Lessons from Olympians
The world of elite sport can seem a long way away from the day to day life of us mere mortals.
Or is it?
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As we watched the Tokyo Olympics, often at bleary o’clock, we were struck by how often the difference between Gold and Silver was not about one superhuman being better than another superhuman, but instead about people tapping into their most natural and highest level of performance by getting out of their own way, trusting their design for success and being present in the moment.
So what lessons can we take from these Olympians to take into our daily lives?
You perform in the present moment
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Take Matty Lee, the Olympic diver, in this article he describes how he had to let go of all his thinking about getting it right, his thinking about the past (how he’d messed up before), and his thinking about the future (how he was on course for a gold medal). He talked about how he had previously experienced a rush of adrenalin about the possibility of a gold which sent his focus off and lost him the medal. Instead, in Tokyo he let his mind settle, or in his words, ‘go blank’. In doing so he experienced a state of flow (no mean feat at the top of a 10m diving board) which meant his years of training kicked in and he simply performed to his potential in the present moment.
Focusing on the past and the future diminish our capacity to perform in the moment.
Your conditioning will show up in the moment if you let it
If you make it to the Olympics there is a high chance that, possibly for the last decade, you’ve done the hard work, put the miles in and pushed your body harder than you thought you could, but you must put all that aside in the moment. It’s sunk cost. Your body will know what to do if you have trained it, in the words of Jamaican sprinter Elaine Thompson-Herah, “I just let go and let my body do the running.”
We say it all the time, ‘I need to get out of my own way’. But it’s fascinating how often we put the work in, do the learning, acquire the conditioning, but then don’t trust it to show up in the moment when we need it, and instead start overthinking.
To have a settled mind gives you more access to all your training, practice (conditioning) and wisdom.
Winning isn’t all about the ego
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The sight of 2 athletes agreeing to share a gold medal tells this story better than anything we can say. Again and again through the course of the Olympics we saw athletes who were competing against each other in warm embrace the second the race was finished.
Most athletes are striving to beat their own PB and to put in their best performance; that’s how they win medals, not by going ego to ego with someone else, or believing our own hype.
How often do we get caught up in what the result should be and in doing so get distracted from showing up and performing?