Bad habits, good habits

Do you think feeling more positive in general has an impact on your skating?

I'm beginning to suspect it does - at least on how you feel about skating, anyway.

It's pretty obvious, if only by the very fact that I have three bodily scars I didn't have previously, that I had a pretty rubbish year in 2013, and I honestly couldn't wait to see the back of it. I do wonder if 2013 was a cursed year in some way, because quite a lot of people I know seemed to have a rough time of it, but that's an aside.

It's January 2014 now, and a new year seems to mean a new start in so many ways. I've begun this year with a much more positive frame of mind than I'd had, certainly in the latter few months of last year. I couldn't seem to drag myself out of the gloom in the last few months; to some extent I felt I'd given up hope of things improving and felt like all the events of the entire year had ganged up on me to break my spirit - - - - but I actually didn't realise this, until now.

I wouldn't go so far as to say I've had depression. With a dad and a number of friends who genuinely do suffer from this horrible illness, I understand it very well, even in its most extreme manifestations, and that absolutely isn't what I've suffered. But I've definitely been on the brink of some major stress.

Even Coach A picked up on it, I think, because he asked me on a few occasions what was wrong when, really, nothing was, specifically. He also pointed out that
I didn't seem myself and that my confidence on the ice seemed to have dipped to an all-time low. There were a number of other issues around at the same time as the physical illness I suffered in the last couple of months of the year, which I don't want to go into on here for fear of creating  unnecessary problems, but suffice to say those things didn't help much.

BUT - not wanting to drag you down, dear reader - that is now firmly in the past, I'm determined of that. It's very easy to hold onto negativity but actually even easier, I think, to make a decision to let it go. You are the master of your own destiny, or some such twaddle.

I started this crusade towards positivity without even realising it, when just near the end of December, (on a whim) I told Coach A that he was to ban negative words and phrases from my vocabulary on the ice. He didn't take me very seriously, but I was deadly serious, so I banned them myself.

I said it because I realised I'd developed a habit of using words I didn't necessarily even mean  - things like "It's scary", "It's terrifying", "I'll try but it's not going to work..."

Now I've discovered that not referring to these things as "scary" has made something click in my head, and I suddenly don't feel they're quite so scary or unachievable either.

I then made the decision that the minute the clock hands ticked around to January 1st, I would put last year firmly in the past and begin as if a clean slate had just been handed to me, and that's what I intend to do. Anything that doesn't quite go to plan this year will NOT be "more bad luck" - it's not likely to be related to the events that have gone before it, and I'll be sure to remind myself of that - it's simply something that hasn't gone to plan. Other things will go exactly TO plan, and I'll be sure to remind myself of that too.

So, starting as I mean to go on, I've signed up to do the "100 Happy Days" challenge. A friend of mine started it and has created a bit of a trend among a few of us skaters. If you don't know what it is, check out 100happydays.com - but basically, it's a challenge to take one photo every day, for 100 days, of something that made you happy, however big or small it may be.

It's already doing what I hoped it would do - giving me a way to see something positive in every single day, however bad the day as a whole may seem. Maybe I'll have to do it for the rest of my life, who knows (!), but I hope that doing it for the 100 days will help turn me back into the positive, optimistic person I was a year-and-a-half ago, simply by getting me back into the habit of seeing the good things.