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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 to your community—whether it be big or small, one person or many people—and links to a greater sense of purpose. It moves you from a “me” perspective to a “we” perspective. The LeBron James Family Foundation’s slogan “We are family,” for instance, exemplifies this perspective, and LeBron himself exemplifies this with his commitment to providing funding to the I Promise School, a public elementary school in Akron, Ohio, that supports at-risk children who are growing up in a similar environment as he did.⁴

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.