Category: Mind set

Anxiety is the theme for this year’s World Mental Health Week, which ends today. As soon as I saw that word, anxiety, I knew that I wanted to write a blog article about anxiety and kayaking. Kayaking on white water is always going to involve some feeling of nervousness. You are under pressure to execute your skills with the knowledge that if you do not, there is the potential for unpleasant consequences. Being anxious is a very understandable response to paddling on white water.

However it is also a sport which can lead to high levels of anxiety at times where it is not always understandable. I am talking about anxiety that seems to come out of the blue and yet has the ability to completely paralyse you. For me, this is the anxiety that appears in situations that in theory you should be completely comfortable in. Local rivers you have run dozens of times before, play spots which you know are safe to practice in, rapids which you could run backwards with your eyes closed and still be fine. It’s the anxiety that no one wants to talk about because it just doesn’t make sense. In this article, I am going to talk about it. I will mainly be talking from my own experiences.

Today I took a playboat down my local white water course, HPP, and enjoyed every minute of it. That may not sound like much but it is a huge deal to me. A year ago, for a combination of reasons, I completely lost my confidence. Specifically my confidence whilst paddling a playboat at HPP. It has taken me a year to find that confidence again.

I wanted to share my experience through this blog. Perhaps this article will help someone else who is feeling the same. I hope at the very least that if future me ever gets myself into this situation again – reading this article will help me!

We all know that if you make a mistake, the best thing to do is own up and apologise for it. Hit your friend in the head with your paddle as you drop into the eddy? Say sorry. Bash into the side of them as you cross an eddy line with a little too much enthusiasm? Say sorry. But what happens when the mistakes you are apologising for are only visible to you? What happens when the only standard you are willing to accept is perfection? Should you continue to say sorry for not being, as seen through your own eyes, ‘good enough’?

It has taken me a long time to realise that I am a perfectionist and an even longer time to admit it. I have found that this personality trait has had a real impact on my paddling, both positive and negative. Learning to cope with my perfectionism is still very much an ongoing process for me but I wanted to share some of my thoughts on here. Ironically this article isn’t perfect and I don’t have all the answers. But maybe it may help someone who is reading this. Equally, anyone reading who has more ideas than me, please do get in touch!

A little while ago I wrote three articles about to how to become an ‘independent boater’. These articles focused on three smaller goals you should achieve in order to move from club paddling to peer paddling. There is one key ingredient that I did not talk about in detail however and that is getting professional coaching. This I felt deserved to be discussed in a separate piece and in more depth.

I want to discuss the value of coaching and how to get the most out of having coaching. I have made the conscious decision not to name any kayaking coaches in this article. A wise friend once said ‘different coaches work for different people and at different times in your life, different coaches will work for you.’ I thought that this was such an accurate statement and it has really stuck with me. Everybody will have different coaching styles that they prefer and that is fantastic. We also are incredibly lucky in the UK to have a huge wealth of talent in our white water coaches and it would be unfair to single out just one or two in this article.

When it comes to head games in kayaking I am my own worst enemy. One of the greatest obstacles that I have to deal with is when negative thoughts about my kayaking or even myself come into my head whilst I am on the water. These thoughts have the potential to affect my river time so greatly that two things usually occur. The first is that I stop enjoying myself. The second is that my paddling actually gets worse because of it. My whole motivation for kayaking is because I enjoy it so if something gets in the way of that, it needs to be addressed. I came up with a list of my most frequent negative thoughts and how I dealt with them. I then asked people what negative thoughts they themselves experienced whilst on the water. I was amazed at the response I received to this question. It was clear from the replies I was getting that there were some strong common themes and many of the answers actually matched my own list. So I decided to address three of the most prevalent negative thoughts along with how I have learned to deal with these thoughts whilst kayaking.

‘What happens if you fall over?’ is a question I am often asked when trying to explain what whitewater kayaking is to non-kayaking friends. I would usually respond by describing what a roll is. Of course rolling back up after capsizing your kayak isn’t the only possible outcome. If you are wondering what another option might be, it is of course the swim! For a water based sport, I have always been surprised by the variation in attitudes when it comes to swimming out of your kayak. As someone who has had many, many (I’m really not exaggerating), many swims, I feel I should share some of my thoughts on the matter.