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 attain your next goals.
REGULATION
Regulation is the ability to manage your behaviour; to achieve high standards by controlling your impulses, thoughts, and emotions; to enhance your performance; and to reach your goals. As high performers we know how to do this. But after the celebration ends, your self-regulation can slide. “I’ll start tomorrow,” you say. Tomorrows come and go. You need to have discipline to stick with this practice when grappling with obstacles or confronting failures. Regulation means to delay gratification, accepting that accomplishing a goal in the future may mean saying no to something you want in the present moment.
ATTITUDE
Attitude encompasses a mentality of ongoing learning, focusing on improvement, and constantly challenging comfort zones. A champion’s attitude accepts failure as a step toward the next accomplishment. Attitude is the mindset that talent and basic abilities are only part of the equation; it’s a baseline accompanied by a philosophy of “I have just not done this yet.”2 On the upward slope toward a personal best, you are surrounded by people who remind you of this. But isolated from that environment, when things are not going well, you must choose to make meaning out of failure, be accountable for your mistakes, and then decide to grow. Your attitude is important for both short- and long-term peak achievements. You’ve got to manage your attitude every day, and equally important, maintain a good one as you move through the natural curves of life.
COMMITMENT
Commitment reflects the promise to yourself and to others that is demonstrated by daily action. Day-to-day behaviours inevitably lead you toward desired outcomes. Commitment is strengthened by working through the daily drudgery, challenges, obstacles, or failure that you naturally experience during meaningful pursuits. For example, every competitive swimmer understands that you show up for practice at 5:15 in the morning, regardless of the circumstances the night before. In a quest to achieve goals, commitment is not always a singular promise but requires the dedication and cooperation of others who also believe in the pursuit. For young high achievers, commitment extends far beyond the individual. Family schedules, vacations, and budgets may be focused on the child’s goal and, in some cases, an intense commitment from the family is needed for the child to succeed.
TUNING IN
As Martin Seligman describes in his book Flourish, at the heart of the concept of tuning in is the realization that one of the most important aspects of life is relationship and connection with others.3 When you are sensitive to your relationships with others, you create communities of positive influence and use your strengths for something bigger than yourself. Tuning in encompasses a desire to add value