This post was originally published by Terry Laughlin on May 9, 2011 and is a follow-up companion piece to an Apr. 2011 post from Terry that we published two weeks ago.

In my previous post, Stalled Progress? It’s Not a Plateau– It’s a Crossroads, I described the plateau encountered by most people soon after they begin swimming as the place where you can learn lessons and gain insights that will determine your ultimate level of accomplishment and satisfaction as a swimmer. The greatest danger is to assume you’ve gone as far as you’re capable of.

It happened to me 40 years ago, and it took me another 30 years to discover the way out. I started swimming competitively as a 10th grader and never quite escaped the literal slow lane of my relatively undistinguished high school team. I swam the longest event – 400-yard freestyle at the time – and while I wasn’t winning races, at least my times were improving.

When I began college swimming (in late 1968), the stakes and the training increased sharply. Over the next two years my time for the 1650-yard freestyle improved by almost 3 minutes. But in my third year, it improved by only 4 seconds. Going into my final season I resolved to work harder than ever, prevailing on our coach to offer double workouts twice a week. Even so, that year my 1650 time was 20 seconds slower and I fell out of the top 6 at our conference meet. I concluded I’d reached the limits of my ability and ‘retirement’ from competitive swimming came as a relief.

A quarter-century later, looking for lessons about skill-acquisition to pass on to “adult-onset” swimmers, I read several books about martial arts. The most influential was Mastery, the Keys to Success and Long Term Fulfillment by George Leonard. Leonard was a student of Zen who became an Aikido sensei despite beginning study at the advanced age of 47. Leonard writes that fulfillment comes not from achieving a goal but from choosing a challenge that requires your full devotion — which is precisely how I experience improvement-oriented swimming.

Value the Process
Those who decide to pursue Mastery most often do so as a result of encountering that initially frustrating first plateau. Where others may give up and pursue something else or simply accept ‘this is as good as it’s going to get,’ a fortunate few learn to Love the Plateau. After all, as Leonard writes, “If our life is a good one . . . most of it will be spent on the plateau.”  Therefore we should learn “to value, to enjoy, even to love . . . the long stretch of diligent effort with no seeming progress.”

Loving the plateau doesn’t infer complacency. Rather, it means coming to value the process over the product. In the previous article, I quoted a TI Discussion Forum post from “SG” who had improved in a matter of months from swimming two laps to three miles, then over a few more months improved his time for one mile from 40 to 33 minutes. When his progress stalled he experienced his first frustration — and a measure of doubt over whether he could swim any faster. When doubt intrudes, improvement — and commitment — become doubly hard.

As I responded to SG, if he were to improve to 32, 31 or 30 minutes, the thrill of accomplishment might last for 15 seconds after touching the wall and seeing the magic digits on the pace clock – and then be followed by 15 or more hours of practice before seeing another drop. 

The key to maximizing the body-mind-spirit benefits of swimming lies in applying the following five insights to those hours:

• Passionate Curiosity  “I have no special talents; I am only passionately curious.”– Albert Einstein    Are there aspects of swimming you take for granted, do by rote, or simply because you’ve seen someone else doing it? Do you know the  specific benefit of every technique or training method you practice?

• Pursue Improvement  Make it your goal to improve your swimming – not just to show up, check off an item on your to-do list, or complete a certain yardage total – every time you enter the water. If your goal is to get in 3000 yards, that’s all you’re guaranteed to accomplish. If you make it your goal to spend an hour purposefully focused on improvement, your chances of that get a quantum boost.

• Be Specific  The human brain dislikes generalities and thrives on specifics. So when you set an improvement goal, make it explicit. Is it your head position while breathing . . . seeing fewer bubbles in your stroke . . . imprinting a Mail Slot entry . . . or to keep your SPL below 17 in a set of 200s?

• Measure  “What gets measured gets improved,” goes the saying. When you set out to improve something how will you know you’re going in the right direction? Set up feedback loops to keep you on track.

• Trust  When your improvement curve flattens, it’s critical to understand that when you practice with specific, measurable improvement goals change at the cellular level (i.e. neurons in your brain and nervous system) – while not perceptible – is ongoing. At intervals that incremental change consolidates to produce a thrilling forward leap. Between those leaps, the pleasure of total immersion in practice is its own reward.

Take Your Swimming to the Next Level!

Learn the Habits of Mastery and develop expert-level skills with Total Immersion’s 2.0 Freestyle Mastery Complete Self-Coaching Course. Do you love learning, practicing, and swimming the TI Way? Are you excited about attaining personal mastery in the most efficient and exacting skills available in freestyle? Have you mastered the TI Foundations in prior videos or the Effortless Endurance (formerly Ultra Efficient Freestyle) Self-Coaching Course? If yes, the 2.0 Freestyle Mastery Course is for you.

The post “Love the Plateau” (If You Wish to Break Through!) and 5 Traits of the Mastery Mindset appeared first on Total Immersion.

Terry leaps off a cliff in Eleuthera, the Bahamas, December 2006 (photo:

Continuing with the theme of goal-setting, which we explored in last week’s post– “Strategies for Achieving Your Breakthrough Season: Success is Not the Result of Luck!”– this week, we revisit Terry’s December 2015 blog on the pursuit of accomplishing “audacious” swimming goals and the vital importance of consciously mastering one’s mindset in such endeavors. In this article, Terry discussed how visionary goals which imbued him with a deep sense of purpose enabled him to accomplish all of the following within a year:

• Complete a second Manhattan Island Marathon Swim
• Win his first National Open Water Championship
• Break a National Masters Record in open water
• Win a World Masters Championship Medal in the 3K Open Water event

And more importantly, he shared his approach in order to demonstrate that these strategies for success can work for any of us, if we choose to cultivate these habits of excellence:  learned optimism, seeking “flow” states,” following a path of mastery, choosing an approach of “deliberate practice,” setting meaningful goals, and finding worthy challenges even in adverse circumstances.  Enjoy… and Happy Laps!

12/21/15

Ten years ago, several months before my 55th birthday, I set a group of BHAGs or Big Hairy Audacious Goals. The term comes from the book Built to Last by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, who studied businesses that had maintained influence and excellence over many decades. BHAGs focus on enduring and meaningful impact: Henry Ford set out to democratize the automobile;  in the early days of Apple, Steve Jobs talked of putting a computer in every home–40 years later there’s a computer in everyone’s pocket!

BHAGs embody visionary thinking. In 1960, JFK  proposed to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. This achievement, fulfilled in 1969, remains a defining and uplifting moment in American history–and, well, “a giant step for all mankind,” as Neil Armstrong put it.

“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Like the moon mission, BHAGs usually take a decade, or decades, to achieve. But I aimed to fulfill mine within a year.  They included:

• Complete a second Manhattan Island Marathon Swim.
• Win my first National Open Water Championship.
• Break a National Masters Record in open water. (I’d never even set a team record in  high school or college.)
• Win a World Masters Championship Medal in the 3K Open Water event.

Happily, I did achieve all of those and more–winning four national championships, at distances from 1 mile to 10K, and breaking two national records for the 55-59 age group, the 1- and 2-Mile Cable Swims.

My greatest benefit was gaining a sense of having a mission to accomplish, which lasted for nearly a year from the time I conceived of them. Not a single practice during that time ever felt like a check-off in my daily routine. They all felt important–even urgent. The imprint of a ‘year of high purpose’ endured well beyond that period and has had far-reaching impacts.

While I couldn’t have achieved my goals without a highly-efficient stroke, even more critical than how I swam was how I thought. For a decade previously, I’d become increasingly interested in Positive Psychology–the study of thought processes displayed by high-performing individuals.

I learned about the traits, behaviors and mindsets of such people in books such as Learned Optimism by Dan Seligman, Mastery by George Leonard, Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi PhD, and the principles of Deliberate Practice by Anders Ericsson PhD.  Setting such galvanizing goals provided an ideal opportunity to test these principles.

By applying these lessons I achieved far beyond what I’d always thought was possible. As a result of that experience, Total Immersion has emphasized effective thinking as much as effective movement.

Goal-setting with the Flow

As I approached my 60th birthday in 2011, I faced physical challenges that limited what I could accomplish athletically. In my late 50s, I began to experience fatigue and chronic musculoskeletal pain associated with the autoimmune syndrome, Polymyalgia Rheumatica (PMR). I also began to suffer foot and calf cramps after barely an hour of swimming–an effect of arthritic narrowing in my lower spine.

Between them, my training was significantly limited compared to previously. If I swam a bit too long or hard, I could be left feeling drained for hours after.   And my feet and calves often began cramping after little more than 2000 yards.

Yet though my training was likely to be quite limited, I still craved the sense of purpose and urgency I’d experienced five years earlier. Going with the flow means seeking opportunity in adversity. So I decided to Goal-set with the Flow.

My mid-50s accomplishments  had been in my lifelong strong suit, distance freestyle.  At 60 I decided to strike out in a new direction, emphasizing events outside my comfort zone–shorter distances and the other strokes.  I’d swum only freestyle for most of my life and had only begun to focus on other strokes a few years earlier.

As well, the limitations on how long or intensively I could train resulted in two surprising developments:

1. Knowing that I had a practice ‘budget’ of 2500 yards made every lap seem far more precious. I would allot time only for activities proven to improve performance.
2. Needing to be careful about intensity, pushed me to rely less than ever on power and muscle, and find the easiest way to accomplish any task.

The results were thrilling and have transformed my approach to practice and training.  In 2011, at Masters Nationals I entered every discipline but backstroke–and medaled in all four! In 200 Butterfly, I even did a lifetime best, swimming faster than I had at 55 when I was in the midst of achieving BHAGs in distance freestyle.

Briefer, More Focused, Better Than Ever

Finding opportunity in adversity has led me to embrace practices that emphasize focus over duration.  I seldom swim beyond an hour; many of my practices last just 40 to 50 minutes. What I love most is how keen my focus remains for that duration–quite literally from first stroke to last at times.

I include only two to three sets or activities in most practices. In each I’m either trying to perform a subtle skill better than I ever have in my life. Or ‘solving problems’ related to controlling stroke count, while swimming faster–on the clock, or on my Tempo Trainer. I can succeed at most tasks only by giving it my full attention. Moments of Flow have become more routine than ever before.

Practicing this way has produced surprising–even thrilling–breakthroughs in awareness or control each year. My pull, kick, and breathing are all strikingly more efficient than they were before I turned 60–a development confirmed by comparing recent video with video shot in my 50s.

And it my stroke doesn’t just look better. It feels amazing almost every day–better than it ever has. Twice in one recent week I posted this on the TI Facebook page: “I felt fantastic in the water today–I’ve never felt this good before.” Not an insignificant claim after 50 years of swimming.

I’ve never looked forward to swimming as much as I do now, nor have I felt a greater sense purpose and flow. I still have PMR symptoms; I often feel achy and mildly flu-like as I get in the water. But within minutes I  feel indescribably great. Swimming has always been known for its unique healing properties. I seem to have tapped into something beyond.

In three months I’ll enter the 65-69 age group. As I did at 55 and 60, I plan to attend Masters Nationals in the spring to get a concrete gauge on my performance capabilities. In early November I wrote out my goals for the next six months. As I was writing them, I felt the familiar sense of purpose and urgency, and I’m more grateful than ever for how central swimming goals have become for my life.

 Learn the skills of Efficient Freestyle with the Total Immersion Effortless Endurance Self Coaching Course!

The post Going with the Flow: Audacious Goals & Seeking Opportunity in Adversity appeared first on Total Immersion.

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

– Anonymous

The above quote was one of Terry’s favorite epigrams in his latter years. Its message so resonated with his personal ethos that he even included it in the signature of his email for a period of time, prior to swapping it out for his own message: “May your laps be as happy as mine.” Together, both quotes reflect two primary themes that drove Terry and his mission with Total Immersion, and form the continuing legacy today:

1) Success is cultivated consciously, through deliberate, daily choices about where to focus one’s attention and energy.
2) Enjoying the practice of swimming as a life-long path of mastery and flow is as valuable as achieving any end goal.

That said, these two philosophies linked together synergistically, motivating Terry to pursue “peak performance” and “flow states” as a daily habit in his swimming life. Whether setting an intention that each practice session be “the best swim of my life,” reading voraciously on any relevant new research, or tirelessly seeking to simplify and refine the most elegant and efficient method of teaching swimming, this underlying credo deeply informed Terry’s life and his mission with T.I.

It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that even the early years of Total Immersion were shaped by Terry’s understanding of the importance of conscious and strategic goal-setting. This week, we’ve reached deep into Terry’s archives to pull material from his “Swimmer’s Bible,” a self-published booklet he wrote and sold in 1991, just 2 years after Total Immersion was founded. This document exists only as a hard copy from Terry’s personal library (perhaps some early alumni have tattered copies) and has never been published online until now– he wrote it before the internet existed! Though T.I. was still in its infancy when it was published in ’91 (5 years before his best-selling Simon & Schuster book), Terry had already been coaching elite age-group and college swimmers for nearly 20 years and had achieved considerable success, developing 24 national champions between 1973 and 1988.

Terry’s primary aim with the “Swimmer’s Bible” was to share with average adult swimmers the same successful strategies that he had employed with the accomplished swimmers he had coached at the highest levels of elite competition. The following excerpt on goal-setting is the opening section of the “Swimmer’s Bible”– the fact that goal-setting was the introduction to his first guidebook to swimming is not incidental, but completely fundamental to his approach. He recognized, from years of successfully coaching high-level athletes, that how one thinks about one’s swimming is integral to how one performs. This understanding is a philosophical thread that connects the founding years of Total Immersion to its current incarnation, and his guidance from 1991 is as practical and effective now as it was then. Enjoy… and Happy Laps!

Total Immersion Adult Swim Camps: “The Swimmer’s Bible” (1991) — p. 1-5

(Scanned copy of original 1991 “Swimmer’s Bible”– Cover and p. 1-5)

The Breakthrough Season

Success strategies to get whatever you want out of swimming!

Success, particularly in training for athletic performance, is not the result of luck, but the predictable outcome of planning, concentration, and cultivating the basic talent we all have. No great success is ever achieved without great commitment. Your swimming can and should provide you with results that are deeply satisfying, and renew your enthusiasm, ensuring your long-term involvement. This could be anything from setting a world Masters record to simply swimming for peak mental, physical, and emotional health. You can achieve all your goals, but it won’t happen by accident. You need a success system, and we have one for you.

Achieving the Breakthrough Season– Six Steps to Success

1. Have a well-defined goal that really matters.
2. Believe totally that you have the resources and capabilities to achieve that goal.
3. Develop a strategy or plan for achieving your goal.
4. Execute that strategy with purposeful, effective, and consistent actions.
5. Monitor your progress and learn from your experience in pursuit of your goal.
6. Adjust your plan as necessary to reach your goal.

Who Needs Goals?

[Editorial Note: Triathletes are not listed because it was still a relatively new sport, hence T.I. was primarily teaching Masters swimmers and fitness swimmers at the time of this writing in 1991. This guidance naturally applies to triathletes, as well.]

Competitive Swimmers: Clearly, the answer is yes; those who define the outcomes they want to achieve greatly increase their chances of obtaining them. Goals engender passion, give power and meaning to what you do, strengthen your resolve to adhere to a training schedule, make a tight interval, do a drill correctly, etc. when your will is weak.

Fitness Swimmers: Yes. Nearly 70% of all Masters swimmers never compete, but they all attend workouts for good reasons: fitness, weight control, stress relief, etc. Swimming for health and enjoyment is no less important than training for competition. Doing anything without some sort of purpose eventually becomes dull, boring, and repetitive. If you allow that to happen, you’ve defeated your original purpose. Therefore, it is important to express your purpose for swimming, then set goals that will help you achieve it.

Know Your Outcome in Advance! Do this exercise in writing:

Setting the Goal

Professionals in the field of motivation and achievement believe strongly that the development and ultimate accomplishment of goals begins with a vision, and that the more vivid and specific that vision is, the better the chance of a successful outcome.

4-Step Goal Setting Process

1. List your goals. Limit to 5 or fewer to sharpen your focus and force yourself to prioritize. State them in positive terms. Describe them in specific and sensory-rich language– what, when, where, why, and how. Impose deadlines and time-frames.
2. Write a paragraph on why each goal has value. Describe how you will benefit from reaching your goals, what you will risk by not reaching them. Your goals should be challenging but realistic. They should have sufficient value and immediacy to carry you through difficulties, to inspire you to passion and extraordinary efforts when needed, but more importantly, to energize and reinforce you for consistent, persistent use of your resources day-in, day-out.
3. Inventory your strengths and capabilities, your resource to get the job done. You can do this best by recalling several past successes and capabilities that made them possible.
4. Identify resources and capabilities that you must acquire, develop, and improve to reach your goal. What has kept you from reaching this goal in the past?

Be consistent and persistent. Keep taking action until you reach your goal. Persist! Commit to applying your efforts over long periods of time. Persist! Nothing worthwhile comes easily or quickly. Persist! — personal credo of Ande Rasmussen, Masters swimmer from Austin, TX

Believe in Yourself

1. Develop an unshakeable faith that you can and will reach your goal. Belief is a catalyst for taking action– the biggest difference between success and failure. If you were guaranteed success, what actions would you undertake right now?
2. As recommended above, remember your past successes and see them in your mind as if they were happening now. Live and breathe the success of the past and project it into the present. Then use that to create a vivid mental image of your goal as reality right now. Experience your outcome on a daily basis, as being already true.

Develop a Plan to Make Your Goal Reality

Martial arts guru Bruce Lee said that 10 minutes of workout with mind and body completely focused is more valuable than 10 hours of going through the motions. How to do it? For adult athletes with limited training time:  precise, effective, goal-oriented use of that time is critical.

1. Focus on 2-3 closely related events (in either stroke or distance), identify the capacities needed to perform well in them, and use the information acquired here at camp to plan a training program that devotes the bulk of your time and energy to enhancing those capacities. Minimize time spent on anything that does not directly enhance your chances of reaching your goal.
2. To assist in your planning process, consider finding a role model who is achieving what you want to [achieve]. Ask them to identify the critical abilities, attitudes, and training habits that permit them to perform as you would like to. Work at developing the same traits and habits.
3. Write down your plan, including:

• Actions to take– what, how, and when you must do.
• Beliefs to cultivate– affirmations and thought patterns.
• Schedules needed– daily, weekly, and a total span.

Results in Real Time

Commit to purposeful activity directed at achieving goals that contribute to the mission! Do something purposeful each day to reach your goal. Even if you have no workout scheduled, you can still review your log book, refine a training schedule, or seek information that will improve your preparation.

1. Begin immediately. Even the greatest journey must begin with one small step, and nothing happens until you take it. Once your goal is set, don’t wait until your plan or conditions are ideal. Even if your plan is incomplete, it is important to take that first step, to be action-oriented. Have confidence that you can adjust and improve your plan as you go through experience and increased understanding.
2. Review your actions critically each day and evaluate what you have done to advance towards your goal. Compare actions and outcomes to the requirements of your goal. Be willing to make adjustments as you learn more. Examine your continuing motivation and commitment.

Learn From Your Experiences, But Don’t Be Limited By Them

Two thought patterns common to highly successful people which will prove useful to you:

1. Everything happens for a reason and a purpose, and it serves them. They think in terms of possibilities and benefits, though those may not always be immediately apparent.
2. Failure is an emotionally-charged concept which they do not entertain. There are only results– some successful, others are opportunities for learning experiences which improve chances for ultimate success.

The best way to measure the effectiveness of your personal training program is to keep a detailed diary or log book of practices and meets [or races]. Over time, the information collected will reveal successful patterns in your training, and make future planning a more educated process.

Course Correction

Peak performers exhibit the flexibility/adaptability to change direction when necessary and find more effective methods– the mental agility to balance the competing demands of work, family, and training.

When a training program leaves you feeling flat and stale rather than strong and sharp, when a race brings poor results, when a taper isn’t working– get more information, understand why, consider alternatives, don’t be complacent. You may simply need to consult with someone– a coach or another swimmer– who can take a more objective or informed view of your situation. Then be willing to try something new. Even failed plans have value because, by eliminating what doesn’t work, they help narrow the path to ultimate success.

It isn’t performing well that makes you feel great– it’s feeling great that makes you perform well.” — Dr. Jim Loehr, sports psychologist

Succeeding in Competition

“Psyching out” in competition can undermine the world’s greatest training program because physical skills and great conditioning are no match for self-doubt and nervousness. Sports psychologist Dr. Jim Loehr, author of the book Mentally Tough, says that the mental game of handling competitive stress can be taught just as systematically as a good stroke, and mental muscles [can be] conditioned just as predictably as your physical ones.

The most important trait for sports success is the ability to shut out stress, doubt, and distraction, and concentrate on the job at hand. Mental toughness, as Loehr calls it, means staying in a calm, focused state. Negative thoughts cause physiological reactions: increased heart rate, muscle tightness, shortness of breath, and reduced blood flow. Pre-race anxiety can even increase blood lactate levels. Positive emotions (Loehr’s “Ideal Performance State”– an internal feeling of high arousal combined with a profound sense of calmness, clarity, and control) produce desirable physiological reactions: greater muscle flexibility and increased endurance.

What can you do at meets [or races] to minimize anxiety and maximize calmness and confidence?

1. Project confidence even when you don’t feel it– “lying with your body,” as Loehr calls it. Anthony Robbins, author of Unlimited Power, says you can overcome fear and uncertainty by projecting energy, confidence, strength, and joy in your posture, voice, and mental state. Such actions can actually produce a shift in your emotions.
2. Enjoy yourself. Sure, competition can be stressful, but racing is your most direct opportunity to reap the rewards of your training. So, mount the block [or enter the water] with eagerness, not dread. When you have long waits between races, don’t sit around contemplating the next race– move around, make friends, socialize, stay loose. “In any kind of performance, we’ve found that the more you enjoy what you’re doing, the more all the other qualities fall into place,” says Loehr.
3. To shut out doubt and distractions just before the race, concentrate on one, well-focused technical point that will help you execute better.
4. A gentle warmup just before your race can also be very effective in calming your nerves and getting focused on what you can do to cultivate a swim that feels great.

 We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. — Will Durant, philosopher

The post Strategies for Achieving Your Breakthrough Season: Success is Not the Result of Luck! appeared first on Total Immersion.