IDENTITY
Identity refers to your sense of self. Some identities are pre-established (such as child, teenager, adult), but much of your identity is built up through life experiences and undergoes constant development. For the most part, identity is shaped by how you view yourself, how you fit into your world, and what you believe the world expects of you because of the way you’ve been recognized and rewarded. As you strive for a level of success, your thoughts, actions, and interactions all contribute to your identity. Additionally, group dynamics—your interactions with the people around you—contribute to and reinforce both the person you are on the inside and the person you project to the world. This is especially important to understand when you are in that messy middle. The world may see you as successful, but inside you might be falling apart.
CONFIDENCE
Confidence is the belief that you can complete tasks and solve problems and is developed in both the private and public spheres. When you pursue a personal best, small wins give your confidence a boost, and big triumphs bolster your sense that you can meet any challenge. We build confidence through effort, execution, experiences, daily routine, the support of others, and our environment. How much you believe in yourself affects the kind of goals you set and the momentum you create for attaining them. In the venue of sport, the momentum or absence of confidence is easy to spot. Tiger Woods missing a shot can snowball into a disastrous round. However, he can shift those moments because he has built a reservoir of confidence through his hard work, experience, and routine.
EMOTIONS
On a purely physiological level, emotions are a neurobiological response caused by a chemical release of hormones. They are a state of mind in response to our circumstances and perceptions.5 Sometimes we describe emotions with words like “mad,” “sad,” “happy,” and “scared.” But the practice of emotions for a high performer is your ability to understand and regulate your feelings and then direct your energy toward a desired outcome. Emotions can positively or negatively influence how you engage with others. For instance, in business and in sport, working in teams can be challenging. Successful businesspeople and athletes alike learn to channel anger about a frustrating outcome into the search for a better solution. While you journey along the arc of transition, you must learn how emotions affect your interactions with yourself and others.
SECURE BASE
A secure base is a safe place, an object (like a good luck charm), a person, or a community that provides you with a sense of protection or caring. In high performance, a secure base can be, according to psychologist George Kohlrieser, “a source of inspiration and energy for daring, exploration, risk-taking and seeking challenges.”6 Your secure base is more than support: it anchors you and is a dynamic two-way relationship that you can call on in times of need. Asking for help takes courage, and the level of trust you have with your secure base allows you to be vulnerable and take risks. When you lack, lose, or experience a violation of your secure base, you likely feel a significant gap and, sometimes, far-reaching ramifications, including on your ability to meet objectives, on your health, and on your behaviour. These effects can show up differently for each of us. It might be physical, social, emotional, or in your performance.7 The higher the performer, the smaller the secure base. You socialize with many but trust few. A young Michael Phelps learned this lesson in 2009 after being photographed at a party inhaling from a marijuana pipe.8
THE PRACTICES MATTER. But, at different times of your life, you may find that some are more important to you than others. Individually, each of these practices is a worthy pursuit. However, in any high performance pursuit, the practices do not function in isolation but interact and influence each other. For example, it’s hard to gain proficiency without a level of commitment. Exceptional performance is the combination of these practices. Paige Mackenzie exemplified this while discussing her transition from professional golf to TV broadcasting: “As I moved into the business world, the only thing that people ever talked about is what you do well. I have to ask, and beg, my bosses to give me things to work on to get better because that’s what I’m used to focusing on . . . I’m comfortable there.” With her commitment, attitude, and building of new proficiencies, she is creating an identity distinct from the one she had playing golf, an identity that works toward her personal next.
HARNESSING THE POWER OF THE PRACTICES
The practices create momentum as you strive for success. But once a meaningful life pursuit such as a sport or a career, or a role like being a spouse, comes to an end or changes radically, we tend to experience a void because we no longer have a place to perform these well-established practices. You may spiral downward, and it takes time and effort to alter that course. But even when you are in the messy middle, you still have all the tools you need to reach your personal next: you know how to be the best and do the work to get there.
Most important of all, to find a personal next, you must let go of what no longer serves you. If you were a celebrated orchestral musician who had to retire because of an injury, you need to accept that you may never play professionally again. If you were a CEO, deeply tuned in to your industry, employees, customers, and competitors, you need to recognize that your identity has shifted. Saying goodbye to something is important. We “must say goodbye to say hello”9 and accept that, in most cases, it is unrealistic to believe you can replicate the experiences of the past. Trying to replicate history detracts from the discovery of new directions.
This means that, as a musician, upon enrolling in a course to gain new skills, you’ll need some of the practices already in your arsenal, such as commitment, attitude, and regulation. As a former CEO in your post-corporate life, you can use your high-level knowledge and mentoring skills to bring value to others; this transfer of proficiency and deeper focus on others can provide new meaning to your life now that your career has ended.
In the next chapters, we examine each point on the arc of transition—from tackling the ascent to negotiating the messy middle to climbing new heights. Although the interviews I conducted primarily focus on the journeys of elite athletes, many of their emotional trials and tribulations reflect the experiences of others, whether they played high school football, work in construction, perform on the stage, or own their own business. The key is how this information informs you about your unique circumstances. What lessons can you learn from the compressed trajectory and subsequent struggles of elite athletes’s lives? And how can you use the nine practices common to the high achiever to find your personal next?
Throughout, we look at how the nine practices play out across the stages of the arc—the exercises in the “Practices in Play” sections will help you dive deeper. As you read the stories of others’ personal bests and personal nexts, you may uncover aspects of yourself that will propel you into your future. Commit to keeping a journal of thoughts and answers to the questions asked, as this book is meant as a tool for discovery and you’ll want to track your progress to assist in that process. For additional personal insight, you may wish to download extra exercises on the Time Outs webpage at melindaharrison.com.
Now, let’s begin the journey together.
STAGE ONE:
TACKLING THE ASCENT
This upward-sloping period focuses on the ascent to a personal best and the experiences that fuel the ascent. In this stage, you move from exploration to intensity and then to actualization. Your lifestyle and environment at this early part of the journey influences your future journey through the arc.
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