You're only as good as your last result - Nonsense!

This statement is bandied around very regularly with very little thought and quite frankly, it's just nonsense in the world of high performance, and even if it is true some of the time you'd have to work hard to make sure this kind of thinking didn't create crippling fear.

I'd like to propose…You're only as good as your next performance as the basis for a more helpful belief to run with.

In my experience, only being as good as your last result is simply a self-limiting, result obsessed belief. Having an obsession with results is fine, but it's only fine when you have an equal obsession with PERFORMANCE*.

If you believe that you’re only as good as your last result, then instantly you define yourself by an outcome only and you miss all of the precious knowledge to be gained from assessing the quality of the performance that led to that results achieved, good bad or indifferent.

Only being as good as your last result doesn’t take into account how good the opposition was and how well you may have played to push them to their limits before they finally got across the line.

A result-defined-you hands your confidence over totally to outcome and misses the chance for you to build confidence through the successful execution of every action you took that you’d intended to.

Choosing to hand your identity over to a result keeps you stuck in the past and biases your drive towards erasing something that is consigned to history, rather than using a curiosity about how good you can be in the future to inspire efforts to set new performance standards and fulfil potential.

Buying into the myth of the last result defining your career just means you’re choosing to become another statistic in the ever growing number of people who don’t fulfil their potential, who become ever more risk averse and held down by a fear of failure…

For a small percentage, this way of thinking may be the route to higher performance because of a very particular personality that responds positively to all of these typically unhelpful characteristics. In my experience, only a very few people naturally use the paranoia associated with this kind of thinking productively. For the majority, there is greater success to be had by defining the ingredients of a great performance to aspire to, rather than fixating on the perfect aggregation of those ingredients.

If you like to think you’re part of this select minority, then crack on with your particularly perverse recipe for success, but don't expect other people to thrive by taking on the same belief.

Chances are you’re in the majority who need to choose a different belief if you’re really going to find out just how good you can be with the talent, knowledge and skill in your possession right now.

So, what are you only as good as? Your next performance or your last result? There's probably a healthy combination of the two to explore.

*The definition of PERFORMANCE that we find very helpful to stay focused on is "doing the things you need to do to get the results you want".