Wrestling Blogs - Mike Tamillow

I’ve got a homework assignment for anyone who’s reading this. I want you to pick out a teammate and talk to him two times, once when he wins and once when he loses. When he wins a tough one I want you to say: “You know that other kid made a lot of mistakes, you got really lucky. The ref gave you all the calls. It was nice you slipped away with that win, but don’t expect it again. On the up side you hit one nice double.” When he loses a tough one I want you to say, “You couldn’t wrestle any worse, could you? You didn’t even try to win. You probably won’t ever be good at wrestling or any other sport, it’s like nothing matters to you. When you’re done with wrestling what are you going to do? No one’s going to want to hire you if that’s your work ethic.” (If you haven’t read my disclaimer on December 4th, do so now)



After you say this see what this person thinks of you. See if he still wants to be your friend. You just don’t say things like that, not to your friends, not to strangers, not to anyone. Think before you speak. A few words can make a lasting impact on someone. You don’t want to say the wrong thing. You’ve probably heard this advice before from someone who didn’t want you to make a bad impression. What matters more is the advice you never got: how to talk to yourself.

Some of the things I’m going to say might seem obvious. But even with the obvious right in front of us we still fail to do this. We find ourselves repeating what we have heard others say about our results, our training, our success and failures. We give into social proof, especially when that proof comes from an authority figure such as a coach. Studies of authority show that we usually follow authority despite our own best reasoning. Learn how to talk to yourself and pick a coach who talks to you the same way. If you take my homework assignment you may find your teammate actually believing he does suck, and performing worse for it. “Knowing is half the battle” - GI Joe

Dogs are great followers, they are always very, very apt to obey orders. Why is this? It’s a simple answer, if the pleasure they receive from something is greater than the displeasure they receive, than they will do it. Dogs are very social creatures and obtain pleasure from human praise. They seek the praise of the alpha dog and form obedient habits that they know will result in pleasure and reduce displeasure. Another way of creating pleasure and displeasure is through electrical shock.

Similar to their obedience to the alpha male the dog will form a habit to reduce the displeasure of the shock. He will jump through hoops, roll over, and step on the green or red button (dogs are actually colorblind). But what about a different scenario, what if no matter what he does, the dog cannot reduce the shock? He quits; he becomes docile and accepts his fate. This is helplessness. When the dog gets shocked again, even if he can escape it by taking action, he will simply accept his powerlessness and lie down. Dogs who have been hit too many times without understanding why become timid and scared.



This is important because in some sense people work the same way. Instead of shock we can replace the cause of helplessness with failure. Failure is very displeasing, whereas success is pleasing. The unusual thing about these dogs is that some were much more likely to quit than others. Studies about the way people react to success and failure in their explanatory style (self talk) show the way people talk to themselves determines helplessness. Helplessness and failure are the main causes of depression. Most people who are at risk for depression have a pessimistic style of explanation. So this isn’t just an article about mentally succeeding in wrestling, it’s another blog about being happy. I want you to keep in mind that success matters, however some people can maximize how they view success and minimize how they understand failure.

Before I go on I want to talk about a rather famous study. A study on how people view their own control. In the study a group of participants are given a button to press, which does not control a light switch. The light is switched on and off and the participants are supposed to determine how much control they have over it. 80% of the group claims they can control it, the other 20% have a realistic view of their control. This 20% is the group that is at risk of depression. You’ll find similar results in other things. In one study of nearly a million high school seniors, 70% said they had above average leadership skills. 65% of poker players think they are above average. These studies show that being optimistic is viewing the world through your own unrealistic lense.

There are three keys to explaining your failures and successes. It really doesn’t matter what actually caused your failures or success as long as you can convince yourself of these things to a greater and greater extent. The three things are Permanence, Pervasiveness, and Personalization. Permanence relates to time. Pervasiveness relates to different areas in life. Personalization relates to responsibility for the occurrence. A good explanatory style will keep you going when you are ready to quit or about yo fall in a slump.



Permanence: John Wooden said, “success is never final, failure is never fatal.” This statement exemplifies permanence. In fact the best way to explain things to yourself is that success will lead you to greater success. An optimistic view creates a great degree of permanence for success and a small degree for failure. When trying to be optimistic explain improvements with permanence for example “Wrestling is like riding a bicycle, I have learned all these skills that I won’t forget.” That way when something isn’t working, you haven’t lost anything, it’s all still there and if you keep trying it will work. In the case of losing you can say what I always say, “Two people walked on the mat, one gets his hand raised, this time it just didn’t happen to be me.” It’s not an unrealistic statement but it narrows the scope of losing to that match.

Pervasiveness: So you told that girl you just met ten days ago that you love her, and she told you she doesn’t even like you. (happens to me a lot) That can really ruin a guy’s day. It’s 3:30 P.M. and practice is at 4. You’re down in the dumps and it seems like the only way to make yourself feel better is to go fall in love with the first girl you meet. But you don’t have time; it would take at least 45 minutes to an hour. You need to get to practice, so you remember what your coach said “When you walk through that door the only thing on your mind is wrestling” Now you’ve got to separate your skills as a Romeo from your Hulk skills. As an optimist, you want to connect these two things when you are having success. Tell yourself “I am loved because I’m awesome at wrestling, I’m awesome at wrestling because I’m loved, and dang I’m smart” When the ladies aren’t treating you so well say “Well I’m awesome at wrestling because I’m smart, and I’m smart because I’m awesome at wrestling. It was only this one girl who didn’t love me; I know other girls will.” Minimize it to a single instance, put your failure in a box.

Personalization: This is probably the worst one for wrestlers. An optimist internalizes success, that means he is the reason he wins, and he externalizes failure, that means he ended up losing because things ‘just happened’. Wrestling is an individual sport; it is very easy to get caught up in blaming yourself and saying you failed. Also, coaches put a lot of responsibility on the athletes. This is a good thing because it really makes the athletes work for that success. (Success makes you feel less helpless) However it is a bad thing in many ways; accepting your failure as part of your identity is incredibly pessimistic. Coaches need to realize they can still hold athletes responsible but they should always put it in the frame of the future. ‘You can be the best in the nation, you are capable of it, you need to work and improve and you will be that good’ instead of ‘you lost because you didn’t wrestle, you aren’t working hard, and you are making mistakes.’ When you succeed internalize it “I am that good”. On the other hand if you lose, find something you can just brush off, for example that takedown in overtime “That guy hit an awesome shot on me and I was sure the time ran out.”



The pessimist reverses all the views of the optimistic. He sees failure as a fatal, life devouring, self-inflicted problem. Optimistic and pessimistic views are on a continuum. If you reread the first few sentences I wrote then you will realize they are completely pessimistic. Children have incredibly optimistic scores. They are incredibly hopeful people. If you have kids, try to use that optimism for yourself instead of hindering it with this reality nonsense. Most people will find themselves trying to evaluate their failures and successes realistically. Stop. There are too many benefits to optimism. Studies were done on optimism by attaching numbers to each factor and by taking a quote from a professional athlete. I could explain the study but I’ll give you the results. Athletes who are optimists do far better after losing than athletes who are pessimists, so much so that you can make a huge profit on continuously gambling on significant optimists after losses. In the long run optimists will improve and find more success than pessimists. There are studies on team optimism and proof that optimism predicts political leaders. If you really want to know more read Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman (my sports psychologist suggested it to me)

Now here’s some real homework. I want you to find 5 things you considered successes recently and 5 things you considered failures. Writing is believing, people who wrote arguments first giving little concessions found themselves favoring and believing things they previously would have never. The more public the more they committed to those beliefs. So be an outspoken optimist. Take those ten times and before you try to explain them think of the factors, Permanence, Pervasiveness, and Personalization. Now create some explanation that you might believe, even if it might not be realistic. Write it down; write it out exactly as you would think it. Now the next times you want to explain something don’t even review how it felt or try to replay it in your mind. Simply go to the factors, create an explanation, and then replay the incident through the frame of the explanation. It doesn’t matter whether it was a success or failure only that you are thinking optimistically about however you saw it.

Lesson #2: Think before you speak. Especially when it’s the voice in your head speaking to the guy you’re going to have to look in the mirror everyday for the rest of your life.