. Being successful in those environments also developed my sense of self-efficacy — I belonged in those places. Success came in two forms: I discovered I was faster, jumped farther, threw more powerfully when I had stronger competition and a greater level of adrenaline and activation in those environments. I generally didn’t win, but I often reached the podium, and that external validation helped cement the notion that I was in the right place. I was competing with peers, and we pushed each other by being in closer competition with one another. I found reserves that I wouldn’t have tapped into if I hadn’t needed to strive to chase someone else.

I learned in track to truly value and appreciate my competition. I am stronger, faster, and braver when there are women right with me all focused on achieving the same outcome. I learned that competition is a gift, and it helps me to push myself harder.

When I initially started competing in powerlifting, local meets were exciting. They were new and fresh, and I didn’t know how I would stack up. When I realized I might be best of only in a masters division or it might just be me and Rampage duking it out for top 72, I wanted a bigger venue with more competitors. The second meet I chose was still technically a local meet, but it was a big one in the Baltimore Convention Center. There were more women in my division, more platforms, more noise, more spectators — it had a different feel with elements of a larger competition that tend to affect me emotionally. It ramped up my adrenaline and gave me a bigger sense of pressure (do I really want to bomb out in front of a ton of people?). Intellectually, I might realize it doesn’t matter if I perform like crap in a full house, but for most of us that little bit of fear of failure tingles more primal emotional reactions — ones that experienced competitors have developed the skill to channel into positive energy. That is a skill I want to ensure I master and retain. I never want to step away because I’m afraid to fail.

There is one other mental element I alluded to earlier, and that is learning to use external goals like hitting specific numbers or coming out first — or, later this year, defending my title at Nationals — to my advantage. These types of goals create more pressure because you are judging yourself against a specific outcome that you can’t always control. Who knows who will compete at Nationals in October? With a centrally located venue like Chicago, it’s likely that we’ll have a bigger field, and The Mountain’s older sister might show up in the M1 72kg category and blow us all away. Concrete goals like target numbers or placing in the top six or winning can increase your focus and determination, and that can be very helpful when you have the mid-season blahs. But it is also very easily to place too much stock in those numbers and, in doing so, set yourself up for failure. If you need to squat a certain weight to achieve that goal and you get called out on depth on your third attempt, how do you adjust your mentality to keep striving in the competition when you may well have blown your chance at achieving your goal? When numbers become too important to you, it can have a significantly deleterious effect on your day-of performance.

I’m not sure if I have conquered this aspect of competition mentality. I want to make sure that I can use tangible goals to facilitate and strengthen my performance and that their presence will not cause me to fall prey to self-doubt, negativity, or fear of failure. It is an intellectual and emotional skill that I want to have, and I see no way to learn it other than to march into that dangerous space and learn what I can from it regardless of the outcome.

And that is the key for me right now: I want to take on these mental challenges. I want to test myself against them. The challenge of acquiring new mental skills, new mental strength makes me want to train and want to compete. The drive I have to improve my mental and emotional toughness is a deep source of motivation. It’s a puzzle I want to keep trying to solve, and it is a skill set that has the greatest transference to other areas of my life. At my desk job, I’ll never have to suddenly deadlift a row of cubicles, but I very well may have to stay calm, focused, and confident in my demeanor when I’m challenged on a strategic plan in a meeting. Practicing that ability — staying focused on achieving an outcome regardless of the noise and pressure surrounding you — is the kind of mental strength that I can continue to develop through sport.