Athlete Academy: Believe Before You Achieve
All you athletes out there - let me ask you a question: what do you believe? What do you believe about your ability? What do you believe about your coach or the rest of your team? How far do you believe you can really go?
Let me tell you something that will unequivocally always be the case…if you do not believe you can do it, you won’t. It’s that simple. You may have more talent and more ability than you yourself even realize, it is just sitting dormant waiting for you to recognize it. You need to want it, and furthermore, you need to believe you can do it.
You have to buy in mentally and physically to your goal. How do you approach the people who coach you? Do you think they don’t know what they are talking about? Do you give your all at practice? How about in the gym? Here is the secret to believing, not only do you have to allow yourself to believe you can do it, but you also have to do the work to back it up.
If you think you are the world’s fastest sprinter but you never work hard in the gym or at practice and tune out everything your coach says, then most likely when its time to take off from the starting blocks you are going to find yourself chasing. Sure, everyone can survive on God given talent for a time, but only those who really work hard and practice their craft will continue to advance. For every one athlete who becomes a professional, or competes at the highest stage, there are 10 others who had the ability but never put in the time or effort to achieve it.
This does work the other way, however, every person who excels at the highest level has one major thing in common, that killer instinct. They want the ball with the game on the line and 3 seconds left on the clock. They want to guard the best player on the other team. They don’t shy away from a challenge on the floor or in life.
One of my most vivid examples of this was Jeff Green, for those of you who don’t know or don’t remember, he played for the Celtics several years ago now. I watched a game where he scored 45 points against the Miami Heat at the height of their power. It, to this day, is one of the most dominating performances I have ever seen. You would have had to watch the game to know what I mean. He wanted the ball and he put it in the basket over and over and over, not from downtown, but the hard way by going into the paint. However, even with all the talent he possessed and the type of dominant game he had the potential for, he never reached his full potential because he didn’t have that instinct.
All in all, the important thing to remember is that it takes two sides to the same coin to achieve greatness. The work and time put in (the physical ability to do it) AND the mental ability to believe that you can. Make no mistake, you cannot have one without the other
-Coach Adam