The only true knowledge is experiential knowledge
We can read all the books in the world about skating or swimming, but if we don’t go on the ice or in the pool, we’ll never really know how to do it. It’s not until we experience something ourselves that we really know it.
Accordingly, our young athletes develop the inner skills of Champions in Life through the experiences they encounter along their athletic career. Their sport, which is the medium they chose to develop these skills, is their laboratory and offers them a controlled environment to safely practice and test themselves to gain true knowledge of what it is to live as a Champion in Life.
The stories of the Universe of the Champions in Life were created as a point of reference to help the athletes make sense of their tests and results in a way that empowers them and to guide them gently into developing the inner skills of Champions in Life.
As the athletes validate the stories with their own personal experiences, the stories progressively become for them more than just stories. This progression is the process of immersion to the Universe of the Champions in Life. The more the stories are validated from their own personal experiences, the deeper is the immersion into the Universe of the Champion in Life.
The immersion goes through 6 stages that overlap. Children moves from stage to stage at a different pace and age and as such may not all reach the 6th stage of immersion by the time they stop competing.
Often, the process of immersion resumes, years after the athlete has retired from the athletic world. When the memories of the stories of the Universe of the Champions in Life, help make sense and give meaning to what they may be going through in their personal or professional life at that moment.
The 6 stages of immersion
Stage 1- Developing awareness of internal dialogue and boundaries of comfort zone
In this stage, athletes start developing the awareness of their internal dialogue and eventually discover that it changes whenever they get close to the edge of their comfort zone. It’s at this stage that they learn to speak out loud verbatim and without judgment the sentences they hear in their minds, their inner dialogue. Eventually, it becomes clear to them that the content of their inner dialogue changes when facing certain situations. In time, they learn to recognize that these changes and situations mark the edge of their comfort zone.
Stage 2- Becoming familiar with the comfort zone’s alarm system
The second stage is to develop their familiarity to the natural innate process designed to keep us safe within our comfort zone. They discover that this process is triggered whenever they get near the edge of their comfort zone, and unleashes a combination of reasons, explanations, justifications, doubts, pleads that they can hear in their minds. They learn that these thoughts are designed to tempt them into choosing the easy way over the hard way. The little Devil on our shoulder represents this process and as the athletes become more familiar with the tricks it uses on them, their ability to choose to step out of their comfort zone grows.
As the ability to resist the temptations to choose the easy way grow, athletes start naturally going out of their comfort zone more often. Every time they do, a little piece of their potential becomes known. As evidence, of their growing competency accumulate, so does grow the confidence that accomplishing their goals is possible.
Stage 3- Building self-confidence
In the third stage, athletes learn that the process of building one’s self-confidence is done by resisting, a little longer, the temptations of choosing the easy way. Every time they resist the temptation to choose the easy way is alike digging out a shovel load of dirt from a hole where our little angel is buried. The little angel represents the voice of our self-confidence. As athletes dig up their little Angel, they accumulate evidences that they can and as such their self-confidence, the confidence that they are able to handle whatever life throws at them, grows.
They also learn from their experiments and tests that choosing to step outside of their comfort zone doesn’t guarantee the outcome of their actions will be as they’d hope, but it does guarantee that they will grow regardless, and it is that growth that can and does bring them closer to their desired outcome.
It’s the struggle that they put themselves through that makes them better, not the end result, time or medal.
Stage 4- Mapping out the unknown
In the fourth stage, athletes learn from their experiences that their minds use many different ways to approach life which are alike channels on a radio. They learn that throughout the day, their mind changes channel often and that not all channels are suitable to perform at one’s best. In this stage they start the process of mapping out these channels and their best uses.
Stage 5- The quest turns inward
Up until this point, athletes have been mostly motivated to choose to step out of their comfort zone by external factors such as seeking approval, seeking attention, seeking social status, seeking love. In the fifth stage, athletes learn to seek the feeling of peace and satisfaction they experience after venturing deeply out of their comfort zone. The quest for fame and glory turns inward and becomes a quest, fueled by curiosity, to find out just how much one is truly capable of.
Athletes start understanding how the fear of failing influences their ability to do what is needed for them to become better and their attention progressively moves from focusing on the outcome, to focusing more on the struggle they allow themselves to go through. As the struggle becomes more important for them, athletes eventually reach the final stage.
Stage 6- Quest for Impeccability
In the sixth stage, the quest becomes the quest for impeccability. The distinction between impeccability and perfection is in that perfection is influenced by external factors and as such can only happen, at best, when all our stars align. On the other hand, impeccability is doing the best we can, in the situation we’re in and with all the knowledge available to us at the moment. It is when they act impeccably that they feel best, the most at peace and satisfied. Impeccability doesn’t guarantee that the outcome of their actions will be as they’d wish, but it does guarantee that they will feel at peace knowing that they possibly could not have done any better. It guarantees they will be without regrets.
Athletes have reached this stage when their doings, being on or off the court, are a constant quest for impeccability. It is the quest for impeccability that makes one behave consistently in the ways of Champions in life.