me, work ethic has meant approaching everything I do with focus and commitment. It means having the self-awareness to understand my strengths and limitations, and the ability to maximize my capabilities within any given moment. It also means making short-term sacrifices and working through discomfort to accomplish long-term goals. When I retired from professional tennis, earning my graduate degree was an important priority for me.
I accepted a position as the head coach at an institution that was my top academic choice and which had exceptional tuition benefits. The position, however, could only offer an annual salary of $15,000, so in addition to my full-time role and graduate studies I worked an additional twenty hours each week teaching private tennis lessons to support myself. During this time, I also had the opportunity to serve on the executive board of a nonprofit and participate in a once-in-a-lifetime internship opportunity. These experiences required making personal sacrifices and working long, physical hours, but they also opened doors of opportunity and provided some of the most incredible years of personal growth.
We also asked her to discuss the life skills that helped her the most in her professional life after a life in sport. First, she noted resiliency. For her, “resiliency is the most important life skill I learned as a student-athlete. We’ve all experienced setbacks, defeat or a lack of confidence and for me, resiliency meant experiencing these challenges and then finding a way to regroup, pick yourself up and try again.”
She also highlighted time management as “the ability to manage multiple and competing priorities, [which] was always a part of my student-athlete experience and continues to be an important part of my professional experience. To this day, every morning when I get to work I take ten minutes to review my calendar and prioritize my workload for the day and week. Investing a small amount of time into planning on the front end goes a long way in efficiently and effectively managing time and priorities.”
The ability to learn continually is another life skill Dawn reported as being of high importance. Specifically, she noted “the skill that has been most important and most fulfilling for me is the ability to learn and recognize that you can learn from every opportunity, every person and every situation.”
In developing all of these key life skills, she noted three factors she believes are crucial: goal setting, value clarification, and utilization of resources. She explained:
Goal setting and values clarification have been valuable tools in my athletic and professional life. Goal setting often involves making the implicit, explicit. It invites an athlete to articulate what they want to accomplish from their athletic pursuits and identify a pathway to accomplish it. There is a lot of interesting research about the power that comes from scripting and verbalizing your goals and every great coach and teacher in my life has challenged me to not only set goals for myself, but also write them down and say them out loud.
Values clarification includes taking time to identify and narrow down your core values. These tools are simple but are an impactful driver for self-reflection, effective prioritization and intentional decision making . . . be both resourceful and ask for help.
The ability to independently problem solve on one hand, and on the other hand be courageous in asking for help, cannot be understated in its importance to one’s personal and professional development.
TIME MANAGEMENT
Oliver Luck, Executive Vice President of the NCAA, identified time management as the best life skill in his experiences. He described his view as follows:
The best life skill that I was able to develop is time management and how to fit all of these different things into my day. Sometimes you can’t because you run out of time. That’s very helpful when you become an adult, when you’re married, you’ve got kids, you’ve got a job. You have to squeeze a lot of things into a busy day. At work, you’ve got to look at a situation and figure out how you improve it.
. . .
RYAN SOLLAZZO
(former student-athlete, football–D1, Director of Sponsorships at Major League Baseball)
From a time-management standpoint, map things out. I would write down my goals, and set deadlines. I would set midpoint deadlines, and then try to map out how many days it would take me to get to the midpoint deadline. By beating that deadline, I would ultimately bring the final deadline 4 or 5 days earlier. If I couldn’t do it, then I knew I had 4 or 5 days extra to meet that deadline. Being able to map out a strategy, have a vision for the strategy, and then have a plan on how you want to execute it is extremely important.
. . .
TEAMWORK
Kristen Brown, a former basketball student-athlete at Northern Illinois University who is now Associate Athletic Director–Administration at the University of Maryland, emphasizes teamwork as a key life skill. She noted “teamwork is crucial to learn as a student-athlete because you deal with so many different personalities on a team. Learning how to interact, and work well together with people from different walks of life, different ages, different backgrounds are certainly skills I use every day. Communication is very important in building relationships, and helps me out every day in my job.”
MANAGING AND HANDLING PERSONALITIES
Nick Manno, a former student-athlete baseball player at Mount Union who went on to work for various teams in Major League Baseball, provided a very interesting life skill which he called “learning how to manage personalities” and noted it was very important to him during his tenure as a student-athlete. He explained further that
any team culture and atmosphere will have introverts, extroverts, and others who are outgoing and those who don’t take criticism well. There will be those you deal with that you like and those you don’t. The reality is whether you are on a team or working in an organization, you are going to have to deal with different personalities.
You are going to have to manage those personalities accordingly. You are not going to get along with everyone you work with or play with, but understanding that not everyone is going to be like you, and not everyone is going to think like you is important. At the end of the day, you need a common goal and have to find out where you fit. My advice for managing personalities is to be yourself, know where you fit, and know where you fall. Be your own person, and try not to fall into the traps of others . . . Try to put yourself in their shoes and situation to better understand their perspective.
As a leader, you need to be able to manage any situation, and have the discipline to be able to still do the best you can even when you are not 100%. Athletes are the same as professionals. You don’t always want to get up and go to work, but we have to be professionals.
DEALING WITH ADVERSITY
Manno stated his belief that the ability to deal with adversity is “the biggest life lesson that can be turned into a skill, whether it’s a team concept or something you are not doing in your own job or own career, allow yourself to be reflective and figure out what you can do better in those situations. Self-evaluation is crucial; Learn how to be self-reflective and understand where you need to improve.”
ACCOUNTABILITY
Former volleyball student-athlete at Arizona State University Alexis Pinson suggested that accountability was a key life skill. “Being a part of team in college really taught me the value of being reliable and knowing that my teammates could count on me as an athlete and as a person. This has certainly carried over to my professional life. I take great pride in knowing that my bosses and coworkers see me as an accountable person and I know that that is a skill that I honed as a student-athlete.”
Nick
