What to Do When Life Gets Tough

Challenges come at us off the strip, too. What fencing has taught me to do when life gets tough...

INTRO TO A TOUGH TIME

I am drafting this as I sit on my bed – my head is clogged, my feet are freezing, and I haven’t been outside yet, even though it’s sunny after four days of rain.  My schedule for today includes sending out a reminder communication which my boss has just edited while I am editing and has had overwrites as a result, attending a Zoom meeting, being on a phone call to redo a website, and finishing this blog post.  The exercise class that I would normally attend at 7:30am today was cancelled (no water, no HVAC, no instructor), wrangling young fencers to focus last night was a challenge, and I am sore from training. Plus, I am a Vet fencer, which means I hurt somewhere, everywhere, every single day.  Plans for the weekend include hiding from social events – I do not have it in me to get up, get dressed, and chat – being a more focused/attentive/creative/cheerful coach at tomorrow’s practice, squeezing in cross-training somehow, and deciding if I am traveling to fence or just cooking at home and going out to a music concert on Sunday.  Somewhere in this weekend my home office needs organizing as do some other projects, and I should get groceries because I forgot to pick up items when I stopped after practice ended at 9:15pm last night… and call my family Sunday morning, as usual, although after hearing the family drama update last week, I’m really not so sure… 

This is normal.  This is not a crisis.  It’s not easy, but not the toughest thing I’ve lived through…

And, fencing has given me the skills to handle this.

How?  Years of practice at focusing and losing and improving and sometimes winning has built for me transferable skills and given me a context for using them. You can use them too. 

Here they are:

LIFE SKILLS LEARNED FROM FENCING

FENCING SITUATIONS

Specific Fencing Skills—

• Focus

• Attending to the task at hand

• Delaying gratification 

• Hustling – even when 1) I don’t feel like it   2) there’s very little time on the clock

• Pushing all the way through

• Asking for help

• Allowing myself to enjoy support

Sometimes I become too focused on myself as a lone individual but being coachable is important — allowing others to help is necessary.  Self-talk, and self-coaching, is important.  How we do this is key.  My coaches are fabulous people and we talk.  To help myself further, with fencing and in life in general (because things get hard in both), I sought the services of a sport psychologist this fall, before I went to Veteran World Championships.  She is really awesomely cool and I highly recommend doing this as my sports psych helped me re-frame my thinking, re-direct my attention, and mentally practice for the high stress scenarios that are fencing and life.

Advice from my sports psychologist:

• Follow your recipe for success.

• Focus on the now.

• Feel the emotions — don’t stuff them down — and then set them aside.

• It’s not about perfection.  It’s about figuring out what works and working on it each time.

• Remember: The goal here is to improve confidence.

OFF-STRIP SITUATIONS

Things get tough off the fencing strip too.  As fencers age they encounter new experiences off the strip, from school to college to graduate school to new jobs to relationships (and possibly marriage) to careers to children to juggling work-life balance and to living in larger society and history.  It’s a lot.  

And there’s a larger context of the issues that surround our sport and of our culture, too. It requires us to think on several levels at once.  Figuring out a response, or if a response is needed at all, can be tough.

Practices that have worked for me I live through these changing times:

• Focus on what’s important.  

  • Clarify my goals.  Think about the “why.”

  • Think about the bigger picture.

  • Know that things will change, regardless.  Is there a direction I want to go?

• Attend to my own comfort.  I am worthy of care.

  • Face the obvious – my feet don’t need to be freezing.  There are these things called socks.  In fact, I own several pairs.  I could put some on and feel a lot better, quickly.  The same is true of other physical states: hunger, thirst, other bodily demands, cold/heat, even lack of sleep.  

  • Choose the moment.  As a fencer, I have trained myself to ignore these states and keep going – and sometimes I need to: with 30 seconds on the clock left for the gold medal bout, I’m going to ignore what’s aching because, while it hurts, it’s not getting worse and it’s not impeding function.  Another example: Communications must be pushed by a deadline, and if that means losing sleep tonight, well, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”  (Thanks, Gen X childhood!) 

  • Let’s ask: how often is this (the need to neglect myself) the case?  

  • Put on the damn socks.  Remember there are these things called “naps.”   Long term care – and function– requires that basic needs are taken care of.  Put your own oxygen mask on.  Then get back out there.

• Understand the difference between a problem and a crisis.

  • There is a difference!  If you know me, you know my administrator saying:  “This is not a crisis.”  Aching muscles are one thing.  A ripping or popping sound, followed by searing pain, is another.   Having life experience with both helps, but this is where learning from others is possible, too.  In other words, you don’t have to have a total disconnect of your own ACL to learn what it’s like.  Just ask me, I can tell you!

  • Avoid the temptation to be a Chicken Little.  Or a Drama Queen.  Catastrophizing is not helpful in real life.  Respond to a problem with thoughtfulness and care to the other people experiencing it with you, even when (especially when) it’s a customer service issue.  Don’t make a problem a crisis.

  • Toughness has limits.  In professional contexts or in fencing, knowing the difference between being competitive and wanting to hurt yourself or others is key. The latter takes us to a crisis state.  Some states you have to pull back from, in yourself or others.  Get support, offer support, or file the SafeSport report.

Additional advice from other folks about what to do when life gets tough:

• Determine what’s really important to you – and act on the priorities.

  • Seriously, the first three agenda items are the only ones that the meeting will “get through.” Prioritize.

  • Spend your “attention coin” on the things that matter most to you.

• Contextualization helps us reframe in useful ways

  • The study of history will teach us a lot.  History in its full glory teaches about human motivation, group interactions, solutions sought and failed, specific conditions under which people made choices and what resulted.  Pattern recognition is a major component of historical consciousness.  It’s also a major part of competitive fencing.  Use it.

• Maintain connections and build community.

  • Make phone calls 

  • Have people over

  • Speak to strangers.

  • Share your goodies with others – donate to charity or just offer someone half of your chocolate bar.

  • Look within your network and build relationships with others who are working on your other priorities – divide the work to get it done.

  • Follow up and check in.

We can learn from history.  And from each other. We don't have to go it alone.

CONCLUSION

Fencing has provided many things for me — significantly, community.   My fencing community has been one of the greatest sources of support for me, especially through some of my more recent hard times. These include living through Lockdown and a hip replacement.  I am grateful for all of you. You have made some tough life moments much easier.

Finally, know that there are days when each of us will encounter the “hardest hard” – and this definition shifts over time.  My toughest days in 6th grade was my father’s car accident and sudden move to a new state.  Being in a place where everyone played basketball and not hopscotch at recess, along with the rest of it, was confusing and difficult.   In my 50’s it was my spouse’s death that was very tough – and later I chose to move to a new state, which felt pretty easy, as I’ve already done that multiple times.  Grad school the first time seemed impossible – now completing those requirements for that degree seems so easy.  When I started fencing, physical training was new, and meeting all the requirements to be an athlete and to practice self-care was a high bar.  Since then I’ve recovered from two major injuries (at different times) and know how to make it work for the body I have.  I’ve changed over time because of the tough times.  These changes reset my ability to handle life’s challenges.

What’s tough changes with time.  At the same time…

Fencing has given you the skills to face life when it gets tough.  Whenever it happens.  Trust yourself.

Cathleen Coyle Randall is a veteran fencer, a fencing coach and club administrator, a former classroom teacher, museum educator, educational administrator, and currently the Chair of the Board of WFencing, Inc. Writing this piece was hard.  Cathleen had to practice what former president Richard Nixon told Time Magazine (when discussing how he wrote so many books) he called “iron butt.”   Not that she quotes Nixon a lot, but iron butt is the only thing that worked in this case.  Just ask her editors.