Last week we welcomed Sara Symington to our little peer review study club in Nottingham.
Sara is a former 2-time Olympic cyclist (Sydney and Athens) and multiple commonwealth games and world championship competitor for England and GB.
In 1999 it was Sara’s result in Australia that qualified the GB women’s team for the road race in the Sydney Olympics.
That was one piece of the jigsaw that kickstarted British cycling to where it went onto and how big it became.
Sara has had an amazing, fascinating and varied career but has now settled on performance directorship and is currently a performance director for Olympic and Paralympic British Cycling tasked (along with the rest of the management team) to bring home an extraordinary medal hold in Paris.
Listening to Sara speak, I was in awe of how she would try different jobs or positions or activities and realised that it wasn’t for her and then switch and change.
That is a character type and one which I’m very familiar with.
Other events though last week have made me consider the advantage of not being like that.
I believe the people that reach the highest possible level of the things they aspire to do hit a groove and stay in that groove.
They develop a system for life which allows them to balance all the competing interests in a way that produces the least amount of discord and stress.
They construct a support network around them who understand that to and whose roles are to remove any of the distractions and stress which knocks them out of their groove.
You can reel off some of the greatest athletes of all time and then dig into their stories and see that this was the case.
The day after winning one of his Ballon d’Or awards Ronaldo posted a video on his social media of the training session he did at 8.30 the next morning.
Ronaldo didn’t get sh*t faced at the awards ceremony, end up in a hotel room with someone he’d never met and then stagger for a fried breakfast at the nearest café.
He went to the ceremony, collected his award and dropped back into his groove.
Michael Jordon was the same.
Some of the greatest professionals in and out of sport are the people who found a format.
Not everyone has the ability to do that and it does not mean that you will lead an unhappy or unsatisfied life.
But if your aspirations are lofty it’s likely that will be the route you need to take.
Blog Post Number - 3214
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