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Are You Feeling Judged in the Gym?

Over the past 2 weeks I’ve had about 10 people come to me saying they’re not feeling super comfortable in class.

I get it, they’re doing weird stuff they’ve never done before and they feel like they look silly. I’ve been there before (In CrossFit over a decade ago AND in a million other places in my life), I think we all have.

When I tell these people “I’ve had 9 other members come to me and say the same thing”, most of them think “You’re just saying that to make me feel better, I know it’s not true, people are definitely looking at me”. I PROMISE you it is true, and if everyone’s looking at you how the hell are they looking at the other 9 people that feel this way too? Also, who the hell is actually paying attention to what they’re doing? Apparently no one, we’re all just gazing lovingly (or judgingly?) into each other’s eyes, watching each other suck at CrossFit.

Most of you are beginners.

You’re going to be bad at stuff. That’s OK! In fact, it’s kind of the point. You HAVE to be bad at stuff in order to get good at it. At some point while we’re growing up we lose this “beginner’s mind”.

We all start out sucking happily. Falling every time we try to walk, crashing our bikes day after day after day. Then at some point we get conscious of the people around us and we tell ourselves we need to be the Michael Phelps of CrossFit the first day we walk in the gym.

If you don’t get a muscle up the first time you try, you’re a failure. Your mile time is over 10 minutes? You’re a terrible person. Obviously, NO ONE at Locomotion thinks this about you. And if they do, you better believe I’ll kick their ass out of the gym so fast they won’t know which way is up.

Almost everyone is scaling the workout in our gym. Stop worrying about that, and make the workout challenging and appropriate for you. No one is paying attention to what you’re doing. Everyone is just trying to survive their own workout. Scaling is by far the fastest way to progress. It takes at least 6 months to start to feel comfortable with what we do…and we haven’t even been open that long! I never said it would be easy, but I swear to you, IT IS WORTH IT.

Just keep reaching a little bit further each day, and pretty soon you won’t be a beginner anymore. You’ll be the person new people look at when they walk in the door and think “Man, I wish I could do that!!”.

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