19/05/2022
As performers and athletes, our ego is essential. We use it every time we go on stage to ensure that we perform at our peak level. It makes us take pride in our effort, strive to win a competition or aim to be the best. Without it we wouldn’t have chosen to be performers or athletes and we certainly wouldn’t be striving for greatness within our chosen sport! While our egos are incredibly important and productive on the stage, they can be detrimental when they show up at training
The ego makes you feel like you have to look perfect in your training, like you have to be the best in the room. On stage, this is great, but in training it stops you from enduring the struggle that brings results physically and from allowing yourself to make mistakes that allow you to progress mentally into becoming a better athlete or performer
The ego usually has one of two impacts on your training:
Type 1. It makes you feel inferior which means that you’ll either get stuck doing the movements, skills or weights that you know well and therefore you’ll never progress into anything above your current level or you’ll just stop showing up for fear of being judged (I’m looking at you, person who won’t take their first aerial session because they don’t think they're strong enough)
Type 2. It makes you feel like you have to be superior which means that you’ll end up pushing yourself into higher level skills or weights before you’re ready and therefore you’ll never solidify your foundations and you’ll likely end up getting injured because you’re not training safely (I’m looking at you, aerialist who is currently scrolling Instagram for the 100th big trick to add to their saved posts list)
So instead of falling into these traps and stalling your own training, next time your ego rears its head in the training space take a deep breath, leave your ego at the door and give yourself permission to suck; you’ll never become great at something if you don’t give yourself the chance to be terrible at it first.
Let me know below whether your ego response tends to be type 1 or 2! We all have an ego, the first step to combating it is to figure out how it affects us!
Happy Training!