Just before the start of her performance at the 2015 United States Figure Skating Championships, the leader going into the short program, Ashley Wagner, said to her coach, “I’m terrified!”
Watershed moment. (I actually screamed at the TV!)
Here’s a world-class athlete at the top of her game, admitting to a nationally televised audience (and a sports arena of thousands of fans), that she too feels things that we often think (erroneously) that we singularly feel. And then we often shame ourselves for feeling them.
Our self-dialogue goes something like this, “There’s something wrong with me if I don’t have it all together. The ‘greats’ don’t have the same fears I do. I’m a failure if I can’t show the world how strong I am. Why is it that it’s only me who gets scared? I’m a loser.”
I loved Wagner’s confession because it was so liberatingly honest. On national television no less. And the commentators had a field day: “This is a two-time U.S. champion, this is an Olympian, this is a skater who’s been on this scene at this level for many years and you hear her say, ‘I’m terrified.’ What do you make of that?”
I’ll tell you what you make of it. Every experience is new. Every moment is fraught with the possibility of experiencing abject terror and failure. Things can fall apart. Everything is unknown at some level. Even those things we do all the time. Pretending that it isn’t doesn’t mean it isn’t so.
As fate would have it, I met Wagner at a party recently and of course I made a beeline to her. “Oh my God. Are you Ashley Wagner?” And then I proceeded to fanboy her, telling her she was the inspiration for my upcoming v-log. I asked her about that defining (televised) moment and she said, “Acknowledging the feeling is a way of diffusing the feeling.”
Eureka.
Once we become aware of something, we actually have the power to turn that thing into an expression that can really benefit us. To deny something we’re feeling distorts truth and fuels the energy into something that may work against us. Destructively. We block our access to other energy resources because so much of our energy is being served up to resistance or denial or avoidance. We feel that we shouldn’t feel something unwanted so then we do everything we can to not feel it. But to say, “Yes, I’m scared,” gives us the permission to move through what we’re feeling. Energy transforms. Feelings becomes fluid. We get un-stuck. Breakthroughs occur.
As Gestalt Therapy founder, Fritz Perls said, “Fear is excitement without the breath.”
So you acknowledge. You breathe. You accept yourself for where you are. You stop making yourself less human because you actually feel real feelings that are normal to feel. And you move through them by transforming them.
And just like Wagner, you too might end up winning a national championship.
*First published on Backstage