Priorities
Clarity around what you want AND what you can control will influence your likelihood of successful performances and your ability to be fulfilled by the process.
You have to make choices.
Choices are matter of preference and are within your control.
Your preferences may be different to others, even if the goal is the same.
Your goals, and how you pursue them, are up to you.
How you pursue your goals will influence your ability to succeed.
What success looks like to you, is up to you.
Sport is a competitive endeavor. That’s the point. What becomes apparent when the competition is over, is how you compared to your competition. Who was faster, or stronger, or had more skill. What we can’t see is the choices made in preparation that determined the eventual results.
The aggregation of these choices is what determines your ability to perform better, or worse, or differently. The decisions you make must be determined by your priorities. You cannot control what other people do, or what other people want. Clarity around what you want AND what you can control will influence your likelihood of successful performances and your ability to be fulfilled by the process.
Focus on What You Can Control
Where you have control, you have choice. Where there is no control there is no choice. For example, the weather is not within your control, but what you wear and what other adjustments need to be made (or not) is within your control and therefor a matter of choice.
The list of things that you can control is long, and where you should focus. When you go to bed. What bed you sleep in. When you wake up. What you have for breakfast. How you conduct yourself when you see your teammates at training. Do you bring energy. Do you do your pre-hab, rehab or whatever it takes to have your body ready.
These are the things that all show up in-competition that we do see not in competition. Talent and luck play a large part too (more or less depending on the sport), but those are things outside of our control.
You Have to Make Choices
What is within our control is our capacity to acknowledge we have finite time and resources, so we have to prioritize certain things over others, which isn’t necessarily clear, even if your goals are. Your priorities may be different from your direct competition. If your priorities aren’t clear, the net positive behaviors within your control have the potential to erode when threatened by other priorities.
Consider junk food. It tastes good, but there are many reasons not to eat it. We all know this. Highly processed, typically high in fat and/or sugar and low in protein food, causes inflammation, has low nutritional benefit and yet we eat it. Why? Because it tastes good. Why don’t we eat it all the time? Because we have other goals! We are often prepared to trade mouth-pleasure in spite of, or in support of our nutritional plan. Clearly people are trading sleep for Netflix, the internet and so on.
What you can do is be clear with yourself about what is of more or less importance in your life. You do not need to only make decisions that are in the absolute best interest of your athletic performance, but realise that there are athletes out there that do. If you meet one of those athletes in competition you are relying on talent and luck to a greater extent than they are. Perhaps what you have in talent and luck supersedes their talent and luck and the sum total of their preparation, but at the elite level this is a very rare thing.
In Order to Prioritise You Need to Know What You Want
Let’s say you want to run a marathon. Do you want to run it as fast as possible, or do you want to maintain other attributes like strength and size? Straight away there’s options and it’s not a matter of right or wrong, but of preference. Different preferences will lead to different choices. Your choices will therefor be different to someones else’s, even if the goal appears to be the same. The nuance is important because our training and performances are a product of our choices. A lack of clarity regarding intent can only lead to a lack of certainty around the decisions you make.
Because you are an individual, and your goals may have subtle differences to someone else, the decisions you make regarding your lifestyle, training and performance execution will be determined by your needs and not someone else’s. Which is not to say that the needs of others are unimportant to you. In fact, other people’s needs and your desire to support them may impact how you go about training. For example, your want and obligation to help other people may mean that rather than pursue your goals in a way that requires a high volume approach to training, you may choose a path that requires the smallest time investment possible in order to have more time for others, or other pursuits. What you pursue, and how you pursue it, are determined by the pursuit and by you.