The Angel and the Devil in the Start Gate
An interviewer asked Mikaela Shiffrin, who was already an olympic and world cup champion at the time, what goes through her head standing in the start gate.
Here's her answer: "I have the angel and the devil on my shoulders yelling at each other."
The most decorated alpine skier in the history of the sport. Top of the course, world watching, everything she's worked for sitting right there in front of her.
And what's happening in there is a cartoon. Two of them, going at it.
I love that she said yelling. Not a quiet flicker of doubt she nobly rose above. Not a whisper. Yelling — which means both of them are loud, and neither one has won yet, and she has to push out of that gate anyway within seconds of listening to that argument.
If that's what it sounds like in a world champion's head, we can all take a deep breath about what it sounds like in ours.
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WE HAVE ALL BEEN IN THAT GATE
Maybe not at the Olympics. But we've all entered the arena, or walked to the line, or stood outside the conference room, with the two of them going at it.
One says focus on your process, trust your skills, you've got this.
The other one has a whole file on us. It remembers the last time. It remembers who's watching. It fantasizes every possible outcome.
Here's what I've come to believe after years of reading everything I can get my hands on about the mind: the people who perform under pressure are not the ones who found a way to evict that second voice. They're the ones who know it's up there.
This week on the podcast I'm walking through five books that shaped how I think about my own thinking. Put them side by side and they are all — every single one — describing the battle happening on Shiffrin's shoulders.
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THE TENNIS COACH WHO NAMED THEM
Tim Gallwey wrote The Inner Game of Tennis in 1974, and he named the two of them Self 1 and Self 2.
Self 1 is the critic, the narrator, and the judge. It’s the one who always needs to be talking - keep the elbow up, don't blow this one, that was a horrible shot.
Self 2 is the doer. It’s our subconscious, our muscle memory, our intuition. It’s the self that knows what to do if left on it’s own, and holds all of our capability and potential.
And here's the whole problem in one sentence: Self 1 does not trust Self 2. So it gets in the way. Constantly.
And Gallwey's central discovery was that the mistake is almost never the problem. The judgment that Self 1 stacks on top of it is. The ball goes out — that's neutral information. But we don't leave it there. We say bad shot. Then bad player. Then this is who I am.
That whole descent takes about four seconds, and Self 1 narrates every step of it.
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THE ONE THAT SAYS WE'RE LEAVING IT TO CHANCE
Dr. Cindra Kamphoff's Beyond Grit is built around ten practices of the world's best, and Practice 3 belongs in this conversation. Master your thoughts.
I'll be upfront that I'm biased here — I'm a Mentally Strong Coach trained by Cindra, so this material has been taught to me directly, not just read.
Her premise is blunt in the best way. If we aren't training our minds on purpose, we're leaving our thinking to chance. There isn't a third option where it quietly handles itself. The world's best, she says, don't hope their thinking will work for them. They make it work for them.
The strategy she gives is one I use constantly: plan your thinking. She points to research showing that when we've prepared specific thoughts in advance to meet our negative thinking, we shut it down far better than when we simply try not to think negatively.
In a nutshell — we can't delete a thought. We can only replace it. And a replacement we picked out on a calm Tuesday will always beat one we're scrambling for in the heat of the moment.
The angel does better when we've written her lines ahead of time.
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THE ONE THAT SAYS IT'S NOT A CARTOON
Shiffrin reached for the angel and the devil the way we all do — as a figure of speech. A shorthand everybody understands.
Joyce Meyer would tell us it isn't a figure of speech.
Battlefield of the Mind opens with Ephesians 6:12 — our struggle is not against flesh and blood. The fight isn't against the other competitor, the interviewer or the boss. The battlefield is our own mind, and we need to be on active duty there.
And she's direct about the opponent. The devil is a liar. Strategy and deception — that's the entire method. The thief comes to steal and kill and destroy, and he does it with lies that sound exactly like our own voice.
Which is precisely why they work on us.
Joyce says it as plainly as it can be said: we need to think about what we are thinking about.
Scripture gives the harder version — take every thought captive. Captive is an active word. And Mark 4:24 tells us to consider carefully what we hear, which includes what we hear in our own head.
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THE RESEARCH ON WHICH ONE GETS LOUDER
Shawn Achor spent over a decade studying happiness at Harvard, and The Happiness Advantage is where he lays out what he found.
We've all heard the formula. Work harder. Then we'll be successful. Then we'll be happy.
Well, his research shows the opposite. Happiness isn't the reward waiting at the finish line. It's the fuel that gets us there. A brain in a positive state is about thirty-one percent more productive than one that's negative, neutral, or stressed.
But the part of the book that belongs in this conversation is what he calls the Tetris effect.
Researchers had people play Tetris for hours on end. Afterward those people started seeing the shapes everywhere — in buildings, in the grocery aisle, in the ceiling tiles. They couldn't turn it off. Through hours of repetition, their subconscious had been trained to seek out those patterns, and it kept right on seeking them after the game stopped.
Now think about the game we've been playing over and over. It isn't Tetris.
Our mind's default is to scan for what went wrong, and if it's been allowed to run that pattern for years, it will find what went wrong every single time. Even when 20 things went exactly the way we wanted, it will latch onto the one that didn't.
That's not pessimism and it's not a personality flaw. It's a trained pattern. And a trained pattern can be retrained.
Start telling our minds what to go looking for. Because they're going to go looking for something, and it might as well be something that serves us.
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THE ONE THAT DOESN'T SOUND LIKE A DEVIL AT ALL
Jim Murphy's Inner Excellence has a chapter called The Greatest Opponents You'll Ever Face. There are three of them, and once again — they are not flesh and blood.
The critic, which judges everything. Us, the ground, the draw, the weather. And a mind that's busy judging cannot be present.
The monkey mind, restless, swinging branch to branch and never landing. Already three runs ahead and two runs behind and nowhere near the one we're actually about to make.
And the trickster.
The trickster doesn't sound like fear. It sounds like wisdom. It sneakily convinces us to believe our insecurities. It says things like: Let's not get ahead of ourselves. There's not enough to go around. Who are you to think you'll be able to do that?
It has excellent reasons for everything it suggests, and every single one of them is fear in disguise.
That's the part that should get our attention. The devil on the shoulder is easy to spot — he's yelling. The trickster uses an indoor voice and sounds perfectly sensible.
Different book, different language, exact same warning Joyce gave us.
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WHAT I ACTUALLY DO NOW
What I do is notice. On the drive home, at the trailer, waiting my turn — I check whether there's commentary running. Usually there is.
Then I ask two questions. Is this true? And is this helping me?
That's it. Most negative self-talk cannot survive those two questions. It's built to run in the dark, unexamined, and the moment we hold it up to the light a lot of it just falls apart. The stuff that survives is usually real feedback worth keeping.
Jim Rohn said it more simply than I ever could. Every day, stand guard at the door of your mind.
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THEY DON'T LEAVE
I want to be honest about this part, because a lot of mindset content oversells it.
That second voice doesn't fully go quiet. Shiffrin has it in an Olympic start gate. I have it hauling to a jackpot. What changes isn't whether it talks — it's whether we know it's talking, and whether we are prepared to respond.
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THIS WEEK ON THE PODCAST
We're spending all five episodes on these books — Gallwey, Cindra Kamphoff, Joyce Meyer, Achor, and Murphy. Monday through Friday on Cowgirl Up, about five minutes each. Our power statement all week: I think about what I am thinking about.
And if there's a voice in your gate that's been running the show longer than you'd like, that's exactly what I help people work through. Book a free discovery call and let's talk about it.
📅 Book your free discovery call: https://thehub-api.mastermind.com/widget/booking/4lv6jvtWDaKLScRzga20
🎙 Listen to Cowgirl Up: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cowgirl-up/id1871929429
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laurie Blickenstaff is a Certified Mental Performance Coach, the founder of Mental Game 101, and the host of the daily mindset podcast Cowgirl Up. A lifelong competitor and 2023 World Series of Team Roping #7 Yeti Championship winner, she works with competitors — helping them build confidence, get over mistakes fast, and compete from freedom instead of fear. She lives in Eagle County, Colorado with her husband and their dog.
Mental performance training is NOT intended as, nor is it a substitute for, mental health care.
