I've been thinking a lot about willpower as a muscle the last couple days and how this concept relates to sailing. Our season ended this fall on a disappointing note: the coed team didn't qualify for the Atlantic Coast Championships, the first time in something like 13 years. At the time our team was ranked 6th in the country so this was a big blow, and I felt a lot of the weight on my shoulders as the top skipper on the team. When it was over our coaches emphasized the need for a sense of urgency, a kind of fired-up attitude. To someone not in the sport the speech would be understood as: try harder.
Sailing is odd because it combines the mental aspects of golf with the tactical and strategic elements of chess, to which it adds the the technical aspect of any other sport. Can you imagine someone telling a golf player they needed to try harder to make a shot? Or a chess player that they needed to try harder to outsmart the other player? No, clearly a different sort of effort must be made to improve in those disciplines.
Willpower will take your game to the next level. Thinking back, at the end of the last school year I had that sense of urgency my coaches were talking about. I was fired up- angry, frankly- and felt I had no time to waste. I gathered a selection of my dad's sailing books and set to work reading them. I was determined to get better, and I did. The books definitely helped, as did sailing a few days a week every week, but what I think really made the difference was that I flexed my willpower muscle everyday. In my fired-up state I forced myself to do every task that needed to be done as soon as I could. Tax forms, emails, working out, whatever- as soon as the thought popped into my head I did it. In other words, I exercised my willpower, and I got stronger. This lasted throughout most of the summer, until I became complacent. At the end of the fall I was certainly "trying" as hard as ever, but something just wasn't the same.
A lot of sailors, and people from other sports for that matter, have said something along the lines of "I know what to do but for some reason I don't do it" at some point in their recreational careers. This fall I said that exact line after doing something particularly dumb in practice. After replaying the race in my head I observed that I had an internal voice that was telling me all of the right things to do ( "we should step back out to the left side, we're over-leveraged in the middle") and a second voice that raised doubts or gave alternative decisions. What I've just realized is that that first voice you hear when sailing is the same voice involved in willpower. When a thought pops in your head that says "I should do my laundry" and you do it, that builds the same strength used to make the right decision in sailboat racing.
Some may be wondering why you need anything but instinct to make the right decision in sailing. The answer is that for most situations you don't. For good sailors the right decision comes naturally. But the hard decisions require discipline, especially when the ego's involved. A simple example would be covering 2 boats on the last beat coming in to the finish. A voice in your head says "there's no way you can cover both boats if they split sides, pick one to cover and stick with it". Instead of listening you decide that actually there is really good breeze in the middle and you think you can catch both the left and right shift. You catch neither, and both boats pass you. With discipline the decision becomes easy: pick one boat and don't worry if the other beats you as you can't control the breeze.
As I wait for the start of the spring season I will be training both my body and my mind.
Flex that willpower muscle, through discipline watch it grow
* Doing some research I came across a blog that had some interesting objections to the depletion aspect of willpower. Check it out http://www.epjournal.net/blog/2011/08/willpower-is-not-a-resource/
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