You’ve all gone to school, right? Most of you went to high school at least. A few of you dropped out, but the majority of you graduated. Some of you went to college and got bachelor’s degrees, and a select few of you continued on to graduate school and got masters (or doctorate) degrees.
 
Do you ever stop and think back about what you actually learned in school? I’m not talking about the diploma or certification you were awarded. I’m talking about what you LEARNED. In other words, how much of the stuff you studied has stuck with you throughout your life and improved you in some way?
 
The answer is probably the same for all of us. We finished some classes without learning a damn thing, and then there were others that truly taught us something. They made us smarter, more skilled, or more understanding of the world we live in. I think it’s pretty stupid when people say things like, “I went to 12 years of school and didn’t learn jack squat!” I hate to say it…but if you went to 12 years of school and didn’t learn one single thing, that doesn’t mean the school was ineffective. It means you’re a moron. Know what I mean?
 
The best class I ever took was during my third year of college at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. The class was called Motor Learning and it was taught by a woman named Dr. Colleen Hacker, who was one of the most extraordinary people I’ve ever met. In addition to being a professor at the university, she was also the women’s soccer coach at PLU, with multiple national championships on her record and Coach of the Year plaques all over her office walls. This class was supposed to focus on the way athletes learn physical skills through motor development of the nervous system, but Colleen expanded it to new dimensions that blew my mind on a weekly basis. I probably learned more about weightlifting and coaching in this class than I ever have anywhere else.
 
One of the things we studied in this class is the subject of this article. I want to talk to you about the difference between internal and external locus of control. In case you’re not familiar with these terms, let me break it down for you. It’s essentially about the different ways people view their ability to control their outcomes and successes. A website called Study.com gave a pretty solid summary of it: “People who base their success on their own work and believe they control their life have an internal locus of control. In contrast, people who attribute their success or failure to outside influences have an external locus of control.”
 
When Colleen taught us about this concept, it was like a rocket exploded in my skull. For some reason, it clarified so many things for me as an athlete…and as a person. The difference between internal and external locus of control is probably one of the most important ideas a human being can learn about. And in my opinion, it’s even more important for athletes. You’re all weightlifters and weightlifting coaches, right? That means you’re outcome-based people. Outcomes in weightlifting are extremely clear and measurable, as we all know. Let’s say you snatch 80 kilos, and you decide you want to improve to 85 kilos (outcome = 5 kg progress). If you train effectively and snatch that 85 kg., your outcome is positive. You got better. If you train for an extended period of time and you can’t move beyond 80 kg., you haven’t achieved the outcome you want. Because the results of our sport are so incredibly black-and-white, the outcomes of our training are very concrete and powerful.
 
However, the big question here is this: how strongly do you believe YOU control your outcomes? Do you see yourself as the one who’s responsible for your successes and failures? Or do you attribute your outcomes to other factors, or maybe even other people? At this point, it should be obvious that it’s better to have an internal locus of control. That’s a no-brainer. But you’d be amazed at how many lifters and coaches I’ve met in my life who are weak in this area. Let’s take a closer look.
 
Signs and Symptoms…
 
People with an external locus of control are blamers. They blame others for the things that happen to them because they don’t believe they have control over their successes and failures. This kind of behavior can take a lot of interesting twists and turns, by the way.
 
When they perform poorly, their first instinct is to point fingers. Sometimes, the finger-pointing is scattered and spread out among a lot of different variables. For example, let’s say a weightlifter with external locus of control competes in a meet and has a lousy day. It’s not uncommon for people like this to start rattling off a list of factors that held them back when they try to explain their crappy lifting.
“The warm-up room was too crowded.”
“It was too hot (or cold) in there.”
“The audience was too noisy when I was trying to lift.”
“The bar didn’t spin well.”
 
And so forth… When you hear comments like this, you’re listening to a lifter who doesn’t want to take responsibility for their own performance. They’re not internally strong enough to just own up and say, “I lifted terribly and it’s my fault, nobody else.” They have a weakness inside, and it’s causing them to run away from admitting their own shortcomings. Instead of putting the blame on themselves, they put it on anything else they can find.
 
I’ve seen a lot of this in my career, you know? Lifters who point fingers in every direction when they fail. However, I’ve also seen lifters who point fingers in a very specific direction when they fail…the coach. This is a pretty common one in all sports, not just weightlifting. It’s an understandable pattern because the coach is an easy target for somebody with external locus of control. The coaches are directly connected to the athlete’s performance, so there’s nothing more convenient than shifting the blame onto their shoulders if you’re a mentally weak lifter. This crap happens all the time. Parents these days pump that garbage into their kid’s heads every chance they get. If little Timmy bombs out of a weightlifting meet, mommy and daddy instantly want to throw the coach under the bus because there’s no way their perfect little angel could ever do anything wrong.
 
There are multiple problems with this. First of all, it’s almost always inaccurate. If you’re a competitive weightlifter, dealing with things like crowded warm-up rooms, noisy audiences, and imperfect equipment is simply part of the game. We all have to overcome obstacles like that. Granted, there might occasionally be situations where a freak occurrence happens and the blame is legitimate. If you’re on a competition platform and you miss a snatch attempt because somebody stood up in the audience and screamed “Your mother is a whore, you jackass!” right as you started to pull the bar off the floor…okay, that’s a sensible thing to blame failure on (although you could also argue that an athlete with supreme mental toughness would have made the lift anyway). In astonishing situations like this, external locus of control might be temporarily justified.
 
But we all know those things rarely happen. And coaching? Well, you probably know what I think about that. The coach is working as hard as possible to make the athlete successful. If the coach has an acceptable level of skill and expertise, there’s very little chance of the athlete getting screwed over or held back. Coaches dedicate their lives to NOT holding the athletes back, so blaming the coach usually doesn’t make much sense. Are there times when the coach might truly be the reason for the athlete’s failure? Sure, it’s possible. We have to admit that. However, the 25+ years I’ve spent in this sport have taught me that if an athlete blames a coach for poor performance, it’s usually a load of horse crap.
 
And the flip side…
 
Athletes with external locus of control are making several mistakes by looking at things the way they do. One of the main ones is the fact that we can’t control external factors. If you’re going to be a competitive weightlifter, you can’t control warm-up rooms, audiences, weather, or most of the other variables that factor into competition. And if you can’t control these things, how can you ever expect to overcome them?
 
As you’ve probably guessed, most people with external locus of control don’t become great athletes. You have to be internally strong to be a successful weightlifter, and these people are weak. If they don’t fix their weakness, it’ll stop them from ever achieving greatness.
 
However, it is possible to occasionally see a high-level athlete with external locus of control. If somebody is born with physical qualities that are completely superior to most of the human race, these physical gifts can take them to the top even if they’re mental train wrecks. It’s uncommon, but it happens. I used to know a woman who was an Olympian in track and field, and she jumped around to six different coaches in the last three years of her career. She was past her prime and her glory days were behind her, but she wasn’t mentally capable of accepting this. So she hired (and fired) coach after coach whenever she had a bad meet, blaming her poor results on their lack of ability.
 
These coaches were all successful guys. They had plenty of athletes doing great things, so it was obvious they weren’t incompetent. The problem was the athlete, and her lack of internal strength. She was an elite world-level performer because of her physical talents, but she had an external locus of control.
 
On the flip side from this are athletes with internal locus of control. These people take responsibility for their successes and failures. In short, they believe they can control their lives. It shouldn’t take you long to figure out the fact that this is a better way to be. People with internal locus of control don’t point fingers at other people. They point the finger at themselves. They don’t say, “I had a bad meet because the warm-up room was crowded and the audience was distracting.” They say, “The warm-up room was crowded and the audience was distracting, and I had a bad meet because I didn’t do a good job of handling those things the way I should have.” They look inside for the answers, not outside.
 
Aside from the fact that internal locus of control shows a lot of responsibility, mental toughness, character, and maturity…it also gives the athlete an opportunity to improve. If you blame your bad performance on a noisy audience, how can you expect to improve in the future? What the hell are you going to do at your next meet? When you walk on the platform for your opening snatch attempt, you can’t bring a pistol with you and yell at the audience, “If anybody makes a sound while I’m lifting this bar, I’ll blow your damn brains out!!” Nobody ever became a champion by focusing on external variables.
 
People become champions by believing they’ll be successful if they focus on what they CAN control…their work ethic, their technique, their attitude, their nutrition, etc. When you spend all your time improving these things, you gradually transform into a mentally tough athlete. And mentally tough athletes are the ones who win.
 
Make yourself this way…
 
When I write articles, I always try to acknowledge that the world is a complex place and there’s rarely a black-and-white answer to anything. Most human situations have grey areas, just like most weightlifting topics. There’s more than one way to move when you’re performing a snatch. There’s more than one way to set up an effective training program. Individual differences and variables have to be considered if you really want to find the right solutions in these areas.
 
However, this subject is an exception to those rules. This is one area where I feel comfortable saying we should all behave exactly the same way. Internal locus of control is better than external locus of control, and you should cultivate it in your personality every single day.
 
Personal inventory time! I want you to think about yourself, and where you rate in this area. Do you point fingers and blame others? I think we all probably do sometimes, at least a little bit. We’re not perfect, and we all have our moments when we advertise our imperfections to the entire world. But think about it…is this something you do often, or rarely? If you’ve got a really strong external locus of control, this article will probably be useless because you won’t be mentally strong enough to admit your shortcomings. But maybe there’s a chance, you know? Maybe this article could be a moment of clarity for some of you.
 
I think I’ve always had pretty strong internal locus of control. I’m not trying to glorify myself or brag, by the way. Trust me, I’ve got plenty of imperfections in my personality that I need to work on. But I’ve always believed my performances in sports (and all other areas) were a direct result of my own effort and work ethic, just like my failures and defeats were a direct result of my poor effort and mental weakness. I also believe this is what paved the way for the accomplishments I’ve had in my life. I believed in my heart that I could pull off some pretty special things if I worked hard enough and committed enough time to them. When I stumbled, I worked hard to figure out what I needed to fix. When I succeeded, I felt the kind of happiness and pride that made me a more confident, positive person. And guess what? That confidence allowed me to show other people the right level of respect and gratitude, like my coach.
 
That’s why I can say I’m grateful to Dr. Colleen Hacker for teaching me a thing or two back in 1993. I didn’t learn life lessons from every class I ever took as a student, but I sure as hell learned one from hers. Greatness comes from a lot of places, but personal responsibility is one of the biggest ones. Think about this in your weightlifting journey, my friends. It’ll make every part of your life better, including your ability to lift big weights over your head.