Do you use yours?
Can you even admit that you have one?
Here’s the thing… we all have a dark side but no, it’s not like the dark side that Darth Vader makes us think of and was constantly fighting with.
Your dark side is deep inside you and where you hide your fears, insecurities, guilt, anger, embarrassment, secrets, greed, things you lust after, frustration and thoughts that you don’t want anybody to even know about. It’s the voices that keeps you up at two ‘o clock in the morning and that reminds you of things you don’t necassarily want to remember but that is, whether or not you like it, a part of your life and what makes you… you.
I am currently listening, for the second time, to Relentless by Tim Grover and he says this about the dark side “The dark side doesn’t have to be sick or evil or criminal; you can be a good person and still have this one part of you that remains untamed.”
Grover, whose books I can highly recommend, trained some of the best, most motivated and driven athletes the world has ever seen in guys like Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant and Dwayne Wade and every single one of the was able to tap into their dark side in order to be better. To perform at a higher level. To win.
Once you’ve accepted the fact that you have a dark side, the challenge is then to be able to not only control it but to tap into it. It’s not easy and can, for some, be quite scary.
When I train I tend to go look to the dark side to push harder. It doesn’t always work but when it does, you know about it. The idea, for me and as a pretty simple approach, is to look for and tap into events and thoughts that evokes a strong emotion and use that as fuel.
It works. It definitely works but it’s kind of a difficult and unorthodox concept to wrap your head around. I have been working on a list of blog topics which I will be digging into when… well, when the time is right 😉, and in one of these I’m gonna be going deep on the dark side and how you could use it to perform better.
The late Kobe Bryant had such an intense dark side that he even ended up giving it a name.
The black mamba.
In his auto-documentary “Muse,” Bryant revealed that he created The Black Mamba as a way to deal with the struggles he was going through off the court in 2003 and 2004 and this was his way of tapping into that dark side and use it as fuel.
This led to such an incredible, focused and competitive mindset that it was called mamba mentality, which is still something a lot of athletes try to emulate but don’t often get right.
Bryant went on to explain in “Muse,” that the ferocity that he brought to his game when tapping into his dark side – mamba mentality – had nothing to do with his opponents and was more about the “battle that was going on within himself” and that the opponents were just in the way.
For now though, a random fact.
Kobe took the name for his dark side from ‘Kill Bill’ wherein an assassin, called Black Mamba, uses a black mamba snake to kill another character. Kobe looked it up online and went ‘that’s me’.
I love the idea of tapping into all your fears, anger, regrets, pain, frustrations, embarrassment and all the other memories and voices that are always in the corners of our minds and using it as fuel.
I have felt glimpses of this when training after a really shit day and when I ws still competing. It’s real.
Recently I have been looking to the dark side quite a bit to execute against goals and ideas and personal challenges. Yes, it can be scary and people won’t get it, but it’s a good feeling.
It’s a great feeling.
And I want more!
