Why your failing at what you are good at ǀ How to succeed under pressure
How common do you think it is that
someone less skilled gets the job, or someone less talented wins the
competition?
For me I realised just how readily this
happens in the summer break last year.
It was a sailing national championship,
I won’t bore you with details. All you need to know is that I’m a good
competitive sailor who is defiantly better than my brother. Ha.
This competition is set to last two days, its windy and I’m fit, feeling good. The first race goes, and I capsize after being in the top 5 and end up finishing dead last.
It’s fine, I say to myself, your going
to do way better than that in the next races.
Long story short that day went
terribly, after that I don’t think I got a single other top ten result.
What’s funny is this isn’t the first
time this happened – and if I hadn’t figured out what I’m about to tell you it
certainly wouldn’t have been the last.
What happened on the second day was
that I used the technique I'm about to tell you and turned up. In many other competitions I have had
this exact same predicament, knowing that I could have done well and yet not
performing – in the same competition my brother, who I regularly beat in training,
came 3rd overall and won the junior national champion title.
Meanwhile I, at the end of the
competition, was sitting at a lowly 24th. However, that doesn’t tell
the entire story. The 2nd day I finished with three top 3 results, demonstrating
just how much I messed up the first day.
What could I have possibly done that improved
my performance so much in just one night? I fixed my mentality, and you can to.
The starting process in sailing goes
like this: a sound signal fires 5 minutes before the start and the sailors set
their watches to countdown, then by using the rules and their positioning skill
they set themselves up for a good start on the “front row”.
If you get a poor start you end up downwind
of the other boats, behind them, this creates a secondary problem of now
causing you to be in all the wind coming from the boats in front.
This wind coming off other boats sails has
lost a lot of energy and become turbulent, meaning it doesn’t power you
forwards as much. In effect not being on the front row is a death sentence and I
was being murdered.
I had the skills. I knew what I needed
to do.
My problem was I didn’t have a plan in
place, I didn’t have anything to execute from so I was just going with the majority
– this was happening in my 800m running races to.
So here’s what I did step by step:
I made a plan. I will use my running as the example as its simpler to understand.
The plan would be something along the
lines be in the top five after 50m, maintain your position to the four hundred
meter mark… etc, as detailed as possible.
To develop such a plan you will have to
use visualisation, this is done by all major performers and athletes: Michael
Phelps, Lewis Hamilton, you name it they use it.
Think about it, if you have prepared
enough the only thing that can let you down is your mind. Prepare your mind so
that it doesn’t have to make decisions in the heat of the moment, it can just
act upon what it already knows it has to do.
If it’s running imagine you position with 3,2 and 1 lap to go. Imagine the pain you’re going through.
Imagine how much it sucks; imagine how
badly you want it; imagine your self finding that extra little bit and pulling through to win.
This process of visualisation will enable you to remove large elements of performances that you may have previously deemed as a luck-based scenario, for me the starts in sailing.