It’s a subject that comes up a lot on the ainslie + ainslie Performance People podcast. What separates elite performers from the rest? We've rounded up some of the best advice from our guests
1 Do The Work No One Sees
Wallabies all-time great and one of the best scrum-halves in history, George Gregan, says the answer lies in the details; practicing the intricacies of your craft outside of your usual routine.
“I remember hearing from one of the coaches at the Australian Institute of Sport, ‘It’s the work that no one sees which makes a champion’. So keep doing the small stuff that no one sees and, surprise surprise, you’ll be in the arena and have a chance to win. That was a very strong lesson.”
2 Reframe Your Story
It’s easy to settle on an accepted version of our capabilities and to keep playing that part. Tour de France winner Geraint Thomas had always been known as a phenomenal team player, who put everything on the line for his teammates.
In episode 87, he describes the moment in 2015 when he changed his own narrative. On stage 19, still in fourth place, despite riding the whole race for leader Chris Froome, he cracked. But the experience made him reappraise his potential.
“That was the moment. I was like, ‘Woah, if I actually look after myself here and don’t help Froomey so much, maybe I could win the Tour one day’,” he says. “And that’s where it all changed really.”
3 Find Your Fuel
Performance coach Steve Magness’s latest book ‘Win The Inside Game: How to Move From Surviving to Thriving and Free Yourself Up To Perform’ explores how focusing on fulfilment instead of outcomes can actually boost performance not reduce it.
For Magness, we should all ask ourselves where our motivation is coming from. Is it extrinsic – for money, or some external gain? Or is it intrinsic?
“The best performers across everything have some sort of intrinsic motivation – some sort of joy, curiosity, exploration of 'let's see what my potential is' that fuels the task underneath and that fuel lasts much longer than the extrinsic side,” he says.
"I thought, 'If I actually looked after myself and don’t help Froomey so much, maybe I could win the Tour one day.'"
4 Up The Intensity
Castore co-founder Tom Beahon has grown his sports-swear brand into a billion dollar global player, rubbing shoulders with plenty of athletes and CEOs along the way.
“The single factor of all the super successful people I’ve ever met is that there’s a level of intensity that other people don’t have,” says Beahon. “They just have that drive to get it done, to push that deal through, to make that thing happen when a lot of people are saying ‘no there’s a risk here’, ‘you might fail’ or ‘are sure you’re going to win the America’s Cup?’ That for me is the single factor that separates the very good from the great.”
5 Embrace The Doubt
Even the greats have moments of doubt, when the nerves hit, and the ‘what if’ anxieties creep in. For world and Olympic champion cyclist, Emma Finucane, these moments aren’t ‘bad’ as many of us grow up to believe, they can even be used to your advantage.
“Nerves are also exciting. You need to care. It’s a feeling you need as an athlete,” she says. “I think how you use that is really important and that’s the trick - you almost need to use the nerves in a way to get the best out of you.”
6 Find Your Struggle
“There’s some wonderful research on elite footballers, comparing those who made it to the top to those that didn’t,” says Steve Magness. “One of the key characteristics was that those who made it to the top had some sort of struggle during their junior career.”
On episode 63, sports journalist Matt Dickinson saw perhaps the most extreme example of this phenomenon when he visited the shack where Diego Maradona grew up:
“I remember standing there and thinking. ‘Is there anything other than sporting talent that could take someone from this shack to the top of everything in terms of greatness...he was beloved by billions and that’s down to this incredible sporting talent that he honed on the dusty streets of this shanty town.”
"The single factor of all the super successful people I’ve ever met is that there’s a level of intensity that other people don’t have."
7 Use Momentum
During the peak of the Alex Ferguson years at Manchester United, his teams always seemed to find a way back, however hopeless it looked.
“We were the best at momentum swings at that time,” says Gary Neville in episode 73. “The manager would say to us at half-time, ‘don’t panic’. Five minutes, three minutes, even 90 seconds is such a long time.”
It’s a mindset that Ben Ainslie discussed in episode 68, when describing the astonishing 2013 America’s Cup comeback win.
“It gets talked about a lot but momentum in sport, and really any walk of life, is huge,” he said. “Get things going, get more confidence, get more speed out of the boat, better decision-making, and the whole thing just snowballs.”
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