So we thought we'd share some of his pearls of wisdom - thanks John! This article ties in nicely with the upcoming Olympics. And if you'd like to see more of John, check him out at the APPA Senior Leadership Conference on our YouTube channel and contact Faye Hauwai to talk about getting him along to work with your school, cluster or association.
Do you ever find yourself making excuses? by John Shackleton
I
spent most of my teenage years in a swimming pool training to become an
international swimmer but I never managed to achieve my ambition. Over and over
again I would lose the races that counted by fractions of seconds and so I
never got the selection call-up. Now, at that time I knew the logical reasons why I wasn’t making it – they
were obvious. I wasn’t tall enough, my hands and feet weren’t big enough and, of
course, I didn’t have the natural talent that every top swimmer had!
I
retired from competitive swimming at the tender age of 19 and became a coach but
it wasn’t until my late twenties that I started to realise that the reasons that I always used to explain
my own lack of success were the same as those used by many of the swimmers I
was coaching. Swimmers that I thought had everything they needed to become
internationals were using almost exactly the same language as I used to, to
explain why they didn’t succeed. Almost 10 years after I retired from swimming
I started to understand that those things I had said to myself back then were
not reasons at all, they were excuses.
Now
when I look back on those days I can see that I had everything I needed to
succeed except perhaps the most vital thing of all - self-belief. That lack of
self-belief was what caused me to think negatively and expect to fail. Because
of the way in which our brains work, once you expect to fail you will start to
take the actions that will lead towards that failure and, if you never change
those negative thought processes, you’ll end up getting just what you expected
in the first place - failure. The only way I could justify to myself my
constant lack of success was to give other people reasons why I had failed (or should I say excuses). Nobody could have
argued with the fact that I wasn’t tall enough or that my hands and feet were
too small as far as I could see. Both
were irrelevant (although not in my head) but extremely convenient facts of
life that I could not change. And as for natural talent – can anyone really explain
what that might be? Looking back I can
see that, at the time, I found it especially easy to ignore the superstars that
did not possess those attributes I had decided were causing me to fail because
they would have disproved my ideas!
I
only saw these wonderful truths when I started to study sports psychology and
discovered the connection between performance and self-belief. When our
self-belief is low our performance will reflect it and we will underachieve. If
we can raise our self-belief we will start to expect success and will therefore
take the actions that lead to that success. If you play golf you will know
exactly what I mean. For most of us, standing on the first tee, about to take
our first shot of the day, with a few other people watching us, will cause enough stress to enable our
self-belief to come under attack and start off those little voices of self
doubt. Those voices question our skill level, remind us of our recent failures
and constantly focus our minds on what other people might think if we don’t
perform to our ability. Those voices help us to find excuses for a poor
performance. This is true of everything we do in life, not just in our sporting
activities. Our performance in anything that is critical to what we define as success,
is affected in the same way by our self-belief.
Probably
the most difficult thing in this whole cycle is knowing when we are suffering from low self-belief. Others can
usually tell by watching or listening to us perform but we often don’t realise
ourselves until it is too late and we are already on the path towards failure.
But there is help at hand and it is those wonderful excuses that we love to use that can be the evidence we need to
indicate to us that our self-belief is beginning to struggle. Next time you give someone a reason why you can’t do something, or a
reason why you did not succeed, or a
reason why something is impossible,
ask yourself this question: Is this really a reason or is it just an excuse?
You’ll need to consider things carefully and to be totally honest with yourself
but if you find yourself making excuses rather
than providing truly valid reasons then
you know that something is wrong. It is your self-belief and it needs
fixing.
When
I was 35 one of the athletes I was coaching suggested that I should start practicing
what I was preaching. “If you think that
good self-belief is what we need in order to succeed, then why don’t you prove
it to all of us? Get back in the water yourself and start swimming again”. Well,
I chose to accept the challenge and, to cut a long story short, I’m swimming
faster today at 52 than I was in my teenage years and I’m breaking National Masters
records. I am training a lot less than I was back then, but I am believing in
myself a whole lot more and that’s what is making the difference to my
performance. Nowadays I find it easier to take on challenges with a positive
outlook and if I ever feel like I am starting to make excuses about my
performance, I work on my self-belief until I feel I can cope again.
When
you find yourself making excuses, it is a great sign that your self-belief is
under attack. At that point don’t spend your energy looking for reasons why you
can’t cope but work on your self-belief - it will always lead to success.
John Shackleton
