Fierce competition, winning by sometimes the smallest margins, achieving goals and targets, establishing long-term and short-term strategies and tactics, hard work, perseverance, determination, teamwork, dealing with success and recovering from failure and setbacks - those are all key challenges in both worlds. Success in sports and business alike relies on the ability to continually move performance to higher levels. What you achieve this year will never be good enough next year. Goals and standards move onward and upward, creating an unrelenting demand to find new means and methods to ensure the delivery of performance curves that can seem tantalisingly, or even impossibly, out of reach. Many of the lessons you can learn from elite athletes can be transferred to business.
The first crucial lesson is that elite athletes are not born but made. Obviously there has to be some inborn natural ability - coordination, flexibility, anatomical and physiological capacity - just as successful senior leaders need to be able to both strategise and relate to people. But the real key to sustained excellence for both elite sports and business leaders is not the ability to swim fast or do quantitative analyses quickly in their heads; rather, it is the development of mental toughness.
The ability to thrive under almost inhuman pressure is perhaps the most defining characteristic of elite athletes. They excel when the heat is turned up. They are able to stay focused on the things that really matter in the face of a multitude of potential distractions. They are able to bounce back from setbacks with a determination and intense desire to succeed. And, most crucially, they are able to maintain their belief in themselves in the most trying circumstances.
For the very best athletes, making it to the top is the result of very careful planning, setting and hitting hundreds of small goals. And if it's hard reaching the top, that's nothing compared to what it takes to stay there. Expectations are enormous, and you become the target and benchmark for every other competitor. You have reached heady heights and have become highly visible and exposed.
It's a marvelous place to be, but it also comes with great potential vulnerability and loneliness if things go wrong. Sustained success in such an environment requires astounding physical ability, but that isn't enough to make you better than all the rest. You need an extraordinary mindset too. The positive and resilient mindsets of the best athletes underpin their drive and ability to reinvent themselves continuously in order to stay ahead of the pack.
Elite athletes also take time to celebrate their victories. It helps remind them why all the hard work and commitment is worthwhile. At a time when survival is a key priority in so many organisations, don't forget to spend time celebrating successes, however small they may be.
For more, see - Thriving on Pressure: Mental Toughness for Real Leaders
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