Snowboarding, Life and The Secret Of Pushing Yourself

I watched a documentary on TV a long time ago that said that Olympic divers will typically spend several days rehearsing a dive they've never done before in their head before attempting it. Only when they feel confident that they've got every motion clearly set in their head do they try it.

There was a scientist who was doing I think fMRI tests on one of the divers as he was "practicing" and the scientist said that most likely when the dive is actually being executed (the diver didn't have that head-bowl thing on when he was actually diving obviously), the same neural pathways are used. What the diver was doing when imagining the jump over and over was reinforcing the same pathway over and over. That's what allowed him to execute the dive perfectly on the "first" try.

The same effect comes into play in a breakup after a long relationship. The reason you feel so depressed and so physically bad in an unexpected breakup is that you've been reinforcing one specific pathway every day for years so if it's suddenly cut off the brain doesn't handle that well at all.

The point I was trying to make is that most of the time, what prevents you from doing something is not lack of skill, but lack of confidence / courage.