The Athlete Failure Blueprint

Amateur and professional athletes alike, at some point, in their journey in their sport will want to progress. Whatever stage they’re at in the immediate moment may have been a struggle to achieve, or it may have been strangely easy to climb the ladder of athleticism. Regardless of your level of dedication or desire to stand on the top step of the podium, there’s a chance you’re about to put in a lot of work and go absolutely nowhere.

As with any endeavor into a sport, we all start in the same place: the beginning. This will be the first time someone talked you into trying pickleball or you may have even chosen a sport of your own desire to take a crack at. Whatever chosen path you’re on to dilate your eyes, get your heart pumping, and your legs moving, welcome to being a beginner. It’s the spot at the very bottom of the learning curve, where you can visually see the difference between a professional and an amateur and you realize you aren’t at either of those levels.

The good news for you though is that you’re enjoying your newfound sport, and once a week doesn’t cut it anymore. You’ve made new friends on the field or the trails, and you’re now meeting up throughout the week to gain some missing athleticism and coordination. As once a week turns into multiple times a month, and you’re feeling like you understand your sport a bit more. You’re feeling your body adjust to the new demands, and you’re enjoying the increase in capabilities. The biggest highlight of this is that the sport itself is still fun and you want to do it.

As any well-balanced advanced beginner does, they decide to find a way to compete at their newfound hobby; sorry, sport. The thrill of seeing your name on a dashboard or your team’s score being higher than the other teams begins to feel really damn good. You begin to believe you’ve found the path toward success, and you want to see even more improvement. Since the past six months have shown so many interesting changes to your life outside of sport, you’re hoping more time spent sporting will also increase all areas of your life.

This is where those with actual talent begin to leave the less coordinated behind. Because the more effort they put into their sport, the more they still climb up the leaderboard, the more goals they score, and the more recognition they get. The less coordinated begin to fall off the progression train, because it eventually becomes difficult. Some will find joy in the sport, and decide they’re enjoying the sport for what it is, instead of enjoying the rise of expert-level athleticism. If you can’t read through the sarcasm, this is the best place to be and to stay.

This point between Intermediate to Expert is the danger zone of progress. It’s the point where most athletes desire to keep doing what they did to get from Beginner to Intermediate. That’s because just doing more of the sport is enough to train the body and the mind for the sport you’re engaging in. As you desire to move beyond Intermediate, an athlete needs to widen their purview to find the gaps in their training toward their sport. This isn’t the grind, or “just do it” culture; this is deliberately breaking down your weaknesses to make them less of a weakness.

This is hard to do and the ego can easily get in the way of the desired progress. If you enjoy busy work and going to sleep exhausted, just do more of your sport in an unorganized fashion so you feel like you did something and pass out after your recovery shake. If you actually want to see progress as you begin to advance, work on finding and labeling your weaknesses. This will allow you to target them in training, and make them less of a weakness. Every three months, check in on those labels you wrote down and reassess.

When we believe we are done, that we have finished learning, or that we desire less growth, we’re done progressing. There should never be a time where an athlete doesn’t want to revisit the basics to progress their skills further than they are currently.

Typically the basics are safer, so fewer injuries will occur, even for older athletes (cough cough, like myself). They will also require less specific equipment, so you can achieve this practice in a more timely manner and place than needing to go somewhere very specific.

It’s because the ego is where we hold our beliefs about ourselves & our abilities. It also gives us a sense of who we are in relation to others. If nurtured properly, our ego allows us to gain confidence in ourselves and a realistic view of our capabilities. I call this the earned ego.

An earned ego is the work you put in, the inputs, toward the person that you want to become. You can’t rely on results, or outputs, alone to gain confidence. It’s about who you want to see yourself as, not who you want others to see you as. If you’re doing this for external validation, it’ll feel hollow & undeserved. If you’re doing this for personal growth, it’ll be rewarding & fruitful.

The opposite of an earned ego is the inflated ego. The inflated ego is an imposed, or desired, belief about yourself that you force onto the world that has no evidence in reality to build upon. When you do this to those around you, you are seen as cocky and arrogant, because you’re asking them to believe something of you that they aren’t seeing in your actions.

If you don’t want any of this and have only had a few laughs, that’s ok too. As humans, it’s fun to be seen as better than others at something. That again is the ego, it just feels nice. Now that we’re aware of that fun fact, we can accept it and move on. We can go back to enjoying activities and sports for what they were meant to be from the beginning, fun. If you want to progress and see how good you can become for you, GREAT, that’s how it should be. Don’t find ways to prove yourself to others, because then you’re doing it for them, and not you. That’s worthless energy spent on people who don’t care about you as much as you care about yourself.

If you’re looking for me, I’ll be at the Delusional Intermediate feeding station just past mile 13 😉.