All sports are mental games.

But, when I was a 10 year-old gymnast, the balance beam event was the toughest mental game of all. It involves doing increasingly difficult skills on a 4-inch wide beam, 4 feet off the ground.

At some point, there was this one mental trick* that helped me.

Normally, we would need to do 10 successful repetitions of a skill, every day. So, for the balance beam, that would be doing a [skill that you were working on, say, a cartwheel] 10 times without falling off.

As skills get harder and you experience more falls, it gets harder to get over the “hump” of fear. And, it’s really in your head.

Obviously, you’ve done it before — but your mind stops your body from doing the skill.

So, what eventually helped me was to tell myself to fall, on purpose. Just…fall the first one.

That got me through a lot of training days. Because, when you do go through with it, you realize “it’s not that bad”. Falling isn’t as scary as you imagined it to be.

See, I’ve had nasty falls - like when I was at 10, my hands slipped out from under me while doing a backhandspring; my chest slammed on the beam, before I rolled and fell off the side. And, those moments are where the fear grows. But, you need to get back on and try again.

I’m working on a service blueprint at work, and I also haven’t blogged in years. For both cases, what stops me is comparing my work to what I expect it to be, to how I used to write before, to the level that I want to deliver.

So, here I am, telling myself to “fall on the first one”.

It’ll never be perfect. And, the first one will always suck. But, the important thing is to get back on and get better.

*Obviously, this was a mental tactic for training days. I would never tell myself that for a competition day.

But, this is about sustaining practice and continuous improvement. The day-to-day, not the big bang.

So, here's to starting again. And falling over.