My name is Tim Borys…and I’m an Olympic Junkie. Every two years, big parts of life get put on the back burner while my family and I soak up the awesomeness of the Olympic competition. So it is this time with the winter Olympics 2022.
Forget the geopolitics, doping scandals, and media hype. At heart, the Olympics are about mindset and personal performance.
I LOVE watching the triumphs, failures, challenges, success stories, and seeing athletes pull more from themselves than they ever knew possible.
It’s also amazing to see how the athletes deal with frustration and failure.
Athletes spend years training for an event that can be won or lost in a split second. One instantaneous decision can have life-altering consequences.
There’s no doubt that each of the athletes is physically well prepared. However, how these athletes show up mentally on the day of their event is typically what makes the difference in competition.
What this can teach us about mindset, perseverance, dedication, and heart is profound.
All sports provide lessons to be learned from training, competition, success, and failure. The even better news is that whether we consider ourselves an athlete or not, we can use these lessons in our own life. Applying these universal personal performance principles will improve your performance at work, home, and every other area of life.
While there are many, the two key lessons I want to highlight are:
Mindset is a skill.
It’s a choice you make about the way in which you view the world around you. Every thought leads to a perception of your environment. Those perceptions influence the actions you take each day. Those actions lead to the outcomes you achieve in life. Those outcomes then feedback on your thoughts. The cycle can lead to success, or failure and frustration.
I call this cycle the “Circle of Success or Distress”™. It’s a key part of the mindset section of my book “The Fitness Curveball”. It took me a long time to figure out that these principles apply outside sport, and I want you to learn from my hard-earned experience.
The biggest lesson I can impart is that “the inputs and outputs of this system (and your life) are completely in your control”. This control is much greater than you think. While there are many aspects of our external world we don’t have direct control over, we ALWAYS have control over our thoughts! And these are key factors in moving the circle forward.
If you would like to know more about cultivating a mindset that creates opportunities and success in your life check out our Mindset Mastery on-demand, online workshop.
The high-level performance takes purposeful practice.
Practice isn’t helpful unless it’s purposeful practice. Learn to do it right. Practice doing it right, and continue improving every step of the way. This takes focus, dedication, and time. The goal is to only put the effort into areas that are improving who you are and building your future self. This is a major reason why I highlight the 4 Pillars of Performance with clients. Cultivating skills in each of these areas (Mindset, Habits, Movement, Fuel) is the essential foundation to creating a long, vibrant, and high-performing life.
Take a moment right now to think about the key skills you are developing in life. Are they the ones that will take your health, happiness, and performance to the next level? Too many people sacrifice these areas for short-term, or unimportant purposes. But they end up paying a hefty price down the road.
Olympians understand that one day of training doesn’t make a champion. But that the culmination of 1461 consecutive days (or more) of purposeful practice creates the foundation that puts them in a position to seize their goal.
THIS is something you can learn from. Every day is an opportunity to be better. You have that choice today, tomorrow, and every other day in your life. What you do with it is up to you.
If you would like help feeling, performing, and being better each day to seize the opportunities in your life, just let us know. My team and I would love to help!
