The key question of this section is the motivation behind goal setting, and the system of habits that either support or hinder it. How does this habit take shape? What is it good for, and what is it not? How can it be changed?
This will be a fencing + psychology post (part 3), but I believe it may also be worth reading for those who have no intention whatsoever of ever picking up a sword. Everything that is a psychological task in fencing is also a task in real life. That’s why I like to use it as an analogy, and that’s also why I bring psychology into training sessions. This time, I’d like to share the more essential ideas from my training camp lectures with you—about experiencing situations, and the relationships between your development, your performance, and your personality.
Since it seemed impossible to write up the material of several lectures in a digestible form, I divided the original post into three parts. This is the third one, which deals with the motivational factors of behavior, whether simple or abstract. And of course, the main question: how can we possibly turn these factors to our own advantage?
We have reached the point where it is clear that the perspective from which you look at situations is of decisive importance. The only remaining question is: how does this perspective come about? Do you choose it, or does the “survival-specialized part of your brain” get there first? Which part of you sets the goals, and which part achieves them?
This concluding part takes that question further. What does adaptive goal setting and habit formation look like? What makes them adaptive: being in balance with deeper psychological needs and avoiding emotional overload? Or surpassing ourselves?
What are the steps by which these questions can be brought to a conscious level?
Target locked
You have an impact on both the external and internal worlds, but both impacts are limited. Some processes are like a bullet: before you fire it, you can take aim—but once it leaves the barrel, it’s too late to rethink everything.
So you’re wise to learn how to aim well, and to pull the trigger with a high level of awareness.
In everyday language, this is called goal setting.
I previously wrote that you can leave the ring successfully even if your opponent technically wins the duel. The obvious goal in a bout is to win, or perhaps to avoid being hit at all—but most of the time, we go to training to study fencing and to develop ourselves. And that opens up a very wide range of possible goals.
A goal can be technical, such as having solid stances, strikes, good footwork, timing, etc.
It can be athletic, focusing on strength, speed, endurance.
It can be analytical or educational: observing how certain techniques work in reality, what typical reactions an opponent has.
And of course it can be psychological as well: training yourself not to lose your head, to maintain a positive attitude, to stay focused, to motivate yourself, to be brave, to be honest with scoring, and so on.
When I told the fencers in the lecture to choose an adaptive narrative position, I meant that they should tell their story from the perspective of their goals.
You can tell the story of a duel as “I lost 5–0.”
But you can also tell it as “I’m applying a technique I don’t yet have routine in with increasing skill—just not skillfully enough yet to gain a tactical advantage from it.”
If your goal was to practice that technique, why torment yourself over the points?
Naturally, it’s easier to stay calm about goals if they are properly thought through. Based on the literature, these are the steps of well-constructed goal setting:
1. Self-knowledge: What are you capable of? What matters to you? What are your strengths and weaknesses?
2. Information: What are the circumstances and opportunities? Who else is involved?
3. Goal setting: Clear formulation of the goal, defining priorities.
4. Action plan: What will you do, and when? How will you measure results?
5. Implementation: Action, maintenance, evaluation.
One wonderful thing about doing this systematically is that it allows you to work from the Adult ego state, setting goals that are both attractive and achievable—and that represent genuine development.
Unfortunately, goals can also serve other functions.
Strictly speaking, something counts as a real goal only when it is personally important to you and there is still substantial work ahead to achieve it.
All other “goals” tend to serve ego reinforcement, protection, or compliance with others’ expectations. This isn’t necessarily a problem—unless you think it’s something else.
If you feel discomfort around a goal, it’s worth reflecting on who set it: you, the part of you you identify most as yourself, or perhaps one of your schema modes?
While it’s true that modes react to frustration, this doesn’t necessarily mean a situation that looks like an actual emergency (though fencing certainly provides plenty of those).
For example, the mere fact of being in a performance situation can threaten your self-esteem.
You might build a narrative like “the real man stands his ground,” and set the goal of honestly acknowledging every hit. This is genuinely a beautiful value system—but underneath it may lie a self-sacrificing compliant mode and a failure-tolerant personality structure.
Or you might say you only go for hand hits, because fencing doesn’t need to be dramatic, and real self-defense is about incapacitating your opponent in the simplest way possible. And if we’re talking about real self-defense—why not aim to take zero hits throughout the entire training session?
Yes, these approaches do reflect what historical swordsmen may originally have had in mind. But could it also be a failure-avoidant mindset, where you set goals that are too easy or unrealistic?
Of course, it may also be that only 100% is good enough, and you truly refine your skills until you overcome every opponent. Yet you are extremely sensitive if you do get hit once—and even tense before a duel because of performance anxiety.
From the Adult perspective, you can see that a single mistake does not invalidate the fact that you are a good fencer—yet an overcompensating mode still pushes you to train harder, fight more fiercely.
When we talk about our relationship to goals, we’re not only talking about a single duel or training session. Some goals span years, even entire life phases. Staying with the fencing example: years may pass between prize bouts that carry real prestige.
Years during which many things happen that prompt reflection: Why are we doing this? What motivates us? What drives things forward in this direction?
These reflections could probably be well described within a schema therapy framework, but so far I’ve found life-script processes to illustrate the issue most clearly (and that’s what the audience wanted to discuss most during the lecture).
There’s a wide range of literature on life-script processes, and I’ve attended lectures on the topic as well—but honestly, I couldn’t tell you exactly where I borrowed these ideas from.
The essence of these processes is that there is a pattern to how and when you achieve what you want. Translated into plain terms, this is what it looks like in fencing (and in other contexts):
· Until: I can’t have something until I’ve done something unpleasant first.
Example: I want to free-fence with steel, but I won’t allow myself to until I’m perfect with the training weapon.
· After: I try to enjoy things, but I know they’ll end sooner or later—and afterward it will be bad for me.
Example: In my twenties, I’m happy to win duels through sheer physical conditioning, knowing that later my body won’t be as resilient, and those techniques I could learn now would really come in handy.
· Always: I’m stuck in a repeating pattern.
Example: I’m a successful competitor, so I focus exclusively on competitions and neglect non-competitive skills—yet I suffer from stagnation.
· Never: I can never get what I truly want.
Example: I want to fence the way it’s depicted in the books, and I also want to win competitions. These goals require different skills, and because I can’t decide on priorities, neither is achieved.
· Open-ended: I’ve essentially already achieved what I wanted, and now I don’t know what’s next.
Example: I reach the highest rank. What do I train for afterward?
These processes originate from what transactional analysis calls drivers—motivators rooted in beliefs about what we must be like in order to be considered “good people.”
At this point, we’re far removed from the immediate ring—possibly all the way back to the beginning of our story.
As you can see, goal setting is where rational and emotion-driven processes meet. Through goals, it becomes clear where free will is at work, and where those ego parts are operating that are shaped by dozens of internal and external influences.
In a coaching session, this system was illustrated with an iceberg. The part above the water represents what is conscious and freely controllable (though the term “free will” wasn’t used). From this perspective, development is essentially about keeping our opportunities, goals, and behaviors in constant alignment, while paying attention to the circular causality between them.
But this iceberg also has a much larger underwater portion that affects what’s above the surface. The lecturer grouped emotions and beliefs here, somewhat condensing the wide range of psychological processes.
His message was that it’s worth treating these two layers separately, so we know which topics can be addressed with coaching tools and which require psychological ones.
My own message only slightly modifies his: if you want to succeed in achieving your goals—and, in some sense, leave the ring as a winner—you have to account for the presence of both layers.
The drill shapes consciousness
"Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth."
— Mike Tyson
Based on what has been said so far, many things can be brought within our circle of control—provided that preparation begins in time and is done consciously.
When I chose habit formation as the topic of the last lecture, I did not intend to contradict this claim, but I did find it useful to supplement it with a few additional considerations.
These considerations mainly concern the limits of consciousness.
On the one hand, a significant portion of our thinking is not conscious at all. In a book about mindfulness I read a witty analogy: if you identify thinking with playing chess, then your mind is not the army of white or black pieces. Your mind is the board on which things happen.
As the boxer-philosopher Mike Tyson quoted above also pointed out, this can be further amplified by our emergency reactions. From an evolutionary standpoint, this is actually advantageous: consciousness is slow, so we need something that “works by itself.” In motor learning, you can actually feel when you move out of the cognitive phase and begin to progress toward the automatic phase: the movement becomes faster and requires less attention.
The concept of drilling—widely used in sports (monotonous repetition to automate a movement)—originates, as far as I know, from the American Civil War. Soldiers have been drilled ever since so that in stressful situations, so to speak, muscle memory does the job, and whatever consciousness can remain clear is able to deal with more complex matters, such as the tactical situation.
Besides slowness, the other problem is that the capacity associated with consciousness is exhaustible. For most people, working memory consists of 7 ± 2 units; attentional focus has limits, as does sustainability. Self-regulation is not a poetic function like willpower, but a material one—such as the “frontal lobe.”
Therefore, alongside consciousness we need more robust, “cheaper,” and more rapidly deployable solutions. Among fencers, drilling is no longer a novelty; many spend hours perfecting a single movement.
Their example is also a model for life management: in their lives, fencing collides with many other domains, and they too lack the capacity to make a conscious decision all the time about whether they should go drill or go out for a beer. That decision already operates at an autopilot level, automatically. In other words, it has become a habit.
My idea is that setting the goal consciously is the real thing, but on the road leading there we are better off if we “turn on the cruise control.” That is why I brought them the habit-related passages of behavior optimization, which I have been delving into recently thanks to my colleague Gréti. She processed an entire book in detail; I will now limit myself to the parts that are most essential to me.
According to the book, every habit can be broken down into four elements:
1. Cue: some external factor that signals the prospect of a reward.
2. Craving: the feeling we experience when we sense that a reward could be obtained—mostly in the form of dopamine.
3. Response: the behavioral action aimed at obtaining the reward.
4. Reward: the factor that satisfies the craving.
This simple sequence is linked to a not particularly advanced part of our brain. It is like animals in behavioral therapy experiments: it seeks reward and avoids punishment, preferably with immediate feedback. It can be taught through conditioning.
It is not an abstract soul, but we get something in return for this simplification: fast, automatic responses that place far less strain on consciousness.
When we are in autopilot mode, it is very likely that this part of the brain “makes decisions,” whether it is about yielding to the right-hand rule, eating a Pocket Coffee, watching one more Reels video, or deciding whether we go down to drill.
Let me bring an example from the ring!
I see that my opponent is not defending one opening (= Cue). I realize that I could win the bout if I strike there. And I like winning bouts—one could say that would be the reward (= Craving). So I strike into the unprotected opening (= Response). If my sword clacks, I am happy, because that means I hit and I won (= Reward). Unless…
Let me freeze the scene for a moment.
This reflex-like action serves me well in fencing, because usually the opponent does not leave a vulnerable surface open for long.
However, my reflex-driven self did not make a tactical decision. It merely saw that there was a reward and moved toward it. And unfortunately, it does not really think long-term.
…and here is the problem: my opponent may have deliberately left that opening free in order to make me attack automatically.
On the one hand, they know what I will deploy against them and have already prepared the parry.
On the other hand, they know that I will open myself up this way, so they already have very concrete ideas for the riposte.
That is why it is not a good idea to entrust every decision to our mammalian brain.
And yet, it is almost certain that at some point in the bout, it will be sitting behind the wheel.
So even if it does not decide, it will certainly execute.
What we can do is teach it, like rats in a maze.
We can condition which cue triggers the habit.
We can learn to tolerate craving and delay the acquisition of the reward, just like in the marshmallow experiment.
We can also drill what we consider the best response.
We can work on what we regard as a reward—mostly derived from our goals.
At the level of reward, the beginning and the end of this series of posts meet: you can be happy not only about hitting the target, but also about positively narrating the events in question.
That is why, in addition to drilling and reinforcement, it is important to work with your narrative position and your schema modes—the parts of the iceberg below the waterline.
It is in these layers that it is decided what the things happening in the ring now will shape you into in the long run.
There is not much more beyond this.
One more thing belongs to this topic: the fencers also received a small worksheet along with the lecture. I cannot attach it here, but if you are interested in the homework, it is worth thinking through the following questions:
Write down some of your goals!
· Organize them! What order are they in? Are there dependencies or a hierarchy among them? Do they run along a single thread, or are there several parallel processes?
· Classify them according to the following two criteria:
o How important is the goal to you on a scale of 1–7?
o How far have you progressed with it, how close is it to realization? (1–7)
We consider a goal to be a real goal if you have not progressed much with it yet (1–4), but it is important to you (5–7). Choose one such goal and analyze it using the GROW model! (Fun fact: it turned out that the exercise comes from one of the guys who was sitting in the audience.)
· Goal: What do you want to achieve?
o What are your values?
o What are your feelings and needs?
· Reality: What is the current situation?
o What are your strengths and weaknesses?
o Where are you and with whom?
o What is not under your control?
· Options: What would be the best course of action?
· Will: What will you do, what can you commit to?
Choose a habit that plays a role in achieving this goal!
· What cue triggers it?
· What motivations do you have in it—are you trying to obtain something or avoid something?
· What is the response, what do you do?
· What is the reward that motivates the behavior?
If you need a new, more effective habit, design it according to the four aspects above.