Leverage To Reaching Your Goals
I was a national athlete between 2002 till 2012. Everything we did as a team is self-funded and we worked hard together to put resources together to send ourselves overseas to get involved in competitions.
Our team was in its infancy. Teams from many parts of the world like Germany, Great Britain, Italy and more had been there for years. With their experience, their teams don't only include athletes who run the show.
The main engine of their successes come from the backend crew. They are made of up mini teams like sports psychologists, nutritionists, sports physiologists and team managers. Without them, the athletes can still compete, but the results they want may take longer to be accomplished.
In the early years, the Singapore team didn't have a backend team of support like that and we had to spend years to figure out what worked for us or not on our own as we competed.
Returning to Singapore with poor results got us discouraged and getting back up took a lot of energy. It was also a very lonely road for some of us. That partly led to burn out and many of us left the team.
We realised we need backend crew support and started to search for sports psychologists to help us. In 2010, stars aligned and we got to know Chris Lee and Antony Lou from SportPsych Consulting.
Founded and created by Edgar Tham, they introduced us mental tools and frameworks that we can rely upon when we meet uphill challenges and pressure. We can never avoid failure in sports and these tools came to good use.
Not everyone was keen to pick them up, but some of us believed in them and in the message they've been advocating for years. I for one, learn as much as I could from their teachings and coping with the competition got easier.
You don't have to be an athlete to apply this theory. This works the same way in business, in school and in everyday life. No matter where we are, be it falling flat or tripping, so long we are alive, we have to pick ourselves up to move on.
If we have to do so alone, so be it. But do others need our help as much as we need theirs for both of us to overcome our challenges to reach our goals together? It's not about being lazy or reliant.
It's about leverage.
Leverage is key to thriving, succeeding and achieving your dreams.
Who can you partner with today to progress further and faster?