Think Like an Incredible Athlete

Think Like an Incredible Athlete
April 29, 2014





To become an incredible entrepreneur, living a great life, work on improving your own individual performance. A good place to start is to learn from the best elite performers who always aim to win – incredible athletes. Their mindsets, determination, rigour, and their psychological processes are applicable to anyone with a desire to win in their chosen field. Replicate elements of how they think, how they improve their performance, and how they succeed.

Guess what? Incredible athletes are not born. Neither is training the only key to their success. It is not just about talent and hard work. There is something else apparent in top performers in all walks of life. High performance is as much about the mental processes of elite performers as it is about talent and work.

You don’t need to be naturally gifted, talented or a hard worker to learn and benefit from this knowledge. Everyone can implement it. So be creative and think about how you can use these high performance processes to help you achieve remarkable things in your work life.

1. Choose what looks like an impossible goal – always striving towards excellence.
Head Coach of the world record-beating British Cycling Team and Team Sky, Dave Brailsford, says: “You can write as many mission statements as you like but what you want is people who are on a mission.”

Incredible performers have very specific, very high expectations of themselves and the goals they want to achieve. For them, they are part of their being, dictating every action. All decisions are governed by how far they take them in the direction of their vision. Everything they do is a step towards these goals.

The clearer your goals, and the more excited you are about them, the more motivated you will be to achieve them.

If you are looking for long term personal efficiency, the greatest thing you can do is to aim higher than you believe possible. And make it happen.

If you are going to have a goal, make it a really great one. The equivalent of an Olympic Gold Medal, winning a World Cup or even climbing Everest.

What is your Olympic Gold Medal?

2. Build your own training regime, and work with the very best coaches to expand your expertise.
Incredible athletes do not work alone. They have the support of great coaches to guide them and ensure they are always fulfilling their potential.

Everything about an elite athlete is scrutinized, from what they eat, to their sleep patterns, and their physical and mental strength. The very best are always looking to get an edge over the competition, to innovate or keep one step ahead, and they are always willing to look beyond the obvious, to improve themselves to reach their goal.

Some entrepreneurs neglect their own personal development, especially with respect to developing a mindset for success. How much more could they achieve, with an external coach and an internal mindset that drive them to build on their strengths, vanquish their weaknesses, and focus on achieving success?

Improving your personal productivity is one element of becoming an ‘incredible entrepreneur’. So challenge yourself:

Can you do what normally takes you 4 hours, in only 2?

Can you contact twice as many clients in a day as you do now?

Can you run your business with half the people?

Can you achieve bigger and bigger goals?

What are you doing to train yourself to improve your personal performance?

Like speed to a sprinter and endurance to a long distance runner, an ‘incredible entrepreneur’ would look at every aspect of their work and life to help them to achieve their goals – and employ coaches to help them get there. Design your training regime, engage coaches, expand your mindset, and improve your expertise.

Do you have a clear and compelling vision?

How would you train to get where you want to go?

What coaching would you need – in which areas?

What do you need to learn?

How do you get ahead of the game?

3. Keep track of your efforts and results.
Having goals, and making a commitment to regular training are expected of an elite athlete. They also document and measure their efforts and progress. There is a saying – ‘what gets measured, gets done.’ Review and evaluation allows them to look at patterns in their performance and to see what is and isn’t working. If it isn’t working, change it!

How many entrepreneurs take the time to monitor and benchmark their own performance? Using this data to learn and to improve?

Think about monitoring and evaluating your performance as a way of both improving yourself, and getting ahead of the others in your field.

How can you measure what you do, in achieving your goals? What can you test? What can you learn?

Dave Brailsford epitomises coaching excellence, and his cycling team’s success at the Beijing Olympics is evidence of the success of his methods. “The aggregation of marginal gains,” is Brailsford’s catchphrase.

“We’ve got this saying: ‘performance by the aggregation of marginal gains. It means taking the 1% from everything you do; finding a 1% margin for improvement in everything you do. That’s what we try to do, from the mechanics upwards. If a mechanic sticks a tyre on, and someone comes along and says it could be done better, it’s not an insult – it’s because we are always striving for improvement, for those 1% gains, in absolutely every single thing we do.”

The sum of many tiny gains can amount to one big gain. When Nicola Cooke won gold in the cycling road race, it was a combination of her aerodynamic skin suit, light track tyres, and taking the final bend cautiously, knowing she could make up the time and stay safe. Not a single one of these small changes made the complete difference: but all together, they amounted to a gold medal-winning performance.

Measure to discover where you can make marginal gains and assess progress. What gains can you make? What will all those marginal gains add up to?

4. Look at the ultimate goal.
Incredible performers always give full commitment to ‘the now’ as an investment for the future – improving their present performance and achieving current goals. Their ultimate goal might be a few years ahead, so they commit themselves to various events in the shorter term – each one bringing them closer to that ultimate prize. The Commonwealth Games could be a stepping stone to the World Championships, which leads them to the ultimate Olympic Gold medal.

The plan they have put in place gives them a path to follow towards their ultimate goal, with opportunities to grow and succeed along the way. They want to succeed now, but keep getting better until they reach that ultimate chance to be the very best of the best: the most elite of all.

Taking the long view can yield huge benefits. Plan your work so that each project or business builds upon the previous one. Ultimately lead yourself towards the bigger, better opportunities in the future, that come from accrued achievements.

How can you use what you are doing now, to prepare for your ultimate goal? If you want to retire to a beach as a successful entrepreneur, what training are you doing to get there? You need to spend time, as well as money!

What are you doing today to create more time?

The ‘incredible entrepreneur’:
has a huge goal
trains hard to get there
is coached to achieve success
measures their performance along the way
takes action to improve performance
uses each stage of the journey to help them get there
What can you learn from this high performance process?

How can you use it to make yourself into an incredible entrepreneur?

Further Reading:

The Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz(Amazon LinkUK,US)

Sky’s the Limit by Richard Moore(Amazon LinkUK,US)

Winning by Clive Woodward(Amazon LinkUK,US)

If the above topic, or indeed any of my blogs are of interest to you, then contact me and let’s talk! Drop me an email atgetintouch@marcwinn.com.


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