“It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell.”

- Buddhist Quote

“Can you imagine what I would do if I could do all I can?”

- Sun Tzu

All of us have experienced those days in which we seemed to find fencing effortless and we can score touches with ease. When we have this feeling, we are experiencing what a sports psychologists call a “state of flow”. Some fencers seem to be able to create this “flow state” even in the face of pressure. We often hear that those fencers are mentally “tough”. In a more general way, a mentally tough fencer remains determined, focused, calm, confident, and energized under pressure. Mentally tough fencers consistently fence at the highest level of their ability. They look at hard opponents not as something to be avoided, but as challenges to overcome. This not to say that a mentally tough fencer is immune to the normal psychological pressures that every other fencer experiences, but the mentally tough approach fencing—and competition—in a way that minimizes the impact of those feelings on their performance. In rare cases, a fencer uses those feelings to fence even better.

Being mentally tough will not enable you to execute actions that you have never mastered. If you are a weekend fencer, you are not going to suddenly be fencing like an Olympian when you have achieved a state of flow. However, being mentally tough will mean that you will always fence your best.

Being mentally tough is not something your are born with. My own observations are that those athletes who are mentally tough at a young age are usually a product of an environment that either required it, or encouraged it. Whether the process was deliberate or accidental, it is an illusion that these fencers were “born” mentally tough. No matter what level of mental toughness we start with, we can train ourselves to be tougher than we are. It just takes time, discipline and persistence.

Through most of my early fencing career, I was not mentally tough. I had only a few occurrences when I was “in the flow” of a bout and fenced to the top of my potential. Those days were invariably the days when I earned a new rating or won an important tournament. Those days were also completely accidental. The rest of the time, I often fell short of my goals. Some days I fenced particularly terribly—far less than I was capable of. At the time, I never made the connection between consistent fencing and being mentally tough.

After my retirement from competition I turned to coaching. I started to see a lot of good fencers fail to succeed for no other reason that they did not seem to believe that they could succeed. I spent more time learning how to coach mental toughness, and learning some of the pitfalls of failing to be a mentally tough fencer. Some of the lessons I learned were pretty obvious. Some of them much less so. In all the cases, I learned that everyone has their strengths and weaknesses, and deliberate effort is needed to build up a fencer's ability to be mentally tough.

I have recently returned to competition to in the Veteran Age group. I have realized that all those years I coached fencers, I was also coaching myself, integrating the things that I have been telling my students with my own thinking and beliefs. I tell Jill—my wife—that my new, mentally tough attitude surprises me every time it comes up.

But why should it? I have spent the last 15 years practicing it with my students.

One does not wake up in the morning suddenly mentally tough. Mental toughness starts by making small changes in how you behave and in how you think about yourself and the fencing situations that you face. As simple as it sounds, standing up straight, looking people you perceive as better fencers in the eye when you speak to them, telling yourself that you find fencing fencers with certain characteristics a “challenge” rather than “your doom”—all of these things work to change your perception of who you are as a fencer, and gradually that belief changes how you fence. Simple steps lead to bigger steps, but all of the steps must be practiced along the way.

I advocate the practice of “believe to achieve”. To actually achieve mental toughness, however, it must go deeper than thinking about mental toughness. To be mentally tough, you first must take on the beliefs of a fencer who already is mentally tough and then act on that belief the way a mentally tough fencer would. In doing this, you take on a set of behaviors that—ideally—you practice and reinforce every day. For instance, suppose you have problems with fencers of the opposite hand. Previously, you might find yourself meeting a fencer like this and think: “Ugh. Another (left/right) handed fencer. I HATE fencing those guys”. The first step in mental toughness is to change that thought to a different one. You might think, instead: “Oh. A (left/right) hander. I‘m going to have to fence extra hard. This one is in for a fight!”

You might still lose this bout. In fact, at first, I can guarantee you will lose these bouts at the start. However, approaching the bout in a different way, you begin putting yourself into a position learn how to defeat these opponents. By approaching tough situations with out the assumption of failure, and determination that you will fence every touch, you will do two things. First, you will actually fence better, since you are now fencing to win rather than “fencing to not lose”. Second, you will open yourself up for a possible break through in fencing the fencers that trouble you, since you are now looking for solutions to the fencer rather than simply avoiding being beaten by too large a score. You will change how you think, and—eventually—you will change how you fence.

If you have fenced for five years, and during all of those five years you have never thought of yourself as a mentally tough fencer, that conditioning is not going to change in one week of practice. But if you act as a mentally tough fencer for one year, at every practice and competition, at the end of that season you are going to see an improvement.

Every time I go to a competition, I hear a lot of chatter from fencers about how horribly they expect to fence that day. It is as if they are walking about with an imaginary gun to their heads and daring themselves to pull the trigger. Eventually, most find a reason to pull the imaginary trigger. “Uh-oh, there are three lefty's in my pool!”, or “That girl uses an extended French. I ALWAYS lose to people with extended French!”. I understand that much of this is a self-defense mechanism, and none of us want to be the fencer that walks into the room and declares that they will win the tournament, and then fail to do so. How can you hope to fence your best if, with every affirmation, you conclude that the day is going to be a disaster? The start of being mentally tough is to control your inner voice to tell yourself that you are going to fence at the top of your game, and then making every effort to ensure that you do.

The most mentally tough fencers I know are quietly confident. They know they only have control over how well they fence that day. They also know that most of the time, that is enough to perform well! They start every tournament working hard to make sure that mentally and physically, they fence at the top of their game, where-ever that may be.

When I first started to fence, I often found myself in bouts in which I would lose confidence and fail to win. I decided to speak to one of my teammates —a very confident fencer—about how she kept her confidence on the strip. When I asked her how she remained positive in a bout, she thought about this for a few seconds and then said: “When ever I have doubts about my fencing, I think about the last NAC I won, and I use that to remind myself that I am a very capable fencer.”

Since I had never won a NAC, this was not very helpful! However, after a little thought, I realized that I had scored against—and even won bouts—against tough fencers at my club, including national finalists and Olympians. I started thinking about some of the best bouts I had in practice, and some of the best touches I scored in competition. I realized while I could not rehearse something I had never done before, I had a lot of good touches and good bouts I could capture and use to imagine myself fencing well. From there, I could build.

I used this exercise to win my first local tournament, and then used the imagery from that win to win regional tournaments, and built upon all my best bouts to bring my best game to a National level. I am still using this concept today.

All of you have had good touches and good bouts in your careers. Use every successes to build the next successes.

One of the ideas of modern sports psychology is something called an “arousal level”. This is a measure of how engaged and excited the athlete is in the task they are performing. By plotting the arousal level against performance, psychologists discovered the unsurprising fact that not being interested in the task at hand hurt performance, but they were surprised to find that being too interested—too excited—about an event also hurt performance.

For the mentally tough fencer, this is important. You have to understand at what level of engagement or excitement you perform your best. The reality of arousal levels is very complicated, and dependant on the task (for activities that are very mental, like an algebra test, you don't want a high level of engagement/excitement. For a physical task—such as fencing—you want a fairly high level of involvement), but the arousal level for every fencer is slightly different. Part of your education in mental toughness is to know two things: what level of excitement you need to fence your best, and how to get to that level of excitement and stay there.

Knowing these things about yourself helps steer you towards your optimal performance. You must avoid those things that interfere with your fencing, and seek out those things that assist you to fence your best. I feel it is important to record these sorts of observations about yourself (“I really panicked when I got to the venue without enough time to warm up”, for example, may lead you to ensure that you get to the venue early) in your competition workbook“you keep one, right? These observations should be very honest. You should record these thoughts, try to draw conclusions about how motivated you were, and any changes you made (if any) and the results. Pre- and post-tournament thoughts are important. Record them, and re-read them.

Once, at a competition, I was down in a bout by a number of touches against a strong fencer. With the bout half over, I scored an touch to the bottom of the opponent's hand. Indignant that he had been hit, he asked the referee to test my weapon, all the time insisting that there was no way he could have been hit by me. His protests and repeated requests to test weapons made me a little irritated. I thought to myself: “I get what might be the only touch I'm going to score, and you're going to deny it to me?”

I did one of the first mentally tough things I had ever done in a National competition. I used the situation to get a little“just a little”mad. I decided even if this fencer was better than me, I was not going to roll over for an opponent who had shown himself to be an obnoxious winner. To spite him, I decided that I was going to score on him again.

I scored the next four touches to win the bout, one of my first come from behind wins at an open NAC.

Later, I realized I had been fencing “flat” in the bout. I had let the relative ease my opponent showed in scoring the first two touches against defeat me before the bout was over. After the fact I understood that I used the focus of an obnoxious opponent to adjust my arousal level to fence my best.

Since my return to competition, I have done the same thing several times. I have not always had to make myself “a little mad” but I have used music, friends, mantras, all of these things to adjust my arousal level to either calm myself down, or to fencing with some excitement. It is important to know what motivates you and what can be used to move your level of arousal up or down as needed. Knowing what you need (to be calmed down, or pumped up) and knowing what moves your arousal level in the direction you need to go is a valuable tool.

I do not think of myself as competitive (I should note that my wife disagrees with this assessment). I do not really like the idea of winning and losing. I do, however, like the idea of solving a problem. This has helped me with facing opponents that are tough. When I frame opponents as “problems” to solve, it helps me relax and fence my best. Is it a trick I play on myself? Perhaps. But it is a trick that works for me. Something like this also works for you: find it and use it.

It is hard to imagine some of the champions we know having a bad tournament. In fact, many of them do have slumps and periods in which they are not fencing their best, sometimes for months or a year. Michael Jordan has a great commercial for Nike in which he talks about his failure to make game winning shots, his failing to make rebounds, and games that he has lost. It is well known that he was cut from his varsity basketball team when he was a sophomore. We like to snicker about the coach that cut the great Michael Jordan from his team, not understanding that he was denying himself a super star. How could he not have seen Jordan’s greatness? But the fact is, Jordan was cut because he was not good enough. He was too small, and did not have the grasp of basketball fundamentals that the coach wanted.

Jordan proved he was a champion by using this set back to motivate him to hit the gym, and to practice harder than he had before (growing a few inches over the summer after he was cut did not hurt). We all know the story after that.

One of the things I noticed when I sit with good fencers as opposed to average (or beginning fencers) is that the good fencers only talk about their positive experiences fencing. I know all of them have had bad tournaments—in some cases I have been there when they fenced them—but they are not going to let those tournaments define their fencing careers. Mentally tough fencers do not ignore bad tournaments, they learn the lessons they need to from them, and then they move on.

Anyone can have a poor tournament or a bad season. Mental toughness says that a mistake is not a reflection on you, but a reflection on the performance at that event. The distinction between you and your performance is an important one. Your performance may have suffered, but you—as a fencer—are moving forward and continually improving your game. You identify the problems in your game and work to eliminate them. By understanding that even good athletes have slumps, and keeping your eye on your own progress and results (and not others) you will work through plateaus faster and easier.

In the end, it does not really matter what rating you hold or what tournaments you win. When you are fencing the mental toughness game of fencing—the inner game—the only real opponent is yourself. Being mentally tough often means that winning becomes easier (and you will win more) but the true benefit of understanding of fencing the mental game is that it enables you to enjoy the sport through good tournaments and through bad. In the end, you do not fence because you are forced, or because there is a prize you strive for. You fence because that is who you are, and being a fencer is an expression of yourself. When this happens, you have won every tournament you need to.

© by Allen Evans, May 2011. This article may be used unmodified, with credit to the author.