NAGALAND
believe in yourself.

While we continuously hear that our lives are self-fulfilling prophecies, we rarely believe it. How can the mind have more power in a physical world than the body?  Nagaland taught me: while brawn runs the race, it is the brain that gives it orders.

Several of the other athletes were well aware of this. Before wrestling matches, one could not even communicate with Brad because he was lost in intense visualizations of beating the competition. Up until seconds before a race began, Rajko was nowhere to be found because he was engaged in a rigorous preparatory warm-up.  Jason, whose motto is “in it to win it,” even told me to slap him and make him angry before combat so that he’d have no reservations.  I was more used to just strolling onto the playing field and seeing how things went. That’s probably why I was a lot more used to losing as well.

In Nagaland I committed myself to prepare like the others to have complete confidence in my abilities in every activity. Not that I would boast or lose perspective (as I had been guilty of before), just that when it came to the task at hand I would focus, strive, and believe in my own success.  The difference was considerable. When we ran barefoot I was in the lead because my mind was in the lead. When we pole climbed, I reached the top because my mind was already there. It worked brilliantly.

I had the same success through the early rounds of the kick-fighting tournament. But after watching unbreakable Richard get beat badly by the same local I was about to face, the bruises on my legs started hurting a lot more and my mind focused on nothing but the fear of how injured I could get. While I fought in the match, I was not the same competitor I was in the practices. My mind had already decided I had lost.  Just as the power of a confident mind can allow us to do anything, the power of a destructive mind can prevent us from doing everything.