I was scrolling through TikTok when a video by US rugby player and Olympian, Ilona Maher caught my attention. She made a name for herself during the Tokyo Games by using the platform expertly to give an insight to her personality and life as an athlete and, since then, has continued to share mostly comedic videos. However, this one was serious.
The visual was simply Ilona preparing for a running interval, training alone, and the audio is just a song she’s chosen, no voiceover. She’s captioned her thoughts for the viewer to read, and the sentiments are powerful – in this particular clip, Ilona is honest about feeling sad about losing at the Olympics (her words) and that she feels “like I’m grieving in a way after preparing for something my whole life and falling short”.
The next thought shared is, “It’s hard to get myself motivated to do my running and lifts after I worked so hard already”, which is something that I think many, if not all, of us can relate to.
This is immediately followed by another sentiment, “But I will continue to train and get better because I know storms pass and I will be so thankful of my past self for being so strong.”
I don’t know about how that’s made you feel, but I found that both powerful and striking. Can you notice what she’s done? She’s thought about the future to inspire herself today. Whilst acknowledging that she is disappointed, and accepting that feeling (which in itself is incredibly important – this is a great demonstration of both mindfulness and self-kindness, two of the three elements of self-compassion), she also recognises that it won’t be this way forever (the recognition that “storms pass”) and offers herself a future perspective in order to motivate herself.
From the basics of the video, there’s nothing fancy. But when you examine the process, it’s very clever, as well as being simple. To break it down again, here’s how you can use it to boost your mindset:
Acknowledge and accept your current feeling (for example, “I don’t want to get out of bed and train today, and that’s ok”)
Recognise that this is a temporary situation (“I will feel differently on another day”)
Think about how you will feel in the future when you have succeeded, be that at the end of your next session, or once you achieve your overall goal (“I know that I will feel good afterwards” or “I’m looking forward to accomplishing my goal”)
The other critical factor is to differentiate between “I’m not in the mood for this” and “there’s something wrong with my body”. The latter is a very important topic that I’ll address another day, but I’ll close with this: people assume that professionals are built differently, and to an extent they are. Some of them do have naturally incredible physiology that they train to their advantage. And they also have access to other resources that many of us don’t.
But when it comes to mindset, they’re simply using techniques that most of us haven’t considered or learned about. Once we are aware of them, they’re actually things that we absolutely can make use of in our own practice.
Professionals aren’t magically motivated. They don’t want to train constantly. They don’t wake up every single morning feeling fantastic. Though they know how to change that. And now you know too.