I was a terrible, terrified swimmer as a kid. About a decade ago, I decided to learn to swim properly. However, because I don’t love swimming, I haven’t prioritized it. Consequently, I’ve improved slowly.
This summer, due to tendinitis in my arm, I’ve been back in the pool a lot. It turns out that doing something 3-4 days a week leads to much greater improvement than doing it once every few weeks.
That’s not the interesting bit.
The interesting bit is the shadow path accompanying the change in my swimming abilities. This path is the narrative I carry about my abilities. It moves independently of my actual abilities. My chart looks something like this:
Two points of note on the graph:
The point of Delusion: Me sitting comfortably at home watching “effortless swim” videos. I feel like I’m learning from all the talk of high elbows and not lifting my head, but I’m not spending actual time in the pool, so my swimming isn’t improving. To note, this point on the graph is the difference between online education and entertainment. (Hint: if you’ve been using a language-learning app for a year and you’re still unable to order lunch in that language, this spot is for you).
Dragging me Down: The pernicious point on the graph. Since I’ve carried a fear of swimming my whole life, at any moment during a swim, I can start noticing I’m swimming. That noticing leads to negative self-talk (“this is hard,” “will it ever end?” “how is my breathing?”) which can ruin a perfectly good swim. It can even make the next swim worse (“I hope that doesn’t happen again.”).
As we work to increase our skillfulness in any area, we must remember that our story and our reality are always interacting. For areas where we have a positive self-narrative, that story sustains us, even through the dips. For areas that have always been challenging, it can be doubly difficult to improve—because we need to do three things: (1) Enhance our skill; (2) Bravely utilize the new skill; (3) Do all of this, over and over again, despite (sometimes) being dragged down by our own negative self-talk.
Examples:
[About to walk on stage] “I’m a terrible public speaker”
[About to have a difficult conversation] “I hate confrontation.”
[Facing down a blank page] “This is so hard. What if I have nothing to say?”
[About to close the sale] “What if they, like the last person, say no?”
[Working on listening better] “How do I show them that I’m smart enough to be here?”
Every time we let our old, negative story infect our new reality, we perform a little worse. That’s OK, it’s part of the process. It’s also why all writers’ advice on writing starts with a version of Anne Lamott’s reminder to just put our butt in the chair and keep it there.
If we relentlessly keep showing up to do the new thing, our persistent work will always win the day. Our doubting voice may appear from time to time, but its power diminishes and, eventually, evaporates in the face of overwhelming new evidence.
“I’ve done this so much, it’s clear that I’ve become good at it.”
Because when your stroke rate is too low, because of the water’s resistance, you start to slow down between each stroke (and sink, a bit).
When this happens, each time you pull through the water you’re fighting this resistance. You’re pushing through a fast-slow-fast cycle which requires expending extra energy.
It’s much more efficient to maintain a constant speed.
Ironically, the very thing we’re doing to avoid fatigue is making us more tired. Worse, the problem can be self-reinforcing: slowing our stroke rate even more because we keep finding ourselves out of breath.
And so it goes with how we approach our throughput in other areas of life.
Task switching, of course, is the most obvious culprit: the ultimate undo-er of pace and flow.
But the point is broader. It’s about seeing that there are moments of optimal flow awaiting us at every turn, ones in which we are producing more with less effort, even though from the outside it might look like we are working harder.
In a similar vein, we can consider that our attempts to insert more breaks and distractions into a day full of an insurmountable pile of work might be helping us and might be contributing to the problem.
The outside world—distractions, worries, the chatter of in our own mind—can all be sources of resistance.
Which means that the solution to our sense of having too much to do might be the exact opposite of what it appears to be.
As longtime readers might recall, I have a bit of a hot-and-cold relationship with swimming.
Swimming freestyle scared me as a kid. Nevertheless, swimming has always seemed like the kind of thing I could love, so I’ve spent a good deal of time over the last five years learning Terry Laughlin’s Total Immersion approach to swimming. In addition to helping me swim better, it was also my introduction to kaizen, a learning philosophy that emphasizes specific, hyper-focused continuous improvement. I recommend it wholeheartedly.
Over these last few years, I’ve made enough progress that I now appreciate swimming and from time to time I even have good swims. However, swimming remains low on my list of priorities, so my progress has been slow.
That said, I can now work my way through a mile in the pool reasonably well and with limited agita—even if being truly relaxed in the water eludes me most days.
Nevertheless, quarantine has been a chance to go deep in all sorts of physical activity, and recently I had the chance to spend a week by a big, beautiful lake in Maine. The only problem was that open water swimming still gives me the heebie-jeebies.
Given this backdrop, and as a nod to safety, when I have the chance to swim in this massive lake, I decide the best approach is to swim laps to a buoy that is about 40 meters from the shore.
I dive in, imagining that soon I be cutting through this pristine lake gracefully.
Then I put my head in the water. It’s nearly pitch black. I cannot see the bottom and I have no idea where I am or how far I away I am from the buoy.
The old narrative in my head kicks in. “This is scary, and I can’t do this. How much longer until I get to the buoy? Should I pick up my head or swim some more? I can’t see, I don’t know where I am, I don’t know how much progress I’ve made or how far I still need to go!”
I am unmoored. The sensory experience nearly overtakes me.
And yet, if you pulled back the camera, what you see looks nothing like what’s going through my head. I am swimming, just as I always do. I’m making progress to and from the buoy. I’m not going particularly straight, but it’s not too bad. Sometimes a wake bounces me, splashing some water in my mouth. Mostly I’m swimming the way I always do.
So which view is the right one, the real one? Is it the one in my head, or the one you’d see from the shore?
What saves me from throwing in the towel is that I remembered the order of operations inside my head: first I have feelings and emotions, then I make sense of them with the story I tell.
The feelings I’m experiencing: disorientation due to darkness, no sense of where I am, of whether I am stuck or making progress.
The emotions I feel: fear and panic.
The story I tell myself: this will never work, I am failing, I should give up.
This pandemic is a bit like those black waters. Stuck at home, we can lose our sense of place, of progress. It’s harder to tell where we are and where we are going. The clarity of what it feels like to go from point A to B and back again has been yanked away from us.
We feel unmoored.
This feeling results in emotions.
These emotions result in a story about what we can and cannot do.
Thankfully, in the water, I had put in enough work before plunging into that lake that I know how to swim reasonably well. I kept the initial panic at bay by talking myself down from the ledge (“Nothing, objectively is wrong, even though I feel afraid. This is not that different from what I do in the pool. I am OK.”). But mostly what I do is continue to swim. Stroke by stroke, breath by breath, I keep on doing the thing I had set out to do. The story my mind wants to create rattles along in the background. I let it be while I continue to do.
In the end, the story never vanishes, but it also doesn’t win. I swim with fear until I swim with less fear until, for at least some bits, I just swim.
These are, objectively, scary times for too many reasons.
The more we believe the worst stories our mind tells us—stories it creates to make sense of our feelings and emotions—the more power we give to those stories.
Rather than try to figure out, analyze, or beat back those stories, we often are better served by putting our heads down and doing the work we set out to do.
The work deserves that much, as do the people it serves.
Remember, courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is continuing to act despite feeling fear.
A month ago, at the age of 66, Terry Laughlin died of prostate cancer. I’ve never met Terry, but I feel like I know him through his books and videos. Terry is the founder of Total Immersion swimming, the revolutionary approach to swimming that can turn anyone (even me), into a relaxed, successful swimmer.
Terry Laughlin demonstrating freestyle in 2013. Photo by Robert Fagan
Swimming is a funny thing: on a planet covered by water, more than 37 percent of adults cannot swim the length of a 25 yard pool. I was nearly part of those numbers. Though I’m a lifelong athlete, from the age of 6 swim lessons terrified me, and as recently as three years ago, while I could swim 25 yards of freestyle, I’d grab at the end of the pool, panting, looking incredulously around me at the people of all ages, shapes and sizes swimming lap after lap without needing a breather.
In 2015 an arm injury finally got me back into the pool. Over the course of a year, I willed my way to swimming a mile. But there was always a sense of lurking panic, always a survival instinct kept at bay that could kick in at any moment—never mind that air is literally an inch away and all I need to do is turn my head to breathe.
I finally decided that muscling my way through the water wasn’t my goal, and, urged on by a friend who can swim across the Long Island Sound, I bought some of Terry’s books and videos.
The funny thing about these books and videos is that they don’t start with swimming. They start with floating.
Terry’s entire philosophy is based on the notion that all of swimming is taught the wrong way. In Terry’s view, we spend most of our energy in the water trying not to drown, which is why we get so tired and why we move forward so little. If we could learn to float and balance, we could swim effectively, efficiently, and with joy. As Terry famously states, “it’s not the size of the motor [how hard you stroke and kick] that matters, it’s the shape of the vessel.”
That may be, but “vessel shaping,” Terry Laughlin-style, can feel like a pretty silly activity.
Having read much of Terry’s Ultra Efficient Freestyle book, I eventually find myself in my local pool trying out Lessons One and Two from the book. They are titled “Torpedo” and “Superman,” and both involve pushing off the bottom of the pool and just floating with arms at your side (Torpedo) and extended (Superman). Over and over again.
Imagine, if you will, those same swimmers speeding past me, cranking lap after lap, and I’m just trying to float the right way. Funny, right?
But eventually I learn how to float face down and not sink.
And then I learn how to float on my back and not sink.
And then I learn to float on my side and not sink, and to extend one arm and not sink.
And then I learn to float on my side, with one arm extended, and face my head down and kick. And then I’m supposed to effortlessly rotate up to breathe.
But I can’t.
Whenever I try, I start to struggle, and then strain, and then panic. After a few tries, and lots of water up my nose, I stop. A few weeks after that, I skip to the next lesson and tell myself that this step probably wasn’t all that important after all. I work my way to the end of the book. I’m a bit of a better swimmer. But in my heart I know that I skipped the most important parts.
When Terry passed away, I had a sense of loss, and, in honor of him, I went all the way back to the beginning of the book to start again. A year later after I’d given up, I find myself back at lesson two, trying to learn to breathe on my side without panicking.
And it still doesn’t come easily to me. But I’m keeping at it. And this time, with a bit more perspective and appreciation, I’m also using it as a chance to learn about how I learn: to observe how committed I really am; and to notice the gap between the narrative I tell myself about what I’d like to learn (the videos I’m happy to watch, the book I’m happy to read) and how many hours I’m willing to spend in the pool—when I have lots of other priorities and lots of other ways to exercise that come more easily.
Most of all, it’s a chance to watch my own narrative of failure, because mostly I feel like I’m failing. Each time I fail, after my nose fills up with water and I curse a bit, I ask myself: do I really, truly, believe that I will fail at this forever? Is it possible that if I put in time and concerted effort, that I am the one person in the world who simply cannot accomplish this?
Yes, it’s possible. But it’s unlikely. And since each next “thing” that Terry has me do is such a tiny increment on the last thing, failing this time means I never really mastered the last step, or I’m not willing to master the next one.
The frustrating, amazing thing is, it’s never Terry’s fault, and it’s never a lesson that doesn’t work. It’s really about what I’m willing to do: the time I am willing to put in, how deliberately I am willing to practice, how well I deal with the plateaus.
And while part of this endeavor is about my interest in learning how to swim, beyond that, I am interested in what Terry has to teach me, and teach all of us, about mastery. Because what Terry has done is to take his passion for swimming and create a program for self-taught mastery that literally anyone can complete. Each step is so clear, so well thought through, and broken into such small pieces that each can be digested and practiced if you have the will and the persistence and the capacity for reflection and self-observation.
And what Terry’s done with swimming could be applied to just about anything. It’s a question of our willingness to take the time to deconstruct something, to deeply understand its component parts, and to commit ourselves to the often repetitive, focused, intentional work of rewiring our nervous system or our limbic system or our musculoskeletal system or our habitual thoughts and feelings, until they, slowly but surely, change.
This is how we can learn anything, without all the false stories about our own limits and the talent we do and don’t have.
In the meantime, I’ll keep going to the pool, less than I’d like to think I would, but more than not at all. I believe that one day I will become an effortless swimmer, and I commit that until then, I will keep walking the path.
To be more accurate, I started a year ago, dipping into the pool because the tendinitis in my right arm was so bad that it hurt to hold a coffee cup, let alone a racquet.
I’d avoided swimming for decades. As a child, for reasons I can’t explain, swimming terrified me. I was the kid who cried before every swimming lesson, tears streaming down my face while I stood waiting to be picked up each summer Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning.
No surprise, then, that 30 years later, despite being physically active, 25 meters of freestyle left me clutching the side of the pool, panting for breath. Something about having my head in the water and needing to breathe to one side brought me back to Beginner Swimming lessons and the dreaded 25 meters of freestyle I had to swim to pass the test.
Nothing like an injury to get me to face my fears. Swimming was the only activity that eased the shooting pain in my injured right arm, relaxing the muscles and stretching out the tendons. That was motivation enough.
Over the course of last summer, I willed myself into the water, swimming 50 meters, then 100, then further. While I did eventually push through to being able to swim a few hundred yards, that old underlying panic still lurked. It was a feeling that at any moment I could devolve into a terrified kid gasping for breath.
(By way of contrast, my wife loves the water. She would describe her Zen-like experience swimming laps, and I’d listen, perplexed. To me, “ease” and swimming mixed like oil and water.)
At the start of this summer, I realized that, despite the progress I made last year, much of my effort and willpower had been taking me in the wrong direction: if I’m trying to work through a fear, then more effort and strain aren’t the right tools to use. This summer, I’ve been trying to figure out where that old panic comes from, and how it’s affecting what I do in the water.
What I’ve recently discovered is that my fear of not being able to breathe is manifesting in every stroke I take. Each stroke, I do a frantic flutter kick and I tense up my whole body in a misguided attempt to lift my full head (and half my torso, it seems) out of the water. That kick, that tensing up, it’s that 30-year-old terror resurfacing to sabotage my stroke and leave me exhausted.
I find it so tempting to muscle my way through these sorts of situations – not just in the water. Wouldn’t it be nice if fear were something we could overpower and wrestle to the ground?
I can’t, directly, beat back the fear, but I can change what I do in the water. I can focus on the behavior that the fear has created – in this case, the kick. So, as I swim laps, I focus on kicking less, on tensing up less, on straining less, and as I change what I’m doing with my body, over time, a bit of ease begins to seep in.
We discover this same pattern so often if we’re willing to look for it. We waste energy on things that feed on the energy we give them: the energy we put into stalling before sitting down to work; the energy we put into maintaining an image of strength and confidence for those around us; the energy we put into protecting someone who can stand on their own two feet; the energy we put into the decades-old stories someone put into our heads that we’ve never let go.
Most of the time, this energy comes from a place of fear or self-preservation. These fears lace themselves through our days and through our relationships. If left unexamined and unaddressed, they exhaust us, draining our mental and physical faculties and insulating us from what our experience could be.
We don’t overcome fear with more effort or by straining more.
We overcome fear by looking back to the source, seeing it clearly and, from a place of calm and clarity, discovering that we can behave differently and that, when we do, those old fears no longer have the power to hold us.
