I want to start this article with a personal question for you. How often do you think and/or say negative things about other people? Never? Almost never? Frequently? Daily? Thrice daily? With every breath you draw? Seriously, take an honest inventory here. How common is it for you to go negative about others?
 
Give yourself a few minutes and mull that over. And while you’re thinking, I want to tell you a little story. It’ll seem like it’s about me, but I’m going to connect it to you.
 
Many years ago, there was a time period in my life when I was a young weightlifter on the way up. I was in my early 20s and full of potential, training in Washington with the Calpian Weightlifting Club and totaling over 300 kg after only three years in the sport. I was eating, sleeping, and breathing Olympic weightlifting…and loving every minute of it. It was a time of excitement, intensity, and constant driving hunger to lift bigger weights and move up through the national ranks.
 
There was an older guy on the local Washington weightlifting scene back in those days who was a former elite US lifter. He had done some pretty incredible things several years before when he was in his prime, and I knew about his accolades before I even met him for the first time. Because I was on my way to becoming a big name, he noticed me and started chatting me up when I saw him at meets. I was a little star-struck, because this guy had done the kinds of things I dreamed of doing. He had been to the mountaintop, so it was flattering to know him. It should have been one of those great supportive mentoring friendships between an accomplished old veteran and a young tiger, you know? But that’s not how it went.
 
Most of what came out of this guy’s mouth was negative and borderline disrespectful. He was always trying to find these little passive-aggressive ways to let me know my lifting wasn’t anything special because it wasn’t as good as what he had done back in the day. Instead of encouraging me, he tried to play some kind of half-ass ego game to make himself seem eternally better than I could ever hope to be.
 
I’m proud to say I didn’t let him get away with it. Although he was older and more successful than me, I was young and cagey, and I would challenge anybody who tried to punk me. Plus, one of the main reasons he had been so successful was because he was a massive drug user, and I knew it. And he knew that I knew it. So he never crossed over and said anything that would have led to a full-scale bloodbath because I think he knew I would pull out the juicer card and stick it up his kazoo. He just kept making his pissy little comments and I kept snapping back at him. Eventually, I just made him one of those people I didn’t talk to. I didn’t let his rotten attitude hold me back, and I had no interest in any kind of friendship with him.
 
That was a long time ago, and I haven’t seen this dude in over 15 years. Like I said, he had a very special track record as an athlete. He was kind of a legend. But do you think that’s what I remember when I occasionally hear people mention his name nowadays? No. All I remember is that he was a complete jackass.
Admittedly, you could look at his attitude in a different way. Some of you might already be thinking he was trying to keep me fired up and hungry for more by not going overboard on congratulating me on anything I had done. Maybe he wanted to make me understand that I still had a long way to go, trying to keep me from resting on laurels that I hadn’t really earned. Kind of a, “Listen kid, you’re doing okay, but don’t get cocky” type of thing.
 
Okay, sure. I understand that approach. I had a lot of coaches plant those kinds of seeds in my mind over the years, and I do it all the time with my own athletes now. However, that’s not what was going on here. I’m not an overly sensitive person. I grew up playing football and wrestling, where coaches and teammates try to mentally break you every day to make you tougher. I know when somebody is giving me that kind of handling, but that’s not what was going on here. This guy was just a bitter old dude who was being a negative prick. He didn’t know about one of the fundamental truths in sports: when you get older, nobody cares about the achievements of your youth anymore. They’ll be impressed if you did something amazing, sure. But that’s not what they really care about. They care about how you treat them, and the kind of person you are NOW.
 
But I need to take this story a little further to give you the useful content you’re looking for in this article. You see, I’m 47 years old at the moment. And do you want to know something that I hate to admit? Every once in a while, I can sometimes see myself acting like that old jerk to younger lifters I meet. I wish I could say it’s not true, but it is. I don’t think I’ve completely converted to a full-fledged ***hole, and I definitely think I’m still pretty encouraging overall. But I occasionally have my moments when I’ll look back at a conversation after it’s over and realize I’m not acting much better than the guy I just told you about.
 
That’s why I want to use this article to say a few things about negativity. I’ve learned that it’s extremely easy to become nasty and snarly in this sport if you stay in it for a long time. Most of you haven’t been in it nearly long enough to experience the kind of arc I’m describing, but you’ll get there someday. If you stay in weightlifting for the long haul, you’ll rise up, have a prime, and then start the inevitable slide down the other side of the hill. You’ll eventually be an old former lifter who’s surrounded by youngsters. You won’t be able to do the things you used to do, but they will. They’ll probably know you used to be hot stuff, too. Many of them will want to look up to you as some kind of role model, like I did with that dude back in Washington.
 
Here’s the thing. Weightlifting is a sport that can dump a ton of negativity into your personality, IF you let it happen. Let me give you another example. At the 1995 National Championships, the winner of the superheavyweight class was a guy named Thomas McKinney. He won the title with a 330 kg total (145 kg snatch, 185 kg C&J). In case you don’t follow superheavyweight results very closely, 330 kg is a much lower total than the usual winning weights of that class at the nationals. Typically, it’s gonna take at least 360-370 to win it, if not more. The reason Tom won with 330 that year is because the US guys we had at the time who were totaling around the 370-380 range (Mark Henry, Mario Martinez, Kevin Coleman) all skipped nationals for one reason or another…injury, prepping for something else, etc. It was just an odd year, plain and simple, and Tom became national champ. He was a friend of mine, and I was one of the first ones congratulating him after the meet.
 
Then, in the following months, you guessed it. The dissing started. I remember all the crappy things people were saying and writing after Tom’s win. They were whining and wailing about how he didn’t deserve to call himself a national champion with a total that low, complaining about the pitiful level of weightlifting in the United States, and basically just soaking the whole situation with a bunch of pessimistic, cynical comments. One of the loudest voices in the mix was the Washington guy I told you about.
 
My response was, “Hey, I have an idea. Why don’t we try congratulating Tom? He showed up, competed well, and finished the day at the top of the medal stand. Maybe we just respect him and have a good attitude about his moment. You think?”
 
Why would so many people immediately pounce on the most negative aspects of situations like this, and why do old former lifters sometimes have bad attitudes towards young up-and-comers?
 
I think one of the reasons is simple anger over losing youthful ability. When you’ve been young and strong, and particularly when you’ve had a lot of success in your prime years, it’s tough to watch it all slip away. Getting old is difficult for anybody, but it’s 10 times worse for athletes. If you’re not careful, it can make you into a nasty cuss. Some of you elders might know what I’m talking about.
 
Plus, we have to acknowledge the fact that some people just have miserable personalities, end of story. It’s got nothing to do with weightlifting. Hell, just spend some time on social media these days if you want to see examples of this. We live in an age where people take pure delight in your failures, and they have a field day talking rot about you if anything goes wrong in your life. It’s pathetic to watch sometimes.
 
So here’s a piece of advice that might be easier said than done, and you might not even realize that you need it: STAY POSITIVE. Sure, it’s good to give athletes proper perspective. If somebody is in danger of getting complacent or overly big-headed about what they’re doing, it’s helpful to give them a reality dose by reminding them that they’ve still got a long way to go. That’s a positive thing to do for an athlete, if you can do it in a way that makes it clear you’re still on their side.
 
But that’s different from pissing on everything and everybody around you. There’s no reason to do that, aside from the fact that you’re insecure, jealous, or bitter, which aren’t qualities that are going to make other people believe in you, respect you, follow you, or like you.
 
All that negative energy trickles over into your own lifting life, and then eventually your personal life. Does that sound like the direction any of us want to go? Of course not. If I can give you a tip that’ll help make you a better lifter, it’s this. Try to catch yourself when you feel this happening. Dumping on others…or yourself. As I said, it’s easy to do in weightlifting because this sport points out your failures in a pretty clear way. When you hit a bad stretch, it can snowball quickly. A bad workout can turn into a bad month, which can turn into a bad year. Everything in your soul is being tested, and your anger gets the best of you. Any of that ring a bell? Don’t feel bad if I’m hitting close to home with this. We’ve all been there.
 
Even if you’re not a great lifter, you’re going to leave behind a reputation in this sport. Do you want people to look back at you as somebody who was inspirational? Or do you want your legacy to be cynical and disparaging? The answer should be obvious.
 
Getting back to where we started, how often do you think/say negative things about others? Personally, I do it more than I would like to. It gets a lot worse when I’m struggling in my own career. Weightlifting is so important to me, and my whole life feels dark when it goes bad. I turn into a nasty old cuss…kind of like that old jerk from Washington I told you about.
 
I know this whole thing has been about negativity, but I hope you can see that this article is actually a desperate attempt to get ALL of us to actively seek out the black streaks in our personalities and turn them around in the other direction. Some of you might not relate to this because you’re naturally optimistic people. If so, that’s great. But you’re lifters, and you’re probably coaches. That means you’re around a lot of other people, maybe even responsible for them. Trust me, some of them might have the kind of darkness inside that I’ve described. If you look closely at them, you can see it. This sport attracts people who have an edge.
 
Make it a part of your training program to build this. Train your positive attitude. Work at it. Put energy into it. Think about it frequently throughout your day. Cut yourself off when you start down the wrong path. I’ll make you happier. It’ll make others feel better about being around you. And it’ll leave behind the right kind of legacy when you’re gone.