Knowing Your Pivotal Practices Is The Secret To Life Mastery

Danielle: Go ahead and let people know if they aren’t familiar with you or what you do.

Leslie: I guess I'll just start from the beginning. I started gymnastics when I was 12 and then I sort of fell into the whole world of gymnastics. I did regular artistic gymnastics for like two months and then some big Russian man came up to me and was like, “Let me see you do your splits. Stand up, where's your mom?” I thought I was in trouble and he was actually the owner of the gym and asked me to join acrobatic gymnastics which I had no idea about, but I was there for fun, so I did that and I worked really hard and within the first year and a half, I was already at level eight. Then the following year, I was a part of the junior national team and then once I was old enough I joined the senior national team and I just kind of represented the US for a few years following that. My I guess my last season of like competitive season, I joined America's Got Talent and we placed third in that. While all of that’s going, I'm in high school senior year doing Acro Army on America's Got Talent and finishing up my last season. Then I got a job offer for a circus show all throughout that. They're like, “We're going to fly you to Ukraine and then you're going to tour with them.” So things just kind of followed themselves, but I'm 17 years old at this point and I've got a million things on my plate and things are about to change. So I did the circus for about a year-and-a-half to two years and then during that, I actually wanted to retire and kind of got back into it and then joined a cruise ship and then they had me do a whole aerial show which was supposed to be a little bit of aerial but it was a 45-minute show of just me. So basically baby gymnast to performer and I just finished about a year-and-a-half ago and now I'm in school to be a school teacher.

Danielle: What grade do you want to teach?

Leslie: Shorter than me. Hopefully 2nd or 3rd graders aren’t quite taller than me yet. Elementary school is the goal.

Danielle: You're going through all this that's not a normal seventeen-year-old’s life, right? So prefacing this, I had some conversations with people on the phone these past few weeks to validate some ideas and a lot of them told me that gymnastics and sports did not teach them time management which I thought was interesting. But because you would think because you have so much to manage that you do. They said exactly, I was almost in survival mode. “Everything was planned for me, I knew when my practices were supposed to be, but I didn’t feel like I was actually choosing to manage my time. Because when you leave that sport, you have a bunch of time, and nothing’s set for you and that's where you have to become good at time management. What do you think about that? 

Leslie: I agree but I also disagree. With gymnastics and that sort of the world you did half the time manage because I like I said I was in school so I had homework and studies to do and I also was training – I had 5 a.m. training and I also had 6 p.m. training every day (except for Sunday) Saturday we only had practice in the morning. But still I had morning and night practices. Night practices we had to stay until he decided he were done, but you have X amount of routines to do and if you mess up, you have that much more to do. But it's up to you how you do it and how long it takes you. That could be like, “Hey I just busted out 12 routines. I'm good, I feel good.” It was never that easy, because I'm annoying 17 year old that doesn't want to do anything, but it also taught me to totally manage with what my world was then. And sure, I transitioned into now a world where I'm becoming this artist and I get to build this routine where I get to do stuff that's outside of the rules of gymnastics. So I was able to blossom in the sense that I'm still finding myself. I fall into this performance sort of a life now. You also have a few shows a week. And it's much easier than a competitive routine where I have to tumble. It was just acro at that point. So it was hard, “Why do I have to be here for this amount of time?” – it’s all up to me. There wasn't this “You're here at 5 and you're here at 6,” “You have a routine, do what you want with your time. You have showtimes at 7 and at 9, do what you want.” There was no coach necessary pushing you, of course it's up to you as an athlete. But luckily I came right out of that when I had the endurance, I had the motivation and that has been my dream since I like walked into that gym. I think because I was so motivated, I didn't necessarily have an issue with that, but I could totally see how someone could just go into a world like that and then because you don't have these “from this hour to this hour, this is what we're doing in the following hour that changes,” I totally see how that's up to you 

Danielle: You were motivated - were there ever times where that motivation dipped or you had some kind of mental or emotional block where you couldn’t do something that was asked of you or wanting to get something, but your body just couldn't do it? Were there any any kind of mental or emotional blocks that you had to overcome during that time or even now? 

Leslie: Yes to both. I think throughout my competitive life, I didn't want to do anything. I hated tumbling. I was terrified of it and I had to do it every day and I just didn't listen. I don't know why my coach put put up with me, I don't know why. I love the man, I owe him everything, he's amazing, but I don't know why he ever dealt with me. Poor guy, I feel so bad. 

Throughout my routines, just do your tumbling passes and do them nice. I’d get scared, I’d panic and I would just run across the floor. I refused to do it. I don't know what my problem was, I just had this mental block where it felt like a panic. I mean I could do a triple, I could do a double something and have them throw me and catch me no problem. But a simple roundoff back handspring back tuck was the end for me. I had this huge mental block with specifically tumbling. And everytime I even go to the gym, I still get made fun of because I would lay in the corner crying. So my coach is like, “Do five in a row without stopping.” For me, the block was “Okay, can you stand there?” Him just standing there was the stepping stone I needed and eventually he stopped doing that. The more in trouble I got the more I had. At some point I had 200 to do in a night. I cried. It was a huge challenge to get over my tumbling. Most people love tumbling and I don’t know why I was so scared of it. 

Danielle: I was a coach too, so it’s like, “You want me to stand here and be close to you when you die?”

Leslie: That’s exactly what I wanted. I don’t know why, it was something that helped me through that and still to this day, I was training with Max, my old partner. I’ve never done a 2 to 1 press on an arm. I’ve done it on a foot, single foot - no problem. But for some reason being up higher and on someone’s hand. I did it on the floor, it was perfect, and then we went up high. I just kept pushing myself out and that brought me back to gymnastics days. I know myself. I need something to show myself that sure, I’m up really high, but I’m physically capable of doing this. So we stood next to a wall and I twisted off into it. But that block of it being there, I did them perfectly right after. It’s finding those mental blocks, and knowing yourself and then knowing this is how I can help myself through that. And I think that’s something that gymnastics gave me that I honestly would not have without it.

Pivotal Points

What are the things in your life that you have to do to stay at peak performance? And if you don’t do those things, the wheels fall off and your whole world crashes. A lot of people don’t even know what theirs are. So then when those things are not present in their life, they’re wondering why their world is up in flames, but getting to a point where you know yourself so well like Leslie did to say, “Okay my pivotal point is having that security during practice.”  So then you know when something is not working, you say, “I turn to my hinging points and I know what I need to do.” Boom, and then it works. That can apply to your training or life in general. If they don’t get 7 hours of sleep, if they only eat twice during the day. What do you think your pivotal points are?

[LINK COMING SOON] Download the PDF here to figure out what your pivotal points are.

Leslie: That’s exactly where I’m at now. I’ve gone in and out of retirement twice and potentially a third time now. I don’t know what’s going on with y world - it’s stressing me. I dove into school the same way that I kind of give myself to everything. If I'm in school I'm taking 18 units every single semester, did full-time over the summer. So I've just gone full blast through school. With that, I am lacking like “Oh, I’ll just like not train gymnastics – it's like not something that I'm like doing all the time. Every time I walk into a gym, which could be a month or maybe even two months apart, in the a year-and-a-half that I've been home. I love this so much and I forget that that's a really big part of what makes me me. I forget that until I'm like up and a handstand on someone's arms, or on silks or the canes. I need to make sure that I continue my training whether or not I'm performing because it's such an important thing that makes me me. I think just continuing and being consistent with my training.

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