Latest / Between The Rounds Official / INSIDE CAMP | FINDING YOUR FLOW
Transcript
- Sarah: Welcome to a mini episode of Between the Rounds. ⁓ This Inside Camp, week four. Think for yourself. The best fighters in the world share one quality. It's not power. It's not speed. It's the ability to look calm when deciding exactly when to attack. The final sparring sessions with the squad took place this week, ahead of them heading off to Brazil for the World Boxing Games. This is camp at its sharpest. Everyone's dialed in and focused. And this week, instead of being buried in my own rounds, I stepped back. I paid attention to what was happening around me. When you spend enough time around world-class athletes, you notice what separates them from the rest. Like I mentioned, it's not power, it's not speed, it's calmness. across sparring, across pad sessions and technical work, they share one quality. They make it look effortless, even under pressure, actually especially under pressure. They find their flow state and they stay in it. They control the action without even forcing it. But here's the part that's key. The calmness isn't passive. Don't get that wrong. They can switch gears in the blink of an eye. One second they're cruising, the next, the tempo changes and you've just eaten three punches. intensity. ⁓ It's the ability to choose when to release it. I've worked with leaders like that. The room's on fire, everyone's reacting, and they lower their voice. Not because they don't feel the pressure, because they've trained themselves to control when they turn it up You don't see the shift, you just feel the outcome of their actions. The other thing that defined this week was feedback. How it's given, how it's received, and how much that approach matters. The coaching style I've come to love here asks you to think. What openings are you seeing? Are you disguising your attacks? That's the work. Not waiting to be told, asking yourself the questions in real time, building your own boxing IQ, developing pattern recognition so you can read the fight while you're actually in it. Now of course there's a place for prescriptive coaching, calling specific shots, redirecting someone who's fixated or caught in their head. You have to be prepared for both. Because if you perform only when someone's calling your openings, you've got a problem. The crowd gets loud, your own breathing drowns out everything, and suddenly you're alone in there with no ability to think for yourself. The emphasis here is ownership. ⁓ Think first, then we sharpen your thinking together. And that's a two-way street. Coaches who only talk build dependent fighters. Coaches who listen and adapt build problem solvers. at the end of most sessions here, the coaches generally ask two questions. How did you find that? And most of all, did you enjoy it? We're deep in camp, the intensity is real, and the last question of the day is about enjoyment. That's quite a reset. If you're not enjoying this, then something is off. not the work, your relationship with the work. If you're improving, but hating every session, that's a short runway. Performance without enjoyment becomes a grind you eventually walk away from. Now that's not to say you're going to enjoy every single session, but you begin to appreciate the work and the progress you're making. I think back to quarterly reviews I've had to sit through. There'd be 15 minutes of how we're reaching targets, 15 minutes on status updates, and zero minutes on whether anyone in the room is actually enjoying building the thing. We measure output obsessively. We almost never ask people if the work still lights them up. That question should follow every leader out of the room. Week four wraps with a reminder. Sometimes the best training you do is observing the standards set by the best and letting it recalibrate yours. I'm Sarah Cunningham ⁓ and this is Inside Camp for Between the Rounds. And I'm so grateful for all for joining me I'll see you all next week.