Aidan Walsh

boxing isn't bad you know and you were making friends and straight away then i realized boxing is actually a massive part of my life and i can actually do so much for me and that was 11. since then i was like right i have to stick it out there's a certain respect for the boxers 100 yeah massive like i remember the first day we went into the school and there was these big banks like grass banks and all the first years new first years all the third and fourth years we were through all the first years down the banks and when i went in all my mates and all the people around me were all getting through down

like no three down and all and all the people that were doing it were the people from the boxing club so I was like the only person there that didn't get three down so things like that it was like you know you respected and yeah you were just appreciated because you'd done a bit of boxing and I thought that was class yeah yeah when did you start realising you were good?

Still don't realise I'm still waiting.

Do you know God's honest truth?

Like I said, God's honest truth.

A few weeks ago, and I said this earlier, I was watching just to put a wee clip up on Instagram.

I watched back a video of me fighting.

I think it was like Commonwealth Games in 2022.

And I watched the video back and that was the first time that I proper watched myself back in my whole life.

And I actually said to my mum, I said, Jesus, I was alright there, wasn't I?

like I never watched it back even from a young age kid never and even I looking back I was like do you know what it actually was alright I always thought I was not good as mad as that sounds I always thought I was not good it does sound magic because I thought you were actually going to have a laugh and a joke there and go still don't be a loser no no but that's honestly that's the God's honest truth see my whole career like confidence was a massive thing for me that's why I love sports psychology and got into sports psychology because I started to read like self talk and goal setting and visualisation and started to use the techniques to sort of

built me up, you know, into something that I wasn't.

I always had to use confidence, self-talk and body language and, you know, write okay, prepare myself and any competition that I ever won in my life, I was using those skills from a young age.

Okay, positive self-talk and a bit of belief in you, you can do it, you can do it and all that type of stuff.

And then after that, my career, any time that I ever really used that, I never performed well because I just went into Michelle then and got nervous and, you know, yeah, it's mad.

Yeah, like I know a number of people, even people with just natural talent and they just go in and enter a competition.

Even to this day, I'm still a massive overthinker.

You know, you overthink things and we'll have a lose.

It probably done me well in my career because it kept me on my toes and it made me sharp for certain tournaments.

but like in the long run like know yourself and that was a real issue that I had when entering high performance because you were in hotel rooms every single night so your training was done at say three or four o'clock and you go back to the hotel room to recover for the next day and you're in the hotel room you're thinking you know you have all this free time because when you're young like you get up you go to school you come home from school you play with your mates you're away to the boxing club you're in bed the same again you've no time to think yeah