Can I? Will I?” And Your Three Choices

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The path to achieving your goals will challenge you many, many times. These challenging moments are what stress you, and they are also what makes what you are doing so very, very exciting. I’ve come to believe that stress is the spice of life; don’t wish it away! Stress occurs for goals that you care about; completion of a task, the quality of your result or external feedback (technical), responses from others (emotional), etc. If you care, there is stress. If you don’t, there isn’t. I have no doubt that you care about your Olympic goals – a lot!

Challenges occur all the time, not just in competition. Some are routine like, “Will I be on time for practice?”, and some are intense, like “Will I give 100% of what I’ve got today?” or “Can I dig-down right now or will I ‘mail it in’?”  Not all of your challenges will be physical, some will come when someone asks something like – Can you help? Can you change? Can you try?

I call these challenging moments “Can I? Will I?” moments. They can force us to question our accountability, our commitment, and even our goals. Our reaction to each challenging moment is to ask ourselves,: “Can I do this?” And then, more importantly: “Will I do this?”

Sometimes our – ‘yes!’  answers come so easily that the moment flies by almost unnoticed… but not always.

I believe that each time we ask ourselves ‘Can I? Will I?’, we have three choices: 

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