Last night we did an ice bath wim hof style after jiujitsu. Every Friday that I’m in town I intend to do these ice baths and everyone in the el dorado hills community is welcome to join! It’s never gotten this cold. Bone chilling cold. I’ve gotten used to the cold in the last few months by finishing my warm showers with cold ones, doing a weekly ice bath and getting into river water, but I think I psyched myself out of this one. It was intimidating. I went and bought 15 x 20lbs of ice at Costco (best price out there about $2 a bag) something I am used to and have been doing. But then people started bringing more and more ice until we had another 140lbs of ice making the total 440lbs. There were 2 inch chunks of ice still floating on top of the bath a few hours later. I was intimidated. I didn’t want to get in even after coaching and watching everyone go through it. I wanted out.
In that moment, standing in front of the below 35 degrees water, so many things came across my thoughts. Will people judge me if I get out too soon? How bad will this hurt? Just do it…. And in that moment, I just made a conscious decision to change how I was thinking. I started to embrace the idea, “this is about having fun” “go deep into the cold” “get in touch with your self” “connect” instead of un-coaching and talking myself out of the moment, I began coaching myself to perform.
I realized the importance of coaching your thoughts. We often try to “control” how we think and that might work for some people, but I realize now that I just needed to coach myself and follow through with it. I had to coach my thoughts as much as I was trying to coach others who had made their way into the freezing ice bath. As a coach I carried the extrinsic voice, but as a student I initially lacked that intrinsic voice. I realize now that your extrinsic coaching needs to sync with the intrinsic coaching. When those two sync, the coach and athlete, teacher and student, employer and employee are able to produce the best results attainable at that moment.
The syncing of thoughts, the connection of extrinsic and intrinsic dialogue, is the connection between leadership and group. As a leader of a jiujitsu group, I discovered that my words mean nothing to my students if their intrinsic monologue is disconnected from my leadership advice.
Thankful for the intimidating ice bath, that led me to some thinking.
Eliot Kelly