Life After Sport — Beware The Competitive Underachiever
‘I found that failure was an artform to which I was well suited’.
At 13 years old I was captain of the rugby team and king of the world (pictured here with ball, centre front). Then after a long summer I moved on to a senior school to find that everyone else had grown a whole head taller than me, and pubes! I didn’t get into any teams. My sworn ambition to become captain of the England rugby team curled up at my feet and died.
I was incredulous — ‘THIS IS NOT HAPPENING!’ and indignant — ‘this is NOT what I ordered!’. I wanted my money back. Or to die. Or preferably both. Not knowing what I wanted to do or even who I was anymore I drifted for the next few years. I became a competitive underachiever.
WHAT IS A COMPETITIVE UNDERACHIEVER?
I’d say an underachiever is someone who shies away from ambition and fails to meet their potential. A?competitive?underachiever gains a perverse sense of comfort and satisfaction from this kind of failing.
This wasn’t planned but something into which I fell. It felt romantic in a way, to wander without purpose. Instead of finding a new goal I simply declined to have any ambition. But in effect, one unwritten one goal remained, to have no ambition. Armed with some elegantly misunderstood justification (from my Grandmother) ‘Do whatever you like until you’re 29 and then spend a year learning how to be 30’, I followed the path of least resistance, and found that failure was an artform to which I was well suited.
EXCUSES ARE BAD CURRENCY
A really effective way of having no ambition was to be quicker with excuses than efforts towards anything with a whiff of ambition about it. My excuses at the time were that I couldn’t compete against these giant new players (a basic fear of pain), and that I didn’t want to play in the second or god forbid, the third XV side (a pride sapping demotion) and that my knees were often painful, which was a convenient minor truth which provided cover for the deeper excuses.
Back at 13 when I needed to reinvent myself to adapt to my new situation, I didn’t have the experience, skills, or support to rise to the challenge. The problem was not so much the specific issues of this period but that it created a pattern of using excuses to avoid doing important things. Avoiding things enough, it became hard not to avoid things as standard, and I routinely failed to learn from things after that. This spanned across relationships and work to health challenges and led me in ultimately unfulfilling circles.
The lingering but misguided traces of my competitive side remained and needed feeding. I swapped joining in and the possibility of those virtuous triumphs and educational losses with a baseless sense of superiority over others who were joining in. Those fools! I suppose I felt like a fool for falling short in my first great career love, to be the England rugby captain, and projected that feeling onto the world.
IDENTITY: LOST & FOUND
Talk to any psychologist and they’re likely to say that at the heart of most issues lies the subject of our identity. Sport, like work, offers a strong source of identity. I’d suggest this can be especially so when our work is our sport. Within this realm it’s the challenges of ambition that reveal ourselves. Both our best and worst. After my glory days as captain of the team I never felt that I quite fitted in elsewhere. The absence of any healthy ambition set me adrift. And so I believe it goes for many of those individuals falling off the path of professional or semi-professional sport every day.
Both sport and work offer us an opportunity to find ambitions that suit us well, and serve us well, meaning those allowing us opportunities to reach out and be our best selves. For me having no ambition did provide some random interesting times but I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone moving on from an incomplete ambition. I did spend the first part of my 29th year learning how to be 30, as Granny had suggested. However, I did so in a rehabilitation centre under treatment for alcoholism. Not exactly snagging a blind side try against New Zealand in the World Cup final as I had intended. However the experience did help me to learn how to start building a new sense of identity with which to fit back into the world.
AND SO
As you may have guessed, these days I dare to have goals again. It’s not so much for the goals themselves as much as the actions required by these goals. The pursuit of goals keeps my inherent excuse making at bay, so that I may continue to grow.
Max Kalis is a career coach specialising in helping athletes rise to the challenge of finding a satisfying career after a life in sport.
Life After Sport is a weekly drop in session for athletes who don’t want to drop out.?https://www.meetup.com/the-last-coach-the-open-sessions/