Belief
Belief- This one word carries weight. It holds force and potential. It can tip the scales away from failure and place success directly in your sites.
Belief is made up of trust and hope and commitment and surrender. It connects action with possibility and dreams with reality. Belief buoys you up when the road ahead looks hopeless. It helps you take the next step when your lesser self would listen to that silent voice blaring out to ears only you can hear telling you it’s just not worth it to go on. It’s a friend, a trusted ally that unites all your efforts and energies into a charge that can achieve magnificence. It’s athletic rocket fuel.
But as potent of an influence as belief can be in a race as demanding as say the IRONMAN World Championship, you cannot just go to the corner market and pick some up.
Belief is intangible. You feel it when you have it; you know when you lose it. It has mass and yields significance because it is the sum total of every experience you have had in life leading up to the exact moment in time when suddenly the final piece comes to you and there is a knowing inside that now you have what it takes. Rock solid knowing. Unwavering knowing. Unbounded enthusiastic knowing. Deep silent peaceful knowing.
Belief is not uniform. There’s the little belief, the one that says I know I can do it if things go my way. If my game is on, I can believe in myself.
The big BELIEF has no caveats. It takes every “if” out of the equation and allows you to embrace all roads ahead.
It’s the sauce that gets you through the ones that are lined with uncertainty, with challenges that look insurmountable, the roads that have no guidebook telling you how to navigate them. The big BELIEF helps you put your arms around the enormity race reality can have and allows you to dismantle every challenge the day brings, piece by painstaking piece, until there is nothing left separating you from ultimate personal greatness.
The big BELIEF.
Greatness always has its own pace, its own timeline, and it’s up to us if we are going to hang in there long enough for it to play out in our lives, or if we are just going to call it a day because we lack the patience to fully embrace the bigger plan.
Belief is something more than saying I can win. It’s knowing with every cell in your body that you are willing to lock in, engage and commit regardless of how clearly you see your dreams or how out of reach they may appear in the toughest parts of the journey. Real belief will take that risk anyway. You grasp how stupendous really giving it your all is. You know that even if come up short, your life will be better for trying.
The IRONMAN World Championship is built on uncertainty. That is what makes it great. The day starts with a big but very vague sense of what the journey is really going to take to complete. Even if you have done it many times before, the task ahead from cannon shot to finish line is revealed one swim stroke, one pedal stroke at a time.
What you have gotten yourself into slowly comes into focus as the hours wear on.
The energy of the day compresses in closer and tighter with each step you take on the marathon. It’s like you are being shrink-wrapped by reality.
And there always comes a moment, a very defining moment, when the thousand other big challenges that have come before pale in comparison to the one you are standing face to face with, the biggest one you will need to confront in your quest for greatness.
You can’t look left for solace. You can’t look right for relief. Belief says look directly ahead and find it in yourself. It will show you that your race is unfolding exactly as it should.
The Big Belief.
It sits in the same room as fear, as self-doubt and cynicism. But if you look deep enough, long enough you will see that your belief in yourself has its back turned the other way. It’s looking the opposite direction staring openly at possibility and trust. It’s showing you the reason you will take the next step and why it’s worth it.
The Big Belief!
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