Consistency After Competition: Finding Stability in Transition
Kristi Yamaguchi didn’t head into the 1992 Olympic season with the highest technical content. She wasn’t the most powerful skater. She didn’t have the highest jumps or the fastest spins.
But she was consistent.
Even after making two mistakes in her long program at the Olympics, the strength of Kristi’s other elements and her consistency in the short program kept her ahead of the field. She became the 1992 Olympic Champion before embarking on an incredibly successful professional career where her dependability stood out event after event.
As a viewer, you felt like you could relax when Kristi performed, you could trust her. Kristi was consistent.
Consistency in sports is lauded. As a young athlete, the importance of consistency is drilled into your head from your first competition. Consistency with your training, consistency under pressure, consistency with your diet and sleep schedule. You’re taught you will be able to depend on yourself to deliver when it counts mainly through the consistency of your practice and preparation.
Consistency as an athlete also extends beyond the consistent actions required to perform well under pressure. There’s a consistency to the regimen of training, a predictability to the training week. There’s a consistency to the competitive season. After several years, your nervous system starts to adapt to the flow of a competitive year: the intense bursts of focus and adrenaline, the comedown following an event and the gradual rise of structure and training during the off-season. As stressful as it can be, there’s comfort in knowing what to expect every year, knowing when your body needs to be in its prime condition and when you can scale back.
When an athlete retires, they usually feel a myriad of emotions. These feelings may include grief, relief, shame, excitement, disappointment, pride and, sometimes more subtly, fear. Anticipating the next phase of life is exciting but can also feel overwhelming due to uncertainty. You have never experienced this version of yourself; there is no “retirement roadmap” to follow. The next stage of your life doesn’t meet you with the same routines, stability and predictability of a competitive season. Consistency can seem like a concept of the past; it may no longer feel necessary.
But could it still be important—now serving a new purpose?
When we’re facing a transition in our lives—whether it’s the transition away from competitive athletics, we’re dealing with injury or we’re embarking on any major life change—our nervous systems are impacted. Even when we’ve prepared for this change mentally, our nervous systems adapt to a certain pace, and abrupt shifts can feel disruptive. Because athletic training is so highly structured, our nervous systems often continue to crave stability and predictability—even if, on a rational level, we feel excited about the freedom of less structured days. Without the predictability we’ve become accustomed to, we may find ourselves stuck in fight or flight—a state of heightened arousal—or in a dorsal vagal shutdown state that can feel depressive over time.
This is where consistency during transitions can aid us. Unlike the more regimented form of consistency tied to elite athletics, consistency during transitions comes in the form of stability and a sense of structure. This means adopting loose routines and rituals we perform on a consistent basis. This may include actions like continuing to move our bodies in an intentional way through the week, making it a daily priority to take care of our basic needs, drinking our morning coffee while writing in a journal or spending time with our animals in the afternoons. Our goal is to help reduce the overwhelm we may be experiencing by providing our nervous systems with small moments of certainty. By doing this, our nervous systems start to know what to expect throughout the day. This provides us with a sense of safety during this time of change and reduction in structure.
A way to view this form of consistency is like the bumper rails for inexperienced bowlers. Just like the bumpers, the consistency of routine and rituals during transitions helps us stay in our lane of nervous system regulation. Gentle routines during transition periods signal to our nervous systems that we are safe because consistent routines increase predictability—what our nervous systems crave for regulation.
The key, though, is to make sure the intention and beliefs behind these behaviors do not keep us stuck in any resentment or shame we may be working through because of our competitive experiences. Over time, for some athletes, consistency during a career may start to be viewed as intense rigidity. You may have triggering memories of pushing through workouts when you were injured—just to stay consistent with your training. Consistency under pressure may have become an annoying benchmark you were constantly striving for but never reached—resulting in self-judgment and shame.
Because of this, we want to be gentle with ourselves as we start to view consistency more as a tool to help our nervous systems rather than a requirement for success. Consistency during transitions is not regimented and strict. It isn’t about striving for perfection. It is supportive, flexible and understanding of what life is currently asking of us. The daily routines we set during this stage are not fixed; they are meant to change over time.
We feel secure watching athletes like Kristi because we expect them to perform well; we want to find ways to offer ourselves a similar sense of security during uncertain times. Kristi wasn’t perfect; she made mistakes. But because most of her performances were so dependable, she gave viewers a sense of relief and assurance when she stepped onto the ice to perform. The consistent daily actions we take during periods of transition can help to provide our nervous systems with a similar sense of assurance and can become one of our most dependable forms of self-support.
The content on this blog is intended for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for therapy. The content does not replace a therapeutic relationship with a licensed mental health professional.