* Diego H. Fernandez
(Special for ANALYSIS)
The Spanish psychologist Pep Marí in his recommendable book “Learning from the Champions” explains the model to order the psychological aspects that participate in the performance with which they work in the sport psychology department where he develops his profession, it is a pyramid with four steps that are: being able to learn in its base, wanting to learn and knowing how to learn in its structure and demonstrate what has been learned in its completion. He tells us that the principles to achieve high performance are the same for any activity and details his experience with athletes from different sports, actors, waiters, security forces, musicians, students, doctors, businessmen, dancers, etc.
Each level of this pyramid corresponds to a psychological requirement necessary to achieve maximum performance (in this case sports) and develops it in this way: at the base of the pyramid we have the “power to learn”. It refers to the athlete’s personality and his or her immediate environment (family, friends, partner, work, etc.). The athlete’s way of being and his circumstances must allow him to learn, otherwise he will hardly perform to the best of his ability. And to summarize this first step in the development of his model, he quotes a phrase from the Colombian coach Pacho Maturana who says: “You play as you live.”
Do you want your performance to be regular, consistent and stable? Well, first you must get your mood to be regular, consistent and stable. If you are normally happy in the morning, sad in the afternoon, and happy again when you go to sleep, it means that your mood is highly variable. With such a variable state of mind it will be very difficult for you to always perform at the same level. In order to learn, it is necessary to have a personality that does not tend to complicate life excessively and an immediate environment that does not interfere with performance. The champions are mentally healthy people and with an environment that, at least, does not subtract.
And it is that, sometimes, the best way to add is not to subtract. And it is that even in individual sports it is essential to work as a team to achieve maximum performance. In the same way, the rest of us non-athletic mortals, to give our 100%, we need to have an environment that supports us. We will hardly offer the best of ourselves in the meeting scheduled for first thing in the morning, if the night before we had a discussion at home.
At the second level of the pyramid we find “wanting to learn” and at this level it refers to motivation. To be motivated, two conditions are necessary: to have very clear objectives that are pursued and to pay the full price to achieve them. This price is made up of three taxes:
• Waivers and sacrifices to be able to choose the objective.
• Efforts to comply with the work program required by the objective.
• Acceptance of the consequences, both positive and negative, that derive from having chosen this objective and having committed to these means of work.
The psychologist mentions César Luis Menotti saying that he heard him say one of his favorite phrases “You don’t have to cry when you lose, you have to cry when you betray your commitment”. In this sense, the winners, the great champions, have very clear objectives and pay the full price to achieve them.
On the third level of the pyramid is knowing how to learn. There are only two kinds of athletes: those who are looking for an excuse to be able to fail and those who are looking for a solution to be able to succeed. And this sentence is very right: if every time we fail we look for an excuse to justify our mistakes, then we do not have the obligation to change anything. And if we don’t change anything, we don’t progress.
Jorge Valdano expresses that losers complain, winners learn. Accepting mistakes, analyzing them and looking for solutions are some of the resources that champions use to quickly correct their mistakes. Who knows how to learn never makes exactly the same mistake twice in a row. He may fail again, but never for the same reason. After an error comes an analysis. An analysis that ends with a conclusion. This conclusion becomes a change. This change may not be enough to fix the error. But even if it were, we would have learned something. Now we would know that this change is not the solution.
Failing consecutively, without changing anything between attempts, is equivalent to wasting time. The error grants us the opportunity to try again. Of course, try again with more knowledge. If we can, want and know how to learn, surely we will learn. We may not learn everything we were expected to learn, but we will certainly expand our repertoire of resources. Now, the only thing that is about is to demonstrate what has been learned. And it is necessary to do it under pressure, at the moment of right, just when it’s time. Otherwise, all the effort made so far will have been worth nothing.
What is the use of having studied a lot if we go blank when answering the exam? It’s time to make the investment profitable. We are in the fourth and final level of the pyramid: “learn to demonstrate what has been learned”; in other words, “learn to compete”.
The first thing we have to know is that we don’t have to make a competition special, but on the contrary, face them all in the same way. Kobe Bryant argued that for him the final shot that was so important to others was one more of the 1,000 he shot per game. What was the difference? None. Not making a date, a meeting, a conference or any performance special is the first step in learning to compete. All appointments are equally important, all meetings are equally complicated, and all conferences are equally difficult. They are all the same, none should be considered special if you want to be up to the task.
To summarize the last level of the pyramid, the one related to tolerating pressure, Marí uses a phrase from someone who is neither an athlete nor a coach, and even less a psychologist. This is the Hollywood actor who has starred in the most westerns, John Wayne. And she prays like this: “Being brave consists in being scared to death and, despite this, getting on the horse”. There are not two kinds of people, those who are afraid and those who are not. How do you want to not feel pressure if you play so much? Yes, on the other hand, there are two kinds of cowboys, those who get on the horse and those who don’t.
We can now, once the pyramid has been interpreted, we can synthesize what an athlete needs to reach excellence in each of the steps:
1- In order to learn: present a stable state of mind, surround yourself with an environment that does not detract from your work, be very clear about the objectives you are pursuing, pay the full price of those goals, learn quickly from your mistakes and tolerate pressure.
2- To want to learn: base your state of mind on three points of support.
• Make your beliefs as flexible as possible.
• Combine ambition, humility and order in your lifestyle.
• Cultivate tolerance.
3-To know how to learn: target yourself with a point of madness.
• Pay the full price of your goals and take the risk of not achieving them.
• Commit only to what you need, choose and control.
4-To demonstrate what has been learned: Get into the habit of analyzing your mistakes.
• Every time you learn something new, review how much you knew so far.
• Set short-term goals that will bring you closer to your long-term goals.
• Never interpret the mistake as a failure.
In addition, another item is attached to learn to tolerate pressure:
• Don’t make any situation special.
• Base your confidence on preparation, talent and results.
• Exchange threats for challenges and limitations for possibilities.
• Notice the changes that occur in the way you function under pressure.
As we can see, everything that has been exposed can be applied not only in sports, since excellence is a good that pays very well in any profession, but as we all know, it takes a great effort to achieve it. The most valuable economic asset is the ability to learn. A person could lose his house, his car, his bank account and all his furniture and be left with nothing but the clothes on his back, but as long as his learning ability was intact he could cross the street and start earning a good living. immediate. Never question whether or not a goal is possible. You just have to worry about acquiring the necessary knowledge and developing the necessary skills to achieve it. This is how those who aspire to excellence in any field handle themselves.
Success = Habits
Habits = Repetition
Repetition = Discipline
Entrepreneur and personal development speaker Jin Rohn is very clear: “Learning is the beginning of wealth. Learning is the beginning of health. Learning is the beginning of spirituality. Seeking and learning is where miracles begin.”
To conclude, it is necessary to exclaim from the rooftops that there is not so much competition in excellence, whatever the branch, since it is found more in the levels of mediocrity. Perhaps many times people are not aware of the effort that must be made to get to position themselves in elite places, the path is overlooked and we are left with the photo of the great stars lifting an important trophy together with the check that completes the prize, but to get to that place there is a long journey where you enjoy and suffer, laugh and cry, win and lose not only matches, championships or titles, but also moments, experiences, common and current experiences such as of all human beings. Everything is not possible.
From the moment an objective is chosen, others are being renounced and all the sacrifices that must be made to achieve the proposed goals are part of the price to pay. A journalist asked a swimmer, who had won a medal in the Olympic Games, what she had sacrificed to achieve such a precious metal. The swimmer responded with a simple “nothing”. She told him that given the choice, she opted for a high-performance lifestyle. However, this passionate choice does not lead directly to success. Paying the full price of the proposed objectives does not guarantee achieving them, but it increases the probability of achieving them and allows you to sleep peacefully.
It is not enough to sacrifice yourself, you also have to comply with the work program and persist in the effort to achieve the goals. No exam is passed with an excellent without studying. No value is achieved without effort and no goal is achieved without dedication. Effort and illusions must be invested if you want dreams to become reality. No one succeeds by chance. Nobody wins by accident. No one reaches excellence unintentionally, the more you work, the luckier you are. As we say, many coaches only reach the elite those athletes who have two gifts: one to work (referring to dedication) and another to develop the sport they practice (referring to talent).
But then what happens to those who, despite everything, do not manage to arrive? What else must be done to achieve the objective? Pay full price and take the risk. The risk of, despite doing everything that is in your hands, not reaching it. That is why behind an elite athlete or a high performance person in any profession there is a story of learning, struggle and personal improvement. Many people fall by the wayside, few are the ones who achieve it, that’s why I say goodbye with a phrase from Toni Nadal, Rafa’s uncle and personal trainer who says: “No one is better than you, they have only become better than you”.
Bibliography: Learning from champions. Pep Mari
* Former professional goalkeeper. Current technical director.