In the midst of failure, I had many soul-searching moments and repeatedly attempted to achieve my goals using the same methods, only to discover that old ways are not always the best ways. After four long years, I finally regained my spot on the national team, but it was not without mess, chaos, and twists and turns.
In the arc graphic on page 11 you’ll see shadows, and twists and turns. These are meant as a reminder that, although the illustration is linear, no journey in life is. Often it’s only in retrospect that we understand this.
WE’RE ALL ON THE ARC
The entirety of an athlete’s experience through the arc of transition is a compressed version of what others go through, whether you are an opera singer, actor, homemaker, executive, teacher, or sales clerk. In a comparatively short period, athletes may reach a career high that might take others many decades to achieve. But we all navigate successes, endings, transitions, and repurposing. What often gives us the most trouble are the endings: the loss of a career, the acceptance that a dream may never be reached, a child leaving home, a divorce, the death of a loved one, a serious health issue that changes your life, plus a multitude of other, less dramatic events. In the many discussions I have had on this topic, I have learned that, when a life structure is removed and the definitions of your world change, the reality hits that “I’m not that person anymore.”
When someone or something important disappears from our lives, optimism, motivation, and self-worth can diminish as fear, loneliness, and insecurity creep in. Although we try to cope with an immense volume of change, we still need to complete our to-do lists and keep up with our daily obligations, even as life keeps heaping reality checks upon us and our identity unravels.
Navigating change, even when it’s anticipated, is tough. The more meaningful an experience, the harder the transition out of it can be. As we try to keep up with what’s happening, the rest of the world moves forward. No one wants to be left behind or forgotten. No one anticipates becoming irrelevant or marginalized. Yet it happens all the time.
THROUGH THE DEPTHS of struggle, most of us figure out how to relate to, live in, and come to terms with a new normal. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that we initially thrive. To truly flourish after having experienced a meaningful success is hard work and requires deliberate planning, commitment, follow through, and often significant outside help. Rarely do next successes happen simply by sitting and waiting for them.
Most important to recognize is that a personal next will not necessarily replicate the past. As we evolve, we need to absorb and work with new perspectives. When we strive to redefine what “success” means, we can fall into the trap of thinking our future achievements should look the same as the past ones. This is even more challenging if those around us also want to define us by our past accomplishments—what we were, instead of what we are trying to become.
The reality is that your future goals will be different from those in your past. However, you can use what you’ve already learned, the practices that contributed to your personal best, to fuel your next adventures and propel you to your personal next.
The Practices
“I like the fact that I am now in a place where I can bring to bear all of my experience.”
—STEVE GREGG, SWIMMER
Even when you are at your deepest point on the arc of transition, you still know you have the inner ability to achieve. You have attained a personal best, but now you want a personal next.
Throughout my own experience, my work with clients, and the many interviews I conducted with high performers, nine capacities kept bobbing to the surface. These capacities are key to training and to preparing us for a personal best, but they also serve as a source of resilience when searching for a personal next. Using a mnemonic device to serve as a reminder of each one, I call these nine competencies the “practices.”
These nine practices are the blood, sweat, and tears that make the glory happen down the road. Athletes striving to reach performance goals use them every day. In fact, any high performer who has given a speech, danced on a stage, prepared for an interview, taken an important exam, or stood in front of a board of directors knows from experience how important it is to be disciplined and put in the work in advance to get results. Simply stated, to achieve and sustain a high level of performance in any venue, you must constantly cultivate these nine practices:
•Proficiency: a high level of knowledge, skills, and aptitudes.
•Regulation: the ability to manage impulses, thoughts, and emotions and to delay gratification in order to reach new standards.
•Attitude: a mindset that embraces hard work, ongoing improvement, and the acceptance of failure.
•Commitment: a promise to yourself and others, demonstrated through daily action.
•Tuning in: sensitivity to relationships and contributing to something bigger than yourself.
•Identity: an awareness and a sense of yourself.
•Confidence: the belief that you can complete a task or solve a problem.
•Emotions: the ability to use your emotions to achieve desired outcomes.
•Secure base: a trusted place, object, person, or community that allows a level of vulnerability and that can be called on in times of need.1
For many of us, these practices are in constant play as we accelerate toward our dreams, with our culture, expectations, and environment positively or negatively influencing each. However, when we hit the messy middle phase of the arc and find ourselves swimming in the sea of post-accomplishment, we don’t engage the practices as frequently, and we may even drop them altogether. The absence of any one of them can be devastating to the individual; the absence of all of them can be disastrous. Many of the athletes I interviewed said that, after sport, they simply had nowhere to use them. But in transforming their lives, they re-established the practices that had grown rusty with disuse, and these became the foundation for their personal next.
The good news is that these practices have been ingrained in your past achievements and can be reconstituted in the here and now. The first step is learning to see how they function when they are in play. Considering each in more depth will allow you to evaluate how the practices have worked for you in the past, and how they might inform what comes next. As one of my interviewees, John Haime, puts it, “You did something very special . . . and certain qualities helped you get to that level, but you are capable of much more . . . Shift . . . try to reach that level again in something else.”
PROFICIENCY
Every success story exemplifies proficiency. The ongoing pursuit of knowledge, skills, and aptitudes sets the stage for future opportunities in ever more complex environments. As you transition from a personal best to the next, some proficiencies are transferable, but some are not. For example, if you were a football player, you could apply your knowledge of how to compete in a pressure-filled environment like a championship game to a new pursuit. But the skill of throwing a football may well be irrelevant after your football career has ended. Understanding which of your proficiencies are relevant and which are not is critical to identifying the skills you will need to
