Training Is For Life, Not Just For Athletes
We train for sport, we train for skills, but how many of us think about training for life? Just as elite athletes create a network of trainers to achieve growth and ultimately success, we can all find people who will act as mentors, supporters, and confidantes in our lives to help us train for our own life events and successfully achieve our goals.
For athletes aspiring to reach the pinnacle of their sport, training is everything. Indeed, many see it as all that separates success from failure. The continuous investment in training allows the mind and body to gradually build up strength and endurance, improve skill levels, build motivation, ambition and confidence, and achieve optimal performance. Most importantly they seek support from others in their training. Elite athletes across all sports surround themselves with an entourage of coaches, nutritionists, psychologists and mentors, supporting them to be constantly training to win.
Why, then, do people in life and work, not think about training? We presume that we are fully prepared and equipped to live the best life and do the best work, but how many people consider the idea of training in pursuit of that goal? If we started thinking about life or work as a series of training events, we would treat how we spend our time and what we do quite differently. We would also seek support from people who would help us train.
Sports people are competitive. Their careers are built on that attribute. But life is no less competitive; people are competing at school, at work, and in business. Organisations talk about the importance of collaboration, but individually you still need to be on your best game. Collaboration doesn't mean that you can allow everyone else to carry you. You are competing to be the best for yourself. Could we take the concept of training for sporting success and apply it more broadly to life and work? Absolutely, but first, we need to understand how training drives people to do their best.
How do professionals get better at what they do? How do they improve and excel in the face of complexity? These are questions that surgeon, writer and public health innovator Atul Gawande has studied in depth. He readily shares what he has discovered to be key: having a coach to provide a more accurate picture of our reality, to instill positive habits of thinking, and to break our actions down and then help us build them back up again.
He often cites the example of legendary Juilliard violin instructor Dorothy DeLay, who trained an amazing roster of violin virtuosos, including Midori, Sarah Chang, and Itzhak Perlman. Gawande said: “Each of them came to her as young talents, and they worked with her over years. What she worked on most, she said, was inculcating in them habits of thinking and of learning so that they could make their way in the world without her when they were done.”
How training works
W. Timothy Galway, author of ‘The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance’, said “Peak performance is a function of a still mind.” The constant competition in our mind and body for resources such as focus or attention, is every bit as powerful as the competition that we engage in with others, externally, in the real world. If we are thinking about too many things we don’t complete any of these thoughts, in the same way that if we are trying to catch several balls we drop them. Training to focus is key. Once we accept that we need focus, the next question is focus on what?
“Peak performance is a function of a still mind”
Renowned health and wellness expert and co-founder of IMPACT Human Performance Alexander Chriest says: “When you are under pressure, you don't rise to the occasion, you sink to the level of your training. Training is the process of putting yourself through a controlled stressful environment to help achieve growth, which can occur as strength, power, endurance, and or mental toughness. During times of high stress, your mind and body will revert to your level of training. You see this in sports all the time. Even during the most stressful environments, players don’t have to exert as much energy thinking to do the basics because they have trained over and over again.”
In and out of the sports arena
We can also look to athletes to see how that structured and systematic approach to training can be applied to life away from the sports arena. Hunter McIntyre is one of the most decorated multi-sport athletes in history. His accomplishments range from Iron Man and Olympic canoeing triallist to world record holder in the hybrid endurance and functional-fitness race HYROX; titles that could only be achieved through a strict training regime. He takes the view that whatever you do, both in sports and in life, must be planned and intentional.
“If you can visualise what long-term success is going to look like for you, identify the small steps that will get you there”
He says: “When it comes to business, whether I’m working on my own supplement company BLDR, or representing another brand, I make sure I’m aligned to a long-term vision for the business and very clear on the short-term steps that will get us there. Once you know what this path of short-term steps is you should try to avoid any distractions that take you away from that path. If that means making another hire or allocating more resources to avoid being distracted from your core strengths as a business person you do it to achieve long-term success. Whether you are chasing down a HYROX world record, building a great business, or being a great partner or parent, if you can visualise what long-term success is going to look like for you, identify the small steps that will get you there and hold yourself to a standard and remain focused on that vision you are a good way towards achieving success in anything.”
That analogy between training for sports and training for life is easy to understand and will resonate with a lot of people, but with some, it will not resonate at all. “Many humans are great at setting long-term goals, but they are not as intentional with the daily goals and rituals that need to occur to achieve the long-term goal,” says Chriest. “We see this all the time. For example, I may want to be a more trustworthy and transparent leader. Establishing that goal is the simple part. What I need to do now is think of each interaction and/or situation as an opportunity to get closer to or further from that goal. If you can focus on the small steps with intention, you will be amazed how differently things can look in several weeks or a few months.”
Identifying your goals
The reason that many people are not intentional and therefore don't achieve things is because they don't set out to achieve them. Instead, Steven Hess, founder of Whitecap, thinks they allow life, and the people in it, to draw them along in the general flow of day-to-day life. He says: “They don't decide to do things. They just allow them to happen. The first step in incorporating training into your life, your career, or your business, to be successful is being clear about what it is you want to train for.”
Hess has helped many of his life coaching and business coaching clients achieve that clarity around where they want to go. He does this by exploring several key factors, for example, clarity about their ambitions, combined with being held honestly accountable to that ambition, their energy levels and necessary experience and the ability to get things done. Those factors, taken all together, help to identify where they should focus their training efforts.
He says: “We can look at why is it you're good at being clear about your ambitions, but perhaps not as good at being held accountable. Then we look at what we've learned from each of those factors and apply that insight to areas where you might not be as strong as you could be, for example, getting stuff done or being honest with yourself.”
Another important step is to look at your goals, whether that is changing careers, launching a start-up, or being a better home cook, and see how they fit into everything else in your life. Until you do that, you can’t train to be your best or deliver the best thing that you want to do. Again, there is more competition for resources.
“Take work-life balance, for example,” says Hess. “We talk about this idea that we have to get a balanced life and a balanced work, but I think that is just a big lie. Why? Because your work is part of your life. It is a subset of your life and therefore, you need to work out what you want to do with your life and how much of it you want to spend working at particular stages of it, how much of it you want invest in holidaying, time with friends, or whatever else you want to do. You have to look at how everything fits into the whole picture, where you are investing and what kind of return you are expecting, rather than just focusing on the individual elements of it.”
Barriers to the training mindset
External influences also have a significant bearing on people’s perceptions of themselves and therefore their appetite for adopting a mindset of training to be the best version of themselves. Social media, for example, has become a major inhibitor of growth and an instigator of stasis. Look at platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Those spaces are full of images of perfection; models, thought leaders, and influencers, all project images of perfection that negatively impact people’s aspirations. To be successful you have to fail many times, but within a structured regime. However, when people start thinking that they will never aspire to that same level of perfection that they are seeing, they give up or worse, they don’t even start. They fear failure. They don’t think about training. They don’t grow, they don’t change and they don’t achieve success. People need to recognise that they are made up of flawed elements, and that failure is part of the growth journey. And this is where training can make a huge difference by enabling people to accept failure as a key element of success and be less afraid of it.
“My sports training has taught me to be humbler and more accepting of failure as part of the journey to success.”
Cara Kotschy runs a post-production company, Residence Pictures, and plays rugby in her spare time. Training has been pivotal to both aspects of her life. She says: “At work, I’m the founder and managing director, I run the business and I can confidently make the right call. In rugby, which I didn't start playing rugby until I was 39, I'm learning and I'm very much the rookie at 42. This has taught me different things about myself. For example, I'm not very good at failing, so when I do fail, I think why did that happen? What did I do wrong? My sports training has taught me to be humbler and more accepting of failure as part of the journey to success.”
Some people may be deterred from the idea of training for life because they associate it with the often very physical effort of training for sport. Kotschy, who does both, thinks that life training and sports training can look very different, yet can lead to the same outcome of success.
She says: “In sport, you are training for a one-off event. A sprinter, for example, has that one chance to run their best 100 metres. Sports-based training has to be structured and systematic because sport is a sport. It’s black and white. if you're a long jumper, you have to be able to jump so far. If you're a rugby player, you have to be tactical. Training in life and work is different. In the context of my job, post-production in the creative industry, you do your best learning on the job. Training is much less structured, it's less systematic. It's more vocational and experience-based, and that's how you earn your stripes.”
Finding your training support
Athletes have a support team to help them with mental strength, resilience, physical, nutrition etc. If you’re not an athlete and have never thought about training before, where do you find that support?
Working with a life coach helped Benyamin Deldar transition from his role as a junior doctor to an entrepreneur. In 2020 he switched careers and co-founded Deep Medical, a company that uses AI to predict patients that are likely to miss several medical appointments or cancel at short notice and then devise better scheduling decisions, with the goal of creating a fairer system. The following year he began working with Steven Hess.
“Good exercise, good food and good sleeping pattern allows me to bring a higher version of myself to what I’m doing.”
Deldar says: “What I found particularly useful was not necessarily focusing on how best to do something immediately, although that's important, but about how I was approaching things? What was my style of doing that? How was I disciplining myself, and importantly, making sure that I was focusing on the other needs that you have as a human, for example, creating the structures around a routine of discipline; good exercise, good food, a good sleeping pattern. This allows me to manage and cope with the complexities of my work and bring a higher version of myself to what I’m doing.”
Not everybody has access to a formal coach or trainer, however, Deldar believes that the benefits can be available to everyone by reaching out to those around them; people they may never have considered to be training supporters, but who can be significant influencers in their lives.
He says: “This is about intergenerational relationships with people, be that family members friendships, or work colleagues, because it is those experiences that somebody else has been through that can save you from making the same mistakes. Having somebody that you respect in that role, somebody you can listen to and who can give you a perspective from outside what you've already been through, is really key.”
“Seek out individuals, personally, on podcasts, or anyone that you can learn from, who are doing what you are seeking to achieve and learn from them”
As Alexander Chriest points out, whatever goal you want to achieve, there will be people who are already doing it. He says: “Seek out individuals, personally, on podcasts, or anyone that you can learn from, who are doing what you are seeking to achieve and learn from them,” says Chriest. “I often see individuals who want to lead healthier lives, but the people they spend the most time with are not helping them get there. It can be difficult, but an honest assessment of the people you spend the most time with is a great first step. If I want to exercise more, eat better, and sleep more, but my closest friends love happy hour over the gym, it could make my growth more challenging.”
Be clear on your ambition, work out what you need to achieve it and seek the support and resources necessary. How else can you work out a training plan? Be confident and embrace training as the catalyst to achieving your life goals.
