Sport At Its Best

The underlying message of this blog is this: athletes with perspective, who see the big picture, believe in sportsmanship and fair play, etc., are also more likely to be successful athletes and successful people as well.  One of the ways in which I believe this to be true is through heightened awareness of both themselves and the people around them and this is the topic of this week’s entry.

To refresh your memory, here’s what Cal Botterill and Tom Patrick said about people with perspective in their book Perspective, The Key To Life,

“People with perspective are usually great at teamwork.  Their ability to see the big picture helps them recognize and appreciate the value of collaboration and working with others.  Their sensitivity and perceptiveness help them realize that everybody has a role that is important and needs to be appreciated.  Most of all, people with perspective have enough vision, gratitude and security to be open to positive rivalries and other people’s needs.”

Notice all the words that relate to awareness here: see, recognize, appreciate, sensitivity, perceptiveness, realize, appreciated, vision, open to.  You could make the generalization that people with good perspective are simply more aware of themselves and the world around them, aware of the bigger picture, aware of the value in sport and competition, and aware of their own values and why they compete in the first place.  I believe that people who have an increased level of awareness not only have better perspective and are better team players as Cal and Tom suggest, but are more successful as well.

One of the ways in which this happens of course is that people who are more aware and are better team players just make their lives easier by valuing their competitors and not looking at them as “the enemy”.  Imagine the stress you would put yourself under by considering everyone around you as the enemy when ultimately you are in a battle with yourself to achieve your best.  Relationships with competitors (and in individual sports we’re also talking about team mates) become a lot less stressed and clearly at an Olympic level a huge part of success lies in one’s ability to deal with stress.

People who have an increased level of awareness not only have better perspective and are better team players as Cal and Tom suggest, but are more successful as well.

Another way in which people who are more aware succeed is through self-awareness.  What is self-awareness and what makes it so important?  I tend to think of it in three sub-categories, 1) technical self-awareness in the performance of a skill, 2) awareness of one’s health or injury status and 3) awareness of one’s reaction to stress or pressure.  Perhaps there are more sub-categories but I believe these three to be key.

For the sake of this discussion I’ll go into a bit more detail with the first sub-category.  Technical self-awareness in the performance of a skill is fundamental – this is the performance of your sport or an aspect of your sport.  Put very simply, to improve, you need to know exactly what you did and what it felt like internally to perform that specific skill – you need this information to perform the skill again and to make corrections.

Recently at a pre-season training camp in Whistler, some of the other skeleton coaches and I had a discussion about a potential concern.  The concern was that with so much external technical (video) analysis going on in multiple locations, every run, run after run, there exists the possibility that the athletes would lose the critical link between what a run looks like on video versus what it feels like to actually do.

Part 2 to be posted Thursday…