The Athlete Way

 “If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.” ― Vincent Willem van Gogh  Every morning when I sit down to write, two things greet me - a blinking cursor on a blank page and my dear friend, doubt. I often stare at that blinking cursor wondering what I’ll write about, and if its even worth the time and effort to write. I chide myself that it is a silly task. That I am an imposter. That I don’t have anything meaningful to say. Few people will ever read my words and the ones who do have most likely done so out of pity (to my pity readers, I really appreciate your pity reads, keep doing it please). The doubts are demotivating. They tell me to stop writing.  Here’s a dramatization of my daily battle with doubt that I wrote in a journal: It’s my 37th birthday. I’m sitting at my writing desk. The computer is open. The coffee is steaming. The morning light drapes itself dimly around me. I’ve set the stage per...

In honor of the release of Kelly Ripa’s memoir, Live Wire, I decided to share this story.      Our values and behaviors are anchored in our beliefs. Belief prompts action.  I am not speaking of religious beliefs but more simply the things we hold to be true about life. For instance, I believe that everyone I meet is a teacher. This belief prompts me to frame interactions that are challenging as having a lesson to offer. It opens me to learning in non-traditional ways.      When  we look at high performing cultures and teams, we often see groups of people with a shared set of beliefs. These teams believe in the way they train, play, communicate and interact. These beliefs often permeate the organization that surrounds the team. Think about Barcelona football during the Pep Guardiola era, there was an unwavering belief in how they played and approached the game of football. Because they believed it, they lived into it.      Everyone h...

I grew up in South Jersey about thirty minutes outside of Philadelphia. That is to say I grew up a Philly sports fan in the mid-90s and early 2000s, which really is my way of saying that every time I hear the word practice, I immediately and incredulously respond, ‘PRACTICE? For real, we talking about PRACTICE…PRACTICE…?' These are the iconic words of 76ers legend Allen Iverson from a 2002 media interview after a disappointing finish to the season. If you’ve never seen the video, watch it.  All that is to say, yes, we are in fact talking about practice. Specifically, we are talking about deliberate practice, and the role it plays in high performance. High performers come from all walks of life, perform in all spheres of life, and possess totally different personalities and abilities. Regardless of where they come from, their personality, or their domain of excellence, common threads are woven into the fabric of high performers. What makes a person a high performer? Is it the envi...

What is high performance? The phrase has become a catch-all in the world of sport, business and society. The educated define it in astutely researched papers, giving us lay people finely wrapped tools for applying it to our daily endeavors. I love reading those papers, however the scholarly, distilled version of high performance paints an almost too cozy and comfortable image of the actual high performance experience. I’d like to explore high performance from a slightly messier perspective, those of my own lived experiences.            There is still so much about my experience in sport that I don’t fully understand, specifically the implicit behaviors that led to a sustained career in sport. What made me a high performer? When did I develop the traits of a high performer? My words will be neither astute nor finely wrapped, instead, they will be a wild foray into hopefully what becomes a deeper understanding of my own experiences in sport.  I’...