WHERE BECOMING A CHAMPION BEGINS (1/3)
Recently I had the privilege of sharing the message of Champions 101 to a group of high-level student-athletes. Our conversation focused on what it takes to become a champion - to become someone worthy of the success we say we're after, on the playing field or in any other important area of life. Of course, when we hear that word champion, it’s easy to connect it to some winning outcome - to a score on the scoreboard, to a trophy in the trophy case, or to a banner hanging to represent some meaningful or even historic achievement.
But the truth is, the best way to earn the outcome you want is to focus on the process it takes to get there. I shared with those athletes the four steps in that process that each of us who say we want to win must be willing to go through. Let’s take a minute here today to look briefly at those four steps - starting at the end and working our way backwards - for the sake of evaluating where you think you land. Where we want to end up, at step four, is having built our identity as champions, and having become the kind of person winning requires us to be. Is that where you want to end up? Awesome! But getting there requires you to build the habits that success requires you to possess. Winning habits is step three. Maybe that's where you find yourself here today, committed to routinely doing what it takes to win.
If you recognize that you haven't built winning habits, then you have to move even further back in the process. What comes before winning habits? Before you can do what champions do on a regular and repeated basis - before winning behavior becomes a habit - you have to exhibit the discipline and intention it takes to make just one winning choice at a time. Intentional choices is step two - deciding, on purpose and maybe in spite of how you feel, to do what winning requires you to do. Maybe this is where you're at, working hard to make those difficult but important decisions today.
If making intentional choices is a challenge, then you may be all the way back at step one. The truth is, you can't make those winning choices and exhibit that winning behavior on the outside until you've taken control of what's happening on the inside. That's really where it all starts, with doing the hard work it takes to defeat our biggest and toughest opponent: ourselves. That's the first step in the process, and where becoming a champion begins - by winning the battle within.
I believe each of us have two competing voices battling for supremacy inside our minds. One of those voices is the voice of our inner champion. The other is the voice of our inner loser. Every day - and usually many times each day - these two voices are offering their opinions on what we should do and on how we should do it. As you might expect, what each of them wants from us is dramatically different.
Our inner champion is the voice in our head challenging and encouraging us to become our best. It’s the voice emboldening us - despite our fear - to do the difficult but important things success requires us to do. It’s the voice reminding us to remain humble in our moments of victory and hungry to keep learning and improving. Our inner champion encourages us to get tough in our moments of testing. It clarifies what our very best looks like, and it challenges us to do the hard but necessary work it takes to turn that vision into reality.
Our inner loser, on the other hand, is the voice inside encouraging us to accept mediocrity from ourselves, and encouraging us to take the easy way out in our moments of testing. Our inner loser wants us to become the victim of our circumstances - to become a blamer, a complainer, and an excuse maker. It’s the voice driven by fear, working to keep us from doing the hard but necessary things success requires us to do. At the same time, it suggests that success should somehow come easy, and that we deserve to get everything we think we are entitled to. Our inner loser is constantly bargaining with us, hoping we’ll settle for something less than our best.
If you need proof that these two voices exist in your head, here’s evidence. I’d bet that I could offer you pretty much any hypothetical scenario, and if I asked you, in that situation...what would a champion do? I bet you could give me the right answer. That proves that you have that voice inside, clarifying those choices winning requires you to make. At the same time, each of us have to acknowledge that just because we know what champions do, doesn’t mean we always do what champions do. That’s proof that we all have that other voice, too, constantly working to keep us from our very best.
I want to challenge you this week to become more familiar with the two competing voices in your head, and to gain more clarity on who’s encouraging you to do what. Work to uncover how each of them communicates, and evaluate which one you typically give more of your energy and attention to. In next week’s newsletter - part two of this three-part series - we’ll talk about the fighting tactics each of these two competitors employ, and the reason we so often end up allowing our inner loser to negatively influence our decisions and our behavior. In the meantime, I’d encourage you to keep wrestling with how you’ve conditioned yourself to think, how it might be holding you back, and how you might more effectively fight and win this battle within. Why is that so important? Because that’s where becoming a champion begins.
