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Success in any endeavor, whether athletically or personally, requires an enormous amount of both tenacity and persistence.  But beyond the basics, beyond the persistence and tenacity, what is it that not only drives the super successful, but carves the pathway to that success?   The following are four key elements that can create a starting point on your road to success. 

 

1)Deliberate Practice

Anyone who knows me knows that I love doing thrusters.  They are within my comfort zone and I rarely, if ever, get nervous to perform a workout that is thruster heavy.  On the flip side, I hate double unders.  If a workout has any double unders prescribed, I am a nervous wreck and will think of every excuse why I should opt out of the workout.  Knowing this about myself, I have spent the last year working specifically on double unders.  I utilized a technique called deliberate practice defined as practice that is purposeful and systematic with focused attention on a specific, well defined goal.  It’s more than saying I want to be better at double unders.  Deliberate practice is calling attention to exactly what you want out of a goal and reverse engineering your practice toward your well-defined goal.  In laymen terms it means getting out of your comfort zone during practice and stretching beyond what you can already do.  Deliberate practice is designed to make you nervous and takes mental fortitude to push through your boundaries.  In designing my double under deliberate practice, I consistently go beyond my comfort zone and in all honesty, it’s very hard.  But I’m chasing results and the nervous energy and fear I feel when I’m challenged beyond my comfort zone allows me to improve.  It’s the same with any goal, we succeed when pushed beyond our limits, it’s not comfortable but it is how results are achieved.  No one is born great.  What we see in our heroes, whether that is Michael Jordan or Mozart, are years of accumulated deliberate practice, years of going beyond comfort zones and systemically achieving results by doing more each day than the day before. 

 

“Deliberate practice requires you to identify specific elements of performance that need to be improved and then working intently on them.”

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2)Self-Talk

When you approach a barbell, with a weight slightly heavier than your personal best, what are you telling yourself?  Chances are those words you are saying to yourself will determine whether or not the lift is successful.  The saying goes, where the head goes, the body follows.  If you approach the lift thinking, this is heavy and I’m not sure about this, I will place a bet that you will fail the lift.  Conversely, if the approach is more along the thought pattern of I’ve got this (for me, it’s laced with many more expletives but the translation is I’ve got this), you are far more likely to successfully complete the lift.  But why?  Without delving deeply into the science behind this, the mind can’t differentiate between reality and fantasy.  If we tell ourselves we probably can’t lift the weight, our mind translates this to the body as if it has already happened and conversely the same is true.  That is the reason visualization is so remarkable.  By visualizing an event, our body elicits the same response to the event as if we are actually performing the task.  Our thoughts and words matter.  Simple changes in semantics can bring about huge changes in performance.  Don’t Stop verses Keep Going.  Both are translated similarly however the brain is wired to pick up on negative words.  What the brain hears is Stop and when under duress, there is nothing more the mind and body would like to do than stop, so it does.   Same with the phrase Don’t drop the bar verses Hang on to the bar.  The brain hears two things, either drop or hang on and will usually respond accordingly.  Always remember, your words, whether verbalized or internalized, have the ability to determine the outcome to many situations. 

 

3)Enjoy the Process

The brain is a complex organ – it is designed to reward us with more dopamine (the pleasure chemical) for the act of seeking a reward than for the act of receiving a reward.  Translated loosely this means we are happier with the struggle than the achievement.  The struggle, also defined as the process is our way up the ladder, the means to an end goal and it’s so often overlooked and ignored for the sake of the goal.  But the process is where the magic happens.  The process is achieving milestones and setting new standards.  The process is meeting new people and sharing new experiences with those you have known for years.  The process is the grind, the challenges, the good days and the bad days.  Essentially the process is the road we take to our destination.  And while yes it feels so great to finally reach our destination, the process changes us and teaches us who we are once we reach the destination.  Without the process, there is no end goal.  It’s important to take a step back and enjoy where we are at the moment.  To look around at the people who believe in us, the people who make the daily grind a little more bearable, and to remember where we started.  Because the goals that are worth it take years to achieve, and it’s valuable to remember just how far we have come. 

“Exceptional people really do believe that the journey is more important than the destination.”

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4)Know Your Why

Knowing why you are doing something, whether it’s an athletic achievement, a career goal, or lifestyle enrichment, is the key element to success.  In essence you have to know where you are going in order to get there.  Few of us would leave for vacation without knowing where we are going; for most of us the destination is predetermined.  We know not only where we are going, but why we are going there.  Whether it’s to visit family or relax on a beach, we know our intention.  The same is essential for goal setting.  It’s easy to set a goal.  For instance it’s easy to say I want to rock double unders.  For me, that’s a great goal, but when it comes down to it, when its 8:00 at night and I’m tired, hungry and want to be doing anything but double unders, I have to remember why I want to rock double unders.  Because it’s the why that matters and it’s the why that makes me push away my fatigue for just a little bit longer.  The why quickly becomes your alarm clock in the morning, it makes you pick up the barbell (or jump rope) far earlier than you would like, and it’s the reason we triple check our presentation.  And in the end, it doesn’t matter what your why is, it matters that you have a why; a reason for continuing toward your goal when it’s the last thing in that moment you want to do.  Purpose fosters motivation. 

 

“Without a why, we easily give up when pushed outside of our comfort zone.”

 

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