Will it Make the Boat Go Faster – Olympic winning strategies for everyday success
Ben Hunt-Davies and Harriet Beveridge
As we take a moment to reflect on the Olympics in Japan this summer, I decided to review a book written by Ben Hunt-Davies, a gold medal-winning rower from the British team at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney. It rarely appears on the bestseller lists for top sports psychology and athlete development must-reads, however for me it highlighted some really key messages in an easily digestible story.
Many young athletes dream of Olympic glory, but few achieve it. What can you do as a parent, coach or athlete to make those dreams come true?
There are several key messages. Firstly, setting multi-layered goals helps us focus our energy and stay on the right path to achieve those goals. Goals help us:
- Set out the journey and make it easier to enjoy that journey without getting lost.
- Have a sense of achievement and pride
- Focus your energy
- Learn and grow
The authors describe how to split goals into four layers:
- the crazy layer – if your dream is not crazy big and exciting it’s not worth committing to and your chances of reaching it are reduced. It needs to be fun and something you genuinely enjoy. Your crazy goal should ignite your passion and fuel your desire.
- the concrete layer – creating a structure to reach the crazy goal with measurable milestones that help you recognise how far you have come.
- the control layer– what to work on under your control. What can you focus on and what is not worth it because you can’t control it.
- the everyday layer – the current to-do list of techniques to achieve our goals. Focus on the process more than the results so that you can be proud of elements of your performance not whether you win or lose. If we don’t know the reason why we made a good performance happen, how do we manage to repeat it? The authors encourage us to get curious about the recipe – once we know the ingredients of a successful performance we can focus on repeating it and improving the recipe. Is there anything our competitors do that we can adopt? If we can figure why or how we failed we can also avoid making the same mistakes again.
Spend time daydreaming of your crazy goal. Create a 30-second clip of you doing the act and be able to replay it in your mind. It helps strengthen your commitment and desire. When the going gets tough, being able to visualise yourself achieving your crazy dream keeps the motivation and hope alive.
The authors take you through Ben’s high and lows of a long journey to Olympic success with real examples of reflections on what worked and what didn’t work. The 8 man crew decided that if someone suggested an idea they would ask themselves “Will it make the boat go faster?” it must be considered irrespective of who made the suggestion. If it wouldn’t, no time or energy would be lost on methods or emotions that would not steer them towards success.
Small daily changes add up to a large long term change and bigger long term rewards. Never be satisfied with what you can achieve now. Keep striving for better. Break the skill and the process down into bite-size chunks that are more manageable “Eat the elephant one spoonful at a time”.
Use every training session as an experiment rather like a cookery lesson. What worked and what did not work? Mistakes are still progress to be celebrated as long as we learn not to keep making the same mistake twice.
The authors showed how for a team to be successful in sport or business, they must share common goals and rules. The team were given the chance to create a set of rules they could all agree to stick to.
If we expect to have setbacks, then when they happen, we do not allow it to derail us from our goal. Identify what might go wrong, …”what if?”…. and see if you can prevent them and if not how to deal with the event when it happens. Develop “bouncebackability”. Successful people don’t have fewer setbacks they just deal with them better. If we don’t care when things go wrong we probably didn’t want the outcome enough. Develop strategies to help you bounce back.
A key element that the rowing team used to stay on track was to accept that you will not win every race. When a mistake or loss happened, they were viewed as learning experiences. Take time to reflect on whether you stuck to your process, what went wrong and what might you be able to learn from it and move on. Give it time – progress is never smooth. It took ages to learn to read and write and it may take ages to master other skills.
My favourite take home lesson from the book was to develop methods for dealing with the opinions of others and dealing with our own self-talk. They called it a “Bull…. Filter” and applied a filter system to decide whether the information was useful or not. If it was, no matter how tough, they used it. If it didn’t take them close to their dreams and goals, they binned it. We have a choice as to how we think and talk to ourselves, and we have a choice as to whether we allow other people’s opinions to affect our performance.
Negative comments, results, thoughts, and interpretations will cast self-doubt. We may hear them and start to believe them especially if we hear it often enough. We may forget that these are just opinions and someone else’s interpretation. Opinions can feel like facts. Keep them separate. We may begin to think of it as the truth. Learn how to filter them out and decide what is helpful feedback and what is unhelpful.
Rubbish in = rubbish out
When deciding on whether to risk pursuing your dreams think about whether the risk is worth taking. Are you going to be happy to play it safe or do you want to step towards your goal
Concentrate on our goal and what works for us to improve the chances of success.
Whilst this book is largely the story of Ben Hunt-Davis and his journey to a gold medal in rowing, Harriet Beverage brings those lessons learned into business and life skills for success. There are many easy lessons to implement that for each of us might make our boat go faster and take us towards our dreams.
If you would like to learn how to create your “Recipe for Success” then visit https://angelajacksonphysio.thinkific.com/courses/athletes-matter-the-recipe-for-success to start your journey to success
