Swim against all the odds

Here's a newspaper article that somehow help . Decided to type it out and share

"Most of my teenage years were spent in a swimming pool training to become an inter-national swimmer. But I never manage d to achieve my ambition.

Over and over again I would lose races by fractions of seconds and I never got the selection call-up. At that time, I knew the obvious, logical reasons why I didn't make it -- I wasn't tall enough, my hands and feet weren't big enough and , of course I didn't have the natural talent!

I retired from competitive swimming at the tender age of 19 and became a coach instead. But it wasn't until my late 20s that I realise that the reasons that I used to explain my own failure were the same as the swimmers I was coaching to explain why they didn't succeed.

Almost 10 years after I retired from swimming, I understood that I had just been making excuses for my failure.

I can see now that I had everything I needed to succeed except perhaps the most vital aspect -- self-belief. That lack of self-belief was what caused me to think negatively and expect to fail.

NEGATIVE THINKING
Once you expect to fail, you will tend to choose the actions that take you towards failure. That is the way your brain works. If you do not change your negative thought processes, you will end up getting just what you expected in the first place -- failure. The only way I could justify my constant lack of success was to give other people reasons -- or excuses -- why I failed.

When I studied sports psychology, I discovered the connection between performance and self-belief. When your self-belief is low, your performance will reflect it and your will underachieve. If you can raised your self-belief, you will start t o expect success and will therefore take the actions that lead to success.

The voices in your head question your skills, remind you of your recent failures and constantly focus your minds on what other people might think if you do not perform to your ability. Those voices help you to find excuses for your poor performance. This is true of everything you do in life, not just in sports.

The most difficult thing in this whole cycle is knowing when you suffer from low self-belief. Others can usually tell by watching or listening to you perform but you often don't realise it yourself until it is too late and your are already on the path towards failure.

POSITIVE OUTLOOK
When you make excuses, it shows that you are struggling with your self-belief. Next time you five someone a reason for something your could not do or did not succeed at, ask yourself: Is this really a reason or is it just an excuse? You need to be totally honest with yourself and examine if your are making excuses rather than providing truly valid reasons. If it is the former your self-belief needs fixing.

When I was 35, one of the athletes I was coaching suggested that I should start practising what I preach: "If you think that good self-belief is what we need in order t o succeed, t hen why don't you prove it to all of us? Get back in the water yourself and start swimming again."

Well, I did accept the challenge and, to cut a long story short, I'm swimming faster today at 52 than I did in my teenage years and I'm breaking national masters records.

I am training a lot less than I was back then, but I believe in myself a whole lot more and that's what is making the difference to my performance.

I now find it easier to take on challenges with a positive outlook. If I feel like I'm starting to make excuses about my performance, I work on my self-belief until I feel I can cope again.

So don't spend your energy looking for reasons why you can't cope but work on your self-belief -- it always lead to success.

Contributed by John Shackleton, a sports coach turned motivational speaker who uses the principles and psychology behind top athletic performance for equality outstanding results i n the business world.