News For
SWIM PARENTS
Published by The American
Swimming Coaches Association
5101 NW 21 Ave.,
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Learning to Prepare
For Success
By John Leonard
As I write this in late December in
My phone rings at 5 AM
and a small voice on the other end asks plaintively, “do we really
have swim practice, Coach John?” Yes, we really do.
“WHY?” Is the next question, which I wrestle
with myself on the 15 minute drive to the pool…. Why
put teenagers in the water on this cold and nasty morning
when both they and I would prefer to stay snuggled in at home for
another hour or hour and a half?
Now, I KNOW why, but can I express it to my
swimmers? Yes, I’ll try. Everyone, on the day after the high
school state meet, vows that “next year” they will A) make a final, B) Make the
meet C) win an event or D) write in your own goal here.
It’s easy to vow to do something the day
after, when you are excited, full of the promise of life and get up and
go. It’s a lot harder to REMEMBER what you wanted to do a couple months
ago when it’s 5 AM and cold outside. Then it’s a lot harder and a lot easier to
rationalize, “it’s just one workout.”
The problem is, when teenagers begin to learn
to rationalize, they get really good at it really fast, and pretty soon, the
ACTION required to fulfill the commitments to those goals, falls prey to the
rationalization. And after you rationalize the decision you want to make the
first time, it’s so much easier to do it the next time, and the time after
that, and pretty soon, the goal is just a dream, because you’re rationalized
yourself into thinking “I’d like to do that if everything could be perfect for
me, and it would never be cold in the morning, or no social events would ever
conflict with practice, and time with my friends always went the way I
want it to. “
But things never go perfectly. The ONLY thing
you can successfully predict is that obstacles to your goal WILL come up, and
little or nothing will go smoothly. And that consistency in preparation is the
only way to raise the percentages of the chance you will reach your goal.
Read that again… ”raise the percentages
of the chance…” Not a guarantee. If it’s a good goal, there are no guarantees,
EXCEPT that if you don’t prepare correctly, according to the plan, you won’t raise
your chance of success, you’ll lower it.
So why go to practice at 5 AM in the cold? Because its part of the plan, and it raises your chance of success.
But most of all, because you have told yourself that you will
commit to doing it. And if you let yourself down, who won’t you let
down? Prepare for a chance for success. And feel really good about doing
that.
Because not very many
people do.
All the Best, JL