BE MORE TO DO MORE

Lee walks softly through the sliding doors into my living room, a converted 1960s garage which we rent from generous friends who live above.  For three years we lived humbly since we sold our home in Canberra and thrown everything into our Find Your Feet adventure business here in Tasmania.  Lee meets my outstretched hand with a quiet confidence and yet boyish nervousness.  I feel like I am looking in a mirror.  ‘Well this should be interesting!’ he remarks with a husky smoothness laced with an accent I cannot place.  ​

I flick on the microphone and watch the sound bars jump up and down as we begin to reminisce about adventures along Tasmania’s remote wilderness trails, the escapades which have profoundly shaped us.  Frenchman’s Cap with its landmark Lorax cliff face plummeting into Lake Tahune hundreds of metres below.  Federation Peak with its wallowing hippo-friendly mud.  And our local icon, Mt Wellington with is plethora of rabbit-warren trails etching a runner’s paradise across her north-eastern flanks.
  
For fifteen years Tasmania has been my home to a wicked combination of adventurous runs, heavy-legged recovery days and interval repetitions up brutal climbs. It shaped me as a person, elite runner and ultimately, a World Champion.  The mountain’s beauty has always helped to spark a belief in my dreams during times of adversity and has become a place for celebration after moments of accomplishment.  As stories unfold during my conversation with Lee, I realise that we are sharing a deeply profound moment of, ‘me too!’
  
Today Lee is a sixty-nine-year old recreational athlete whose greatest claim to fame, aside from the significant accomplishments in cycling to triathlon, running to trail running, is the fact that he has never been injured.  How is this possible?  A celebrated ecologist with an inquisitive mind that allows him to ask the deepest questions of humanity, Lee has adopted a belief in a theory called Punctuated Equilibrium.  Tasmania is his Petri dish.  I am rivetted.
  
“It is not the external world that needs to change. Transformational shifts happen from upgrading the internal world – your patterns of both thoughts and actions. These pattern shifts might just begin with moving beyond the drive for high performance; beyond the search for peak experiences; beyond being able to do more in your life. While the peaks are important and wonderful, the transformation of living more fully daily begins with a fundamental commitment to organize your life to be you at your best more often; to be more present, more grounded, more joyful, more playful, more focused — more “switched-on”. That way of living requires an investment in recovery: proper sleep, proper hydration and food intake, plenty of movement and an optimal way of thinking.”
  
This year, Federation Peak formed a huge punctuation mark in my life.  Over eleven hours of wading through mud and scrambling through a maze of horizontal scrub I overcome fear after nervous fear, driven by the knowledge from an early podcast guest, Dr Clive Stack, that fear serves the purpose of highlighting what is of greatest importance to us.  Being out there on that back-jarring trail, running and wading my way to the summit, was vitally meaningful to me.  And in the depths of one mud-hole, at a moment of ‘what am I doing!?’, I found a heightened realisation that we can only reach our greatest performances, our wildest ambitions, when we are grounded by a strong sense of self and what we love. Yes, discomforts aside, I love this side of Tasmania, and it helps me to uncover my truest self.   
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As a performance coach and consultant, time and time again I have observed the phenomena that when individuals have a profound understanding of their values and an ability to empower themselves; when they are then willing to play wilder and find the child within; only then do they reach their greatest levels of mastery and to strive for performance. Be wilder, play wilder, perform wilder.  Stability. Fun.  Perform… a constant cycle of self-exploration, playfulness and striving after which it is critical to return to our inner foundations and to ensure that they are still serving us. 
  
“Regardless of what you are aspiring towards, you do need elements of stability” 
   
As Lee explains, we grow in waves, with internal and external forces pushing us to rapidly adapt.  And if you are aware of how we as a species grow like this, then you can self-inflict the punctuation marks. From his steady home-base, this is how Lee has come to grow as an athlete.
   
“We have to be careful of not all heading for the middle ground. I think we need to pick up on our strengths and at times, create the punctuation marks.” 
   
In summary, it is vitally important to learn to be more to do more.  For me, I know that the old way of do more to be morehas passed and now been replaced with a desire to be wilder, play wilder and perform wilder.  In doing so, I slowly believe that I am finding the pathway to finding my feet.

LISTEN TO PODCAST #32 ATHLETICISM THROUGH THE THEORIES OF ECOLOGY WITH LEE BELBIN