TRAIN, or TRY?

We learn many tools in counseling.  I have had clients learn a skill and then try it once during the week and come back to let me know that this skill doesn’t work for them.  While I am glad to see that they tried the skill and put in at least that much effort, I have come to learn that there is a difference between training and trying something.  I was reading a book called “I am More Than Enough” By Dr. Robert Jones and Bryce Dunford.  In this book, they had a great analogy that helped me explain what I was seeing when client’s I worked with did this.  I am going to paraphrase that analogy here.

Let us say that your gym is having a contest. In four weeks, they will draw a couple of names for the people that are going to be able to win $100,000. There are many names in the jar but you choose to add yours along with the others.  Now once your name is drawn there will be a date set and if you can bench press 100 lbs. by that date, you could be a winner. 

Four weeks pass, and along with another person, your name is drawn.  The date for the big lift is set for two weeks.  Ecstatic (as any of us would be) at a chance to win that kind of money, you find yourself obsessing about it.  You plan how to spend the money and what you will be doing with it once you have won the money, and then at last the day of the big even arrives. 

The News is there to cover this event and you feel the pressure to do well.  Here is your moment.  If you can lift the weight just twenty-four inches away from your body you win. You feel that weight rest on you as two men steadily place it there.  Next to you is the other person that got their name picked. The next ten seconds will tell your future. 

You begin to exert all your best physical and mental effort to lift the weight.  You can’t move it off of your chest.  It might as well have been three hundred pounds for all that matters.  You simply can’t budge it.  Next to you, the person is slowly lifting the weight and you see that they are going to win the money. 

Two men come and finally lift the barbell off you and a T.V. personality shoves a microphone in your face and asks how you felt.  You responded that you are very disappointed, and don’t know what happened.  You tried as hard as you could.  You guess it just wasn’t meant to be.  Your partner in the lift reports that he is grateful for the chance he had and is excited to see that all of his training and hard work in the last six weeks has paid off.

The same principal applies to mental health skills.

If we don’t take the time to train our brains, so that we can create the neuropathways that it needs, we won’t be able to implement a skill when we need it.  We can try once, and not see results, or we can practice the tools we are learning and use therapy to train, learn, and get better.  In the end, you are only going to get out what you put in.  Are you going to TRAIN, or TRY?

By Kristy Goodson, LMSW