A Newbie's Perspective: The Cookie Jar on Tough Days
Us newbies, we've all had those days, the ones where your ass was thrown around like ragdoll all practice. It's a slippery slope once you get on those long bus rides. You start thinking, maybe it's not worth all the pain and you should just start hitting the gym full time. Well, maybe not everyone, but as someone who started off fighting OFSAA guys, it definitely affected my morale. And from what I learned in the last couple of months is that mentality is like sixty percent of the sport.
And to avoid days like those, you have to develop mental toughness. One of the methods that Coach Neal introduced me to is the Cookie Jar technique by David Goggins . You compare what you’re going through now, to what you’ve been through, and you tell yourself that what’re you’re going through now is nothing. The whole thing sums to self gratitude.
Self graitude is the cornerstone of any mental toughness, it's similar to ego but you're not always showing off your achievements. Once in a while, during those days when you only to score two points from a lucky sprawl while your opponent managed to pull out his whole arsenal. You ask yourself.
Where was I before?
When did I start?
When did he start?
How many matches has he been in?
I asked myself, then I realize, I dun started five months ago getting nothing but dropped. Now I'm scoring twos on some of the most elite guys in the province, maybe I'm not doing so bad after all. Because when you start thinking too much about how bad you lost, it'll start to feel like you won't ever win a match. That mentality will carry onto the next match, then the next and the next. It certainly felt like that for me, there were days where I just stood like a rock pushing back because I was too afraid to take the shot or sprawl because I felt it was pointless. But when you think about how you scored, and how you can get the next two, you won’t be limited by the fear of getting hip tossed., you’ll just go for it. And if you don’t succeed, pull yourself up from your bootstraps and try again. You tell yourself hey, I’ve been dropped over a dozen times, but it’s the fact that I’m going to go through all of that again to be a better wrestler is what is going to take me to the podium.