SELF CONTROL: SETTING AND REACHING ACHIEVABLE GOALS

The best examples of self control come from those who have reached their limits.

They set a goal and worked toward it. If it was an easy goal, they hit the mark and moved on.

Unrealistic goals not met leave a haunting reminder that we’re not who we thought we were.

The self-aware person gets the difference between easy and unrealistic goals and makes adjustments to both.

Problems come from the less aware people. What kind of problems? Self control problems.

Who has seen this happen: A team competes to win a championship in their particular sport. They make the semi-finals in their league and play a hard, close game that takes everything they’ve got to win.

The celebration starts at the final buzzer and everyone takes part. Making the semi-finals was unexpected. Winning was a miracle.

Their trek was so unexpected that they forgot the last game and get steamrolled for the title.

It happens every year in The Big Dance where the Cinderella team of the year makes it further than the experts predicted. I’m thinking of Butler and Gonzaga runs to the final four.

Then there are the teams that get hot at the right time, like this year’s NBA champion Milwaukee Bucks coming back from 0-2 deficits in the playoffs.

When the goals are winning everything, the road gets rough. It’s even rougher if it’s an attempt to repeat a championship.

Consider The Great Simone Biles

From ESPN.com:

This time around, she wanted to compete for herself in a way she didn’t in 2016, to push the limits of the sport simply to see what her body is capable of achieving. 

What’s it take to even think of a goal like trying to see what your body is capable of achieving?

After winning four gold medals in the last Olympics, she must have a pretty good idea of what her body is capable of achieving. Wouldn’t that self awareness come with the title of ‘Best Gymnast In The World?’

But it wasn’t enough, so she came back to repeat. And make history doing it.

Even the idea of coming back to the Olympics after winning four gold medals in a sport so demanding it breaks lesser beings is an achievement.

Olga Korbut competed in two Olympic Games but doesn’t anyone remember the second?

Now she’s called ‘The Mother Of Gymnastics.’

Nadia Comăneci came back for a second Olympics, too.

Now she’s married to Bart Connor and lives in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Who would know more about the pressure to repeat Olympic greatness than those who have tried? And who would know more about life after the Olympics?

Our Ms Biles showed who she was by staying with the team and keeping them fired up instead of retreating to isolation.

She did the right thing by withdrawing from competition in spite of what the ‘lounge chair Olympians’ have to say about it. Those people have strained their self control with their criticism.

This blog won’t post links to jackasses of that sort.

What It Feels Like To Set Goals With Self Control

Take me, for example. I had sports goals, still do.

Younger me wanted to join the wrestling tradition of my high school. By my reckoning, winning an Oregon state championship in Greco-Roman was the ticket.

My coach was a Junior World Greco coach in his spare time. His first wrestler to win a state title was a Greco guy. One of his first to make a college wrestling team was a Greco guy who also won a senior open national title.

The wrestler in my weight class had won state Greco titles twice before me and I wanted to continue that tradition. But first I needed to avoid my bad habit of throwing myself on my back and getting pinned. That was my initial goal.

In my first match of the tournament I threw myself on my back and nearly got pinned, so that was progress. Between my first and second match I changed everything. With a new approach I went out against the #1 seed and didn’t do my usual flop.

Instead, armed with new ideas, I pinned him and beat everyone else in the bracket. The older brother of a guy I beat hung a gold medal on my neck. It was nice.

Ten years later I had the running bug and needed to set a goal: Qualify for the Boston Marathon sounded right.

My boast would be: Yep, qualified for Boston.

A 3:32 marathon time didn’t quite make it. Three hours would have been fine. So would three hours and thirty minutes. But no, 3:32. I’ve lived with it somehow.

Twenty years later I joined a Hood to Coast team. I was the last runner on the team, which meant I’d be the finisher. While I slogged in I heard the crowd cheer, just not for me. They cheered for the one guy finishing at the same time I did, and he was passing me.

I used my self control and didn’t tackle him for showing me up on the beach sand finish.

Since then I’ve lifted weights with regular attempts at personal records. And failing over and over. Those damn goals are too high, but isn’t that the point of setting goals?

Knowing When To Shut That Mouth

If you’ve never been to the mountain top, keep quiet.

Have you been on the trail to the mountain top? If not, pipe down.

Never seen the mountain, the top, or the trail, and couldn’t find it on a map? Just STFU.

That’s for the talking heads calling Simone Biles a disgraceful quitter for letting her team down.

(Psssst, hey superstar, the U.S. team got a silver medal. The gold went to the banned Russian team. What have you done, son?)

It’s human nature to dream and dream big, but maybe keep those dreams to yourself if they involve trying to take someone of incredible achievement down a notch.

Simone Biles is a world class high flier, you are a subterranean troll with a brown sky view based on where your head is stuck.

Like the man who commented after we talked running and I reported my 3:32 marathon time, “So you didn’t really ‘run’ the marathon,” they have no idea.

Or the motor pool captain who said, “You know, you’re not really a veteran if you were never deployed.”

Some of us out here do things with self control, work toward goals, and strive to make life better for others.

We see challenges and say, “That’s for me.”

Failure is just a new standard to overcome, but it doesn’t give us license to smear those who fail worse than we do.

But for those who never try, have never thought to try, or who will try and barely scratch the surface with their weak effort?

Take a hike, loser.