The Spirit Of Champions
Everyone has it in them to become champions, whether in work,
relationships, family, endeavours, sport, whatever. The key to
our success lies in the following 7 world-beating mental
qualities.
1. Attitude. Attitude is the start and end point of all
championship work. Without the right positive attitude of
self-belief, you will not achieve anything of importance in your
life. With it, everything is possible. As Charles Swindoll put
it: "I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90%
how I react to it."
2. Ability. You'll have a tough time achieving your full
potential in life if you try to do something you have no gift
for. Better to take time to find out your own unique gifts and
develop these. Here's what Quentin Crisp says: "It's no good
running a pig farm badly for thirty years while saying, "Really
I was meant to be a ballet dancer." By that time, pigs will have
become your style."
3. Faith. The one thing that distinguishes those who
realize their full potential and those that don't is
Self-belief. In fact, the strength of your self-belief is the
one thing that determines whether you conquer mountains or
conquer foothills. But self-belief, or faith, is not easy. It
means a belief in something that you can't prove or be certain
of. It means believing in life's magic. "Faith is like a bird
that feels dawn breaking while it is still dark." (Scandinavian
proverb)
4. Industry. There is a common fallacy that championship
work is purely a mental undertaking. Much of it is, perhaps most
of it. But when the mental side is right, you still need to take
action and work your socks off to achieve the goals you want for
yourself. Charles Dickens put it this way: "Industry is the soul
of business and the keystone of prosperity."
5. Courage. It is easy to start the process of
self-development, much harder to keep it going, particularly
when the score seems to be going against us. That's when we need
courage. Lots of it. Sometimes we need a bold David versus
Goliath kind of courage. At other times, we need a quieter
courage, the kind described by Mary Radmacher-Hershey: "Courage
doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the
end of the day saying: "I will try again tomorrow"."
6. Chance. The combination of all the factors of genuine
self-development, such as ability, faith, self-belief, and
awareness, are the factors that produce what we call "luck".
Quantum physicists tell us that there is no such thing in the
universe as random accidents. Everything that happens to us is a
result of our mental focus and our physical action. In fact, we
always get what we expect to get, no more, no less. Anatole
France described it this way: "Chance is the pseudonym God uses
when he doesn't want to sign his name."
7. Perseverance. All champions know the feeling of
working hard to what they imagine is the finishing line only to
find that the line has moved somewhere else. The real finishing
line can only be reached through diligence, patience, and
perseverance. "All endeavour calls for the ability to tramp the
last mile, shape the last plan, endure the last hours' toil. In
the fight to the finish, spirit is the one characteristic we
must possess if we are to face the future as finishers."
(Unknown).
In the final analysis, it doesn't much matter whether you become
a champion on the world stage or a champion in your own little
neck of the woods. The feeling you will have will be exactly the
same: one of wonder, achievement, and triumph.