The skills athletes need to design and project manage their lives
Key topic
Today’s lesson will focus on the skills athletes need to design and manage their life plan. For many of you The Dream and Goal is to become professional athletes. Turning pro can thus be a dream come true. However, if not properly managed—all the traps and pitfalls— it can turn into a nightmare. We will begin with an overview of those skills and then zoom in on emotional strength and its importance. We will give you some tips on how you can develop your emotional strength and contextualise emotional strength in sports. We will finish by listing some tips on how to try and ensure your long-term happiness and success.
Learning objectives
- Understand the skills athletes need to succeed in life
- Familiarize yourself with the concept of emotional strength and what you can do to achieve emotional strength
- Understand how emotional strength applies in the context of sports
- Learn how adjusting your attitude, approach and behavior will set the right framework for success
The skills athletes need to design and project-manage their life plan
Let’s watch a short clip where Adonal Foyle encourages athletes to manage their finances properly:
NBA veteran’s guide to managing money for pro athletes
As we stressed throughout this course, to design your desired life plan you need to be aware of who you are, your skills, your strengths and of course your weaknesses. In addition, you need to understand where you are in life right now and what, in broad terms, are your life goals. These life goals should cover the different aspects of your life such as health, family, relationships, career and finances.
We all need a plan to go through life and right now it is a good time for you to come up with a rough draft of this life plan since you are closing in to the beginning of your adult life. Your plan needs to include and cater for your college life, your personal life, work or business life as well as your financial life, considering your values and what matters most to you.
Now it is the time to start thinking about what you want to accomplish in your life and what your mission is. If you have not already discovered your passions and talents outside of sport, may be now it is a good time to look into that. Given that you are about to become a collegiate athlete, it means that you are passionate about sports; however, there must be other things that you are passionate about or at the very least, good at. Do not exclude your other passions or talents from your life plan. Embrace them and include them in your plan, even as a background objective. We all know that sports careers are difficult to build and that in your case, the percentage of student athletes that will eventually go professional is a mere 2%, therefore you need to have all your options open and available.
To build a successful career and life plan you need certain skills, and these skills are the ones they don’t usually teach you at school. Financial and life skills do not usually form part of formal education and most people develop these skills through trial and error, by dealing with uncertainty, failures, and whatever life brings to them.
Our purpose here is to equip you with these skills which will enable you to build the life you aspire to have and deal well with whatever life brings. You will develop a number of these life skills as part of your sports career: discipline, consistency, grit, determination, resilience. We have been supplementing these skills with simple financial concepts so that you acquire a well-rounded view of how finances work in every phase of your life and how you can create a financial plan that will serve your greater life plan.
Emotional strength and resilience
Let’s start with a short clip:
‘Mental toughness is the secret to success’
Emotions can bring out the best and the worst in us. Your emotional ability is one of the fundamental pillars that you need to master along with your technical and physical strength.
You will experience victories, defeats, ups, downs and upsets on the field from a very young age and you will continue experiencing them throughout your life, if you decide to purse a career in professional sports. Emotional strength is a similar concept to physical strength, although it requires and offers a different set of skills and attributes. Emotional strength refers to your ability to keep your feelings and emotions under control in order to prevent yourself from acting in the heat of the moment, without filtering your actions and thoughts.
Feelings are only one aspect of emotional strength. Emotional strength refers not to what we experience in any given, but how we respond to it. Expressing our feelings creates the opportunity for release; finding peace and harmony. Developing emotional strength will help you to:
- Increase your ability to recognize and express your needs
- Face setbacks head on.
- vBe more adaptable to change
- Focus on finding solutions instead of drowning in the problem
- Learn from mistakes and move on
- Recover faster from failures, rejections and roadblocks
- See the bigger picture
Emotional strength is not a science, it’s a state of mind that you need to consciously and constantly pursue. You have to be aware and keep reverting to your feelings and emotions in order to understand them and try to put them under your control. The key to achieving emotional strength is appreciating that ‘strength’ does not necessitate your being rigid or unbent. Quite the contrary; it requires you to be flexible and willing to adjust and adapt in the face of reality. Here are a few tips on how you can work on your emotional strength:
- Be grateful, or at least try to be-We’ve already discussed gratitude extensively. As we stressed, it’s not about ignoring or overlooking the bad things; it’s a lens that helps us see the good next to the bad, or at least helps us mitigate the effects that a bad event or occurrence has on us. Practicing gratitude daily is a great first step towards improving your emotional strength.
- Getting thigs done is better than perfect- Perfect does not exist, or rarely does. Perfectionism is the enemy of emotional strength. It’s linked to the misbelief that something can only be done in a very specific way, or even worse, through a very specific procedure. Perfectionists want to be in total control which is a unicorn in real life. They design something in their heads, and if it doesn’t happen exactly the way the want it, then they think that everything is ruined. In short, perfectionism is an enemy of emotional strength.
- Accept your vulnerability- It is hard and scary to be vulnerable; relinquishing control and accepting that your fate does not depend entirely up to you. For instance, to be able to truly share yourself and your life with another person, is truly huge. Unfortunately, people consider vulnerability a weakness when it can be utilized as a strength. Vulnerability enables you to be honest, to be sociable, to connect, and it allows others to see the real you.
- Focus on your strengths (not your weaknesses)– Instead of focusing on what you’re bad at, or what you’re missing, focus on what you’re good at instead. Consequently, this will help you focus on what’s going right. We are not suggesting, of course, to neglect your weaknesses and refuse to improve. All we are saying is that you need to focus more, or at least equally, on what you’re good at.
- Be growth-oriented– A person who is growth-oriented seeks development and learning new things gracefully. They are honest about not knowing everything and do not see this as a weakness. Someone with a growth mindset believes that there are always ways to improve and learn.
- Look for solutions, not problems– There is nothing to be gained by focusing on the problem. People with emotional strength know that things will rarely go their way. Rather than focusing on the problem, drowning in it and replaying in your head over and over try to funnel that energy towards finding the solution.
- Embrace change– Emotionally strong individuals know that change is inevitable and they actually embrace it. Don’t overlook the effects of change, but at the same time, accept it. The sooner you do that, the sooner you will adapt.
Emotional strength in sports
If everything we just discussed sounds a bit vague or confusing, don’t worry. We will now put it to the test and explain what emotional strength means in practice in the context of sports. There will be times where you will mess it up and fail; sometimes it can happen a few times during a game, sometimes many times during a game and sometimes you might even fail once but massively. All these can come in the form of mistakes, botches, or even plain shortcomings.
You might be a striker for a soccer team and miss a clear opportunity; for example, in a tete- a-tete with the goalkeeper. You’ may even get funny looks from fans, coaches and teammates. What do you do? If you’re emotionally strong, you’ll just suck it up, recover and go for the next one. You’ll understand that there’s another 30,40 or 80 minutes to play and you’ll just work hard to get another chance. What’s the alternative? Cry about it and let it get to you for the remainder of the game? It happens to a lot of athletes. The result will just be one mistake after the other and instead of making up for your mistake in the next chance you get, you’ll just keep missing everything and give the ball away, you will just go into a loop in your head and you’ll just perform badly throughout the game.
If you’re a tennis player and you get hamstring injury that will cost you the next two tournaments, how do you react? Obviously, you’ll be devastated and rightly so. But injuries are part of sports and it certainly won’t be the last time you get injured. What should you do? Make that injury work for you; do things that you couldn’t have otherwise done and be productive. Maybe it’s an opportunity to take that course you wanted to, to learn that new language. Maybe it’s time to work on some of your weaknesses. Revisit your mistakes or weaknesses and work on them. That way, you’ll come back from your injury better and/or wiser.
It could also be the case that you find yourself in a scenario where you have messed up big. You had the last two free shots in the basketball league cup final, and you need both, to get the game to extra time. But you miss. You feel like you have let everyone down: friends, family, teammates and coaches. What can you do? You need to bounce back. What’s the alternative? Cry about it? How is that going to help you, or your teammates, or your coaches? You have to move on and go at it the next year.
Finally, you might not make it to collegiate sports and have to find an alternative path. You are devastated but what you need to do is pick yourself up, dust yourself off and think about the next day. You might not become a professional athlete but there is a whole world out there with thousands of jobs both within and outside of the sport industry. It might feel like the end of the world now, but that is because you were so fixated on sports. It’s time to see the bigger picture.
The key to success lies in your off-pitch performance and behavior
Just to be clear, we should clarify that we don’t imply that you shouldn’t work hard, be committed, trying to constantly improve, proving your supporters right and critics wrong. However, designing and successfully executing your life plan depends on what you do when you’re not competing, when you’re not training. Especially if you make it as a pro athlete. Your life plan and skills should provide the “right” answers to these questions.
- How are you managing your money?
- Where are you investing?
- Do you have the right people by your side?
- Are you being cautious?
- Are you fully utilizing your commercial capabilities?
- Have you thought about life without sports?
- Are you giving back? Helping the community?
- Are you leading a responsible and decent lifestyle? Are you a role model for the younger generations?
Have a plan: We can’t stress this enough. You should have goals and objectives: on and off the pitch. Short-term, medium-term and long-term goals. Otherwise, you’ll be just drifting through your career and your life, and roadblocks and traps will just increase and become unavoidable. Live within your means, invest, budget and avoid debt, or at least bad debt! Enjoy your career and your life but always have one eye set on the future and how you want your future to look like. Ask yourself: Is what I am about to do in service of that?
Be grateful: For where you are, how you look like and what you have. Gratitude is the first step to realizing your privilege, that the money you make may be a lot more than what other people make and that you have a lot more than a lot of people your age!
Be humble: Both in your attitude, your behavior towards people and in your spending. Avoid extravagance, avoid arrogance, keep your head down, enjoy the ride and plan for the future.
Assemble the right team of advisors: You’ll need a variety of people to help you in your journey. You can’t do it on your own so you need reliable, trustworthy and moral people by your side. However, never relinquish control, just delegate and keep a close eye on what each one is doing and how it affects you. Nobody cares about your wellbeing more than you do! Be aware of where you are and always do your own homework when you are about to make an important decision.
Give back and help the less fortunate: Take note of athletes who have greatly helped people and communities; the LeBron James family foundation, the Jamie Carragher foundation, the Michael Phelps foundation. The most successful athletes realize that they have a moral obligation to do something and give back to the community. There are so many problems in the world that you can help, or at least try, to alleviate.
Be the role-model you had or needed: Going out and drinking and partying can be fun for a while. However, you need to make sure that you set the right example for the future generations. If you become a professional athlete, that will be the mirror of your success; whether people consider your performance and behavior worth having as a compass.
Avoid short-termism: This will help you avoid overspending, living in the day too much and not thinking about your future and long-term financial and overall well-being. Don’t overspend, don’t be reckless and start thinking about your future early on.
Learn to set boundaries: Don’t let your family, friends or anyone else overstep. It’s your life and your choices. You are not obliged to take care of everyone or let them dictate what you should or should not do.
Look after your health: Your team will take care of your physical health. However, mental health is equally important. If you feel sad for prolonged periods of time, anxious, stressed, overwhelmed, seek help.
Maintain a positive and can-do attitude: If you get in debt, or have a career-ending injury, or your relationship fails, pick yourself up and dust yourself off. It’s not the end of the world. Life is all about overcoming difficulties and turning them into success. Seek help and get back on track.
Action Steps – Exercise 1 (10 minutes):
Ask the students the following questions and try to get at least 4 to 5 answers from different students to have a meaningful discussion with the whole class.
- Have you been thinking about your greater life plan and what you want to accomplish in life?
- Do you understand that your college years may not include sports and that you may end up following another career? How do you feel about that and how can you get yourself ready for such a case?
- Do you know what you are good at, outside of sport, and how you can use that in a future non-sport career?
Lesson wrap-up
Today we took a glimpse into the life of athletes and the challenges they will might face in their life. We looked at the skills that athletes need, and focused on the importance of emotional strength and stability. We also discussed how emotional strength relates to sports by exploring some made up, yet very realistic scenarios. Finally, we saw how attitude and behavior form the framework upon which a successful career is built.
At this point we will wrap up today’s lesson. First, we will go over the learning objectives of this lesson and we want your feedback as to whether they have been achieved and then we will address any questions you may have. Please feel free to ask anything you’d like in relation to today’s lesson and we would love to hear how the concepts we discussed today relate to you and your life!