A Growth Mindset is the Key to Success
Once a gymnast, always a gymnast!
I was a gymnast growing up and I often think about the role that sports played in shaping who I am today. As a kid, my world revolved around going to the gymnastics gym and I loved it!
I remember the 1996 Olympic Games clearly, and the Magnificent Seven was everything! Dominique Dawes was my favorite. I remember crying when she slipped on a landing during her floor exercise in the All Around Finals, taking her out of contention for the gold medal, the most coveted title in all of gymnastic. It was heartbreaking, but I digress.
Looking back on my time at the gym, I can see that gymnastics taught me a lot. As a child, I was a bit of a late starter. I started the sport at the ripe old age of 7, but was a quick learner and took to the sport like a natural.
Lesson Number 1: Natural ability will only take you so far
Within a few months of my first gymnastics class, I was picking up skills with ease. I quickly advanced to a pre-team level and found myself as a competitive gymnast in under a years time. The handspring vault? Got it! Back extension roll to handstand on the floor? Check! Kip on the bars? Not so fast.
As I was preparing for my first meet as a competitive gymnast, I hit my first roadblock in the form of an essential skill on the uneven bars. The kip. Every gymnast probably has a story about learning the kip. It appears as an effortless glide to mount the apparatus, but it requires perfect timing, technique and strength which makes it difficult to learn. In fact, learning the kip is a demoralizing right of passage for gymnasts.
Now, just like other skills in both gymnastics and life, some will learn faster than others. In my case, everyone on my team had gotten their kip before me. I was the very last girl on the team to learn the skill. Try as I might, I just could not master the technique.
Still, I tried and I failed. I cried at my first meet after I attempted and botched my kip in front of the judges. I actually fell three times during my uneven bars routine, but who’s counting, right? And now that I think of it, props to my seven year old self for being brave enough to put myself in the position to be judged, knowing that the end result was not going to be a positive one.
Maybe that routing was a bit of a mess, but I did get a ribbon on the vault, so there was a slight silver lining at the end of the competition. More importantly, later, after the tears had dried, my determination had never wavered. My mind was set on mastering the kip and I was going to continue learning and growing within the sport.
Lesson Number 2: A growth mindset is the key to success
As a young gymnast, I tried a lot, I failed quite a bit, and I earned a lot of medals along the way, but that isn’t what sticks with me today. Ultimately, the joy wasn’t in winning, but in overcoming fear and taking on challenges head first. I wanted to learn how to master those new skills that seemed impossible at the start, and from there, I wanted to continue building on top of those fundamentals. In sports, as in life and career, the learning never stops and there is always room to grow, as long as you don’t psych yourself out and quit when that inevitable roadblock eventually appears.
Natural ability can open doors, but there is no shortcut for handwork, and no tool as effective as the right mindset.
And yes, I eventually mastered the kip and went on to climb to the top of many podiums to what became my best, and favorite event; the uneven bars.
