Ilia Malinin skated off the Olympic ice with his head in his hands. About a week later, Alysa Liu literally jumped for joy on the gold medalist podium. Together, their stories are a master class in Tim Gallwey’s observation that your performance equals your potential minus the interference.
First, Ilia. Known as the Quad God, 21-year-old Ilia was competing in his first Olympics and was expected to win the gold going away. Until he collapsed – almost literally – in his concluding long program, falling out of several jumps and finishing 8th in the overall competition.
You had to feel for him – especially after the sportsmanship he showed towards the eventual gold medalist and the incredibly composed and candid interview he gave to NBC’s Andrea Joyce just after his results were announced. He acknowledged that the pressure of competing for the gold on the biggest stage in the world for the first time in his life got inside his head. Later, he said in another interview that in the seconds before he started his final skate, his mind was flooded with memories of every trauma he’d ever experienced. His interference overwhelmed his potential.
And then the exact opposite occurred in the women’s competition when 20-year-old Alysa Liu won the gold after giving the performance of her life.
Unlike Ilia, Alysa had been to the Olympics before, having competed and succeeded at the highest levels of world skating competition between the ages of 13 and 16. And then she walked away from all of that because she recognized she wanted to be a normal teenager. Eleven months ago, she realized that she still loved to skate, but the joy was in the skating, not the competition. So, she started skating again. But skating when you have the talent of Alysa Liu means you can skate with the best skaters in the world.
And that’s what she did this week on Olympic ice in Milan. She skated with pure joy. The point was the joy, not the gold. And from a place of freedom and joy she won the gold – decisively. With joy as her motivator, Alysa’s interference was eliminated and her performance just equaled her vast potential.
As Alysa skated, the NBC cameras panned to the face of Ilia Malinin watching her from the stands with a smile of deep appreciation. As a parent and as a human, my hope for Ilia is that after watching Alysa skate to her gold medal, the next time he’s on Olympic ice, he, too, will be propelled by joy and not the interference that comes with the pressure of Olympic competition. If he does, he’ll win.
Where in your life is interference overwhelming your potential? And where have you found the kind of joy that eliminates it?
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