Away from - towards

Are you one of those archers? Always searching for the right solutions, always striving to further refine your technique. Perhaps even to the point of the mental aspect of archery. Repeatedly reflecting on yourself and then trying things out again from a fresh perspective with courage are important qualities on the path to personal success. It also enormously increases self-confidence.

But if you're one of those people like me who tends to focus on that, then be warned. If you focus too much on the rearview mirror, you run the risk of driving your plan into the wall and quickly losing sight of your goal. At some point, we'll even create new problems for ourselves without realizing it. Because saying "I don't want to miss" is not the same as expressing a desire to hit the target. Unfortunately, such statements are far too often lumped together. What makes these statements so drastically different is simple. Our brain is constantly working, and the rest of the body is preparing itself for these thoughts as future experiences.

If you had to break these thoughts down to an image or a feeling, the differences are significant. Because thinking about what you don't want triggers a completely different feeling in us than thinking about what we do want, and our body reacts accordingly to these visualized stimuli. So there's a fine line between reflection and unconsciously training our own weaknesses. So here's a tip that has always worked well for me. If you've been feeling a bit stuck for a while, check what you're currently tending to do. Imagine your lap of the obstacle course is a test drive. During this time, are you more likely to constantly glance in your rearview mirror to see if and how many traffic cones you've already missed, or are you so fixated on your goal that you keep hitting the whole row without correcting yourself? As a rule, this means that if we tend to go to one extreme, it's time to find balance with the corresponding opposite. So always ask yourself what you need more of at the moment.

Because it always takes both: the bow and the arrow, the anchor and the release, the tension and the relaxation, the uncertainty and the trust!

Bettina Platzer