When you are performing, you need to become your own lifeguard. You need to know what to do, when to do it and how to keep yourself safe while doing it.

You keep training the steps, over and over again, so when you are called up, you can do the necessary performance without any guesswork because you know it inside and out.

Luckily, my first job was a lifeguard – accident prevention and rescue. Every single step was chunked down and repeated over and over until it became an instinctual readiness of how to save someone´s life.  There was no room for panic because my training gave me the full procedures of what to do, when to do it and most importantly, how to keep safe while doing it. It wasn’t a robotic feeling rather it was ingrained knowledge. It gave me the confidence to instantly pull up whatever skill was necessary to get the job done.

So how do you do it for yourself?

Let’s call your performance X. You break down X into much smaller 1-2-3 steps which can be repeated over and over again. Training is about getting better at X by learning step 1. Repeat. Learning step 2. Repeat. Learning step 3. Repeat. Sticking it all together. Repeating again and again until it is a part of who you are.

But did you know that you can make your total X (1-2-3) so much better by also working at what happens before and after too. How much effort and understanding do you put into:

X – 1 day

X – 30 minutes

X – 5 minutes

X – 1 minute

X

X + 1 minute

X + 5 minutes

X + 30 minutes

X + 1 day

X is what everyone sees and the scoreboards “reflect”. But everything surrounding X can be trained too.

Learning X will get you far BUT your optimal performances will come ONLY when you perfect what happens before and after X.  This is the key to excellence and more importantly this is the way to truly love what you do.