Life is too precious merely to get by or to charge through without making course corrections.
Your sports career and your high school/college days (or whatever season of life you are in) are too short for you not to make a conscious effort to thrive.
Yet I see it all the time– young men and women who merely aim to survive because they don’t take responsibility- they don’t take the necessary steps to thrive.
Below is a simple approach to succeeding in your academics, in your sport, in your relationships, and in your life:
THE SUCCESS CYCLE: test-->fail-->learn-->improve-->re-enter-->test-->learn-->improve-->re-enter
- TEST: we can’t wait until we have all the answers and the perfect plan before we test things out. We need to take wise risks and get out of our comfort zone if we are going to thrive.
- FAIL: you can call this whatever you want– “falling short” is fine. We must recognize and embrace that we need to go through times where we fall short of excellence if we are ever going to get close to that excellence we desire.
- LEARN: this one is highlighted because THIS is the one everyone skips.
You failed in a relationship but you didn’t take time to analyze and breakdown where the failure was on your end. You know the other person's shortcomings like the back of your hand, but perhaps you didn’t look within.
You didn’t make the soccer team but you also didn’t get a coach afterwards, or someone close to you, to help you learn from that failure and REALLY find out what you need to improve for next time.
You applied for a job or internship and didn’t get it, so you threw your hands up and said “who cares, I don’t need one” rather than taking the simple but powerful next step of learning from your failure.
I could go on and on and on and on but THIS step is the one, for whatever reason, that people get lazy with.
Pause and reflect: What have you failed at in the past that you haven’t yet learned from?
- IMPROVE: after you’ve analyzed and learned from the failure, you will want to do 2 things.
The 1st is that you will want to identify ways that you will improve upon the things that you did well.
The 2nd is that you will want to identify the changes you are going to make next time you re-enter
- I.E. In the next relationship I am going to replace my sarcastic, cunning remarks with words of love and encouragement.
- I.E. Before the next time I tryout for a club team, I am going to get 100 shots everyday and improve my running times by 20%. At the tryout this time, I am going to use my Mistake Ritual (we teach this during an athlete’s Success Session at PFP) and I am going to outhustle everyone else
- RE-ENTER: you’ve done the hard work, now you need to step back into the ring. You are stronger and more equipped than every before because of your learned and evaluated experience. Now it’s go time.
Where can you apply the Success Cycle today?
Dedicated to your success,
Coach Andrew Simpson
P.S. I now have just 2 spots open on my private 1 on 1 Mindset Coaching program for athletes. This lesson is one that I break down for individual students to help them achieve massive success on and off the field. You can apply for 1 of those 2 spots here.
