Unfamiliar Waters
It's a mindset thing 🌊
Early on in a conversation, I could usually tell whether someone was actually going to toe the starting line of a triathlon or if we were just indulging in a fun hypothetical.
It always started the same way: “I don’t like swimming,” “I hate the water,” or “I’ve never really swum a lap in my life.”
And it’s rarely about the water.
An open water swim isn’t really testing your stroke technique as much as it’s interrogating your mindset. I’ve coached athletes with zero swim background who harbored real, visceral fears yet jumped into training and racing anyway. On the flip side, I’ve spent time around physically gifted people who talked a massive game but never actually put anything on the line, least of all showing up on a race morning.
The divide was rarely about athletic pedigree. It came down to how they framed the dark open water (lake, bay, ocean, reservoir, etc.). Was it a murky, fixed abyss waiting to swallow them whole? Or was it the great wide open, waiting to be explored and experienced?
Carol Dweck spent her career mapping this split.
A fixed mindset treats your abilities as carved in stone, turning every genuine challenge into a referendum on whether you are inherently “good enough.”
A growth mindset treats capabilities as something built through messy effort, turning that same challenge into just another rep to take on.
Same water, same distance, two completely different outcomes waiting on the other side.
I’m sure you’ve noticed this pattern bleed into other areas of life.
I’ve certainly lived it. As an entrepreneur at a scrappy startup early in my career (WAKA) and later when I built a coaching business from scratch (Train Race Inspire PDX). Those ventures represented entirely new open waters for me. They were full of problems I’d never solved, with zero guarantees I’d be any good at any of it.
The people who launch companies aren’t the ones facing lower stakes, no matter how much we like to joke about the startup life. They are the ones who dive into risk and decided (at a fundamental level) that unfamiliar water is a growth problem rather than a fixed trap.
At the end of the day, it isn’t natural talent that gets someone to a start line. It’s a deliberate decision on what the challenge presents.
Growth lives on the other side of the unknown; it isn’t a mirror reflecting what you already are. Progression awaits.
