Aim High (4 page)

CHAPTER SIX

What I've Learned Along The Way

I meet lots of young people every year, both with and without impairments. I remember when I was a teenager being asked by adults what I wanted to do when I grew up; now I am one of those adults, and ask the same thing.

It amazes me how many young people just look and shrug and say ‘I don't know'. And it scares me when young people who do know what they want to do have no clue, or have taken no action, to enable them to achieve it.

I met a young girl about two years ago who, when I asked her what she wanted to be, looked at me and said ‘a pop star'. I asked her if she was in a band. She said no. I asked if she played a musical instrument. Again she said no. When I asked if she was in a choir, sang with her family, or did anything musical at all, she said no each time. When I asked her how she was going to achieve her ambition, she smiled broadly and said, ‘I'm going to win
Pop Idol
.' It is sometimes hard not to despair that so many feel that the way to achieve anything is through the media, or by taking short cuts. Of course miracles can happen, but even when they do, most people find that they have to work extremely hard afterwards.

There was a tiny part of me that smiled at her ambition (because it is important to have a dream) but mostly I was sad, because the chances of her achieving her ambition, without doing anything herself to increase that chance, were so remote.

When you see media reports about stars being ‘discovered' overnight, you only have to delve a little beneath the surface to reveal the hard work that has been involved. Years of acting classes, performing schools and competitions, make the ‘overnight discovery' tag amusing. It simply makes a better story for the media, if they can claim a Cinderella moment. And it feeds that small part of everyone which hopes that we will have our lives changed or fulfilled by a chance discovery, or that we will one day win the lottery and our lives will be changed for ever…

You need to have a goal, or dream. You need to be able to plan how to get there. (Or get someone else to do it effectively – this is why so many athletes have coaches who help them deliver their goals.)

You need discipline that enables you to go out and do not just the nice, easy things, but also the things that are a challenge.

You need self-belief. Although this may be challenged from time to time, really successful people are those who are able to deal with failure. Anyone can be successful once, but coming back from failure is a huge challenge, and one that not everyone wants to do, or can do. It means building on the hard days, when times are tough, and coming out the other side. You also of course have to learn to deal with success and not get carried away by it, believing that you are invincible.

You need to develop good relationships – and having a group of people you can trust around you is very important. These may be people who don't have exactly the same goals as you, but they can still help you on your way.

You need to take time to balance your professional goals with your family and friends and the people that you care about.

And you need to treat the people around you with respect – the way that you yourself would like to be treated. It is truer in sport than in any other field that you meet the same people on the way up as you meet on the way down. Early on, while you are developing, arrogance can be a big strength, but humility is good to have too.

There are four aspects to achievement. You have to know what you want to achieve, where you are now, how you plan to get where you want to go, and what work you need to do to get there.

You should begin with the end in mind – and work back from there. Don't start by just knowing where you are now, and assume you will get to your goal somehow. You need to write a plan of all the steps that are needed along the way, and you need to anticipate the ups and downs you might encounter. Without a plan, while you might indeed move in a certain direction, you could find out that this is the wrong direction.

You may feel that there are lots of things that you want to achieve. I have many goals for my sport, and many goals for my personal life too. What is vital is working out which are the important ones, and which the realistic ones, and how they affect each other.

Some goals may appear to be more urgent than others, simply because there are time lines associated with them. Or they may be goals that other people want you to achieve. It really helps if you write those goals down and think about how they fit into your larger plan, so you can prioritise what you want to do. You may not be able to achieve everything that you want – so make sure you pick the right goals!

Some time-management organisers say that writing lists is not constructive, because it doesn't help you prioritise. But I like writing lists, and I often use post-it notes, because I can move them around. Once I have my collection of notes, and have put them roughly into the order that I want to do things, then I can move on to the next step. As you write the plan you may find that the order changes, but this is all part of the process of working through the steps.

Once you have listed your goals, you have to ask yourself: where am I now? To be able to plan anything, you have to know where the starting point is. You wouldn't decide to go on a family day out to the local park with no clue as to where it was. You wouldn't take your family out to wander around randomly until you happened to find it.

Planning to be an athlete (or other achiever) you need the same fore-knowledge. You need to know your starting point, and there are many ways to achieve this. You may talk to your coach (or boss), or your friends, you may look at your personal (all-time) and season-best performances. You could also look at how you competed against other people, scoring points for victories and taking them away for losses.

However, this can only give you a small part of the overall picture. Some of the information will be subjective. The objective stuff can be harder to obtain.

You have to know what you are good at, and not so good at, and where you could improve. But that can be tough. If you ask your boss, say, he might not want to tell you about things that you are bad at, because you might get upset, and that would bring a different set of problems to deal with. Your friends and family, on the other hand, may be a little too open. Because of their closeness to you, and because you asked the question, they may feel that they can let rip with everything critical they feel about you.

The answer is to lay ground rules. You should explain what you are hoping to get from them, and that you are looking for responses that that will affect you positively, rather than make you defensive. (If all you want to hear is that you are brilliant, then only ask your mum. But if you want to hear what you can do to improve yourself, you must ask other people.)

Give them a list of key areas that you would like to talk about, and govern the time that you spend with them. You don't want to turn it into a three hour meeting from which, at the end, you get nothing.

Something that we have used from time to time is a SWAT analysis, which anyone can do. You look at your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, and name your goals. Then, at a carefully guided meeting, outlining what you can and cannot say, we share that information with other people. This can be done with several people at a time, in the context of what everyone is trying to achieve.

Once you know what you want to achieve, and you have got other people's input on it, you are really in a position to work out where you are now. From this you can work out honestly what skills you already have, and which you need to work on.

If you know accurately where you are, you can measure improvement. You now know your start and end point, and can sit down and plan the steps that you need to take. This can be a detailed list, or a time line, or any way that works well for you. I write my winter training programme in quite general terms first, looking at what I need to achieve each month, and then I fill in the details below that. So by the start of winter training I know pretty much all the sessions that I need to do for the following year. This may change, when I either reach or don't reach my targets (sometimes illness can get in the way or you can progress quicker than expected). But it is easier to change a plan than try to write it as you go along.

Once you have completed the first two steps of planning – knowing your goals, and where exactly you are starting from – you have to write down your plan. This is the step that may take the longest, and for many is the least interesting. It will be a personal training plan, as in the business world it would be a personal development plan. Whatever format the plan takes, you need to be able to mark your progress against it to see that things are moving in the right direction. It is better to find out three months ahead of major Games that some things haven't worked in training, rather than finding out the night before an event.

Then, the fourth step: you have to follow your plan. Anyone can train hard, and some people find it easy, but others find this the biggest challenge. I have met many athletes who are talented, but who lack the ability to push themselves really hard in training.

Often the things that you are not so good at are the things you least like doing, and you are tempted to ignore them. At work, people will often ignore things in their inbox in favour of tasks that seem more appealing, or that will take less time. Anything that is challenging seems difficult. This is why planning ahead is important, so that you can be sure you have put aside time specifically to complete these tasks.

The world of athletics is not unique – it is about building on success in the same way as you build a house with bricks. You have to get the foundations right, and then you can practise and improve and reach your peak.

Even when you know yourself, and have your plan, you will, as an athlete, have to make some tough decisions. Are you going to work on the things that you are weakest at, where you can possibly make a big improvement, or is it best to work on the things that you are better at, to make the most of your natural talents? For me, my top speed is one of my huge strengths. I can push very fast over short to medium distances. What I am not good at is starting. Some years I work more on my starts than on my top speed, but the pattern can change. Coming up to major Games I may be working on both things at the same time. What is important is that whatever decision you make, it must be an informed one. In wheelchair racing, for instance, it is highly unlikely that if you never practise a start you will ever be really good at them!

Once you reach your peak you should ‘tell the world' about your goals. This is definitely one of the things that has contributed to my success If you have a dream and share it with others, it puts pressure on you to try and achieve. It also makes that dream more real. While dreams remain in your head, they may never progress; but vocalising them brings them alive and moves them forward. Just writing the dreams down doesn't do the job. You have to vocalise. It is about making things happen.

Before the Games at Athens I spent six months doing interviews with journalists, and everyone one of them asked me what medals I was going to win. The scenario I came up with was two golds, one silver and a bronze. My own personal goal was a little higher, but what I told the journalists was what I thought I could realistically achieve. And from the moment I told the first journalist that this was what I wanted to do, the motivation to train was there for every session that I did.

I often get asked for advice by young athletes, and I'm happy to try to answer questions. But some of the training sessions that I do are not appropriate for someone who is just developing in the sport. And few problems in sport, such as how to acquire the technique for pushing a chair, have a ten-minute quick-fix solution. Yes, in ten minutes I can show someone what they should be aiming for, but to perfect that technique the athlete will have to do it again and again in training to embed it into their brain. It may seem tempting to blame equipment and try to solve difficulties with a new chair, or a new pair of gloves, but the solving of most athletes' problems only comes from learning a good technique, and then training hard.

Over the years I have seen many naturally talented athletes who possessed the potential to go far, but what has stopped them from achieving this potential was their inability to learn, or train hard.

Gary Player is reputed to have said, ‘the harder I train the luckier I become'. Practice can indeed make perfect. A reality of life is that some people are more naturally talented than others. Some people make everything they do look easy. Some people are natural risk-takers, while others are reluctant to try anything new. We can change some of the ways in which we behave, but we can't completely change our personality.

An American athlete, Jim Knaub, who had eight Boston Wheelchair Marathon victories behind him, once said, ‘It isn't always the fastest person who wins, it is the person who slows down the least'.

When I was growing up, I wasn't the most talented, but I was keen. I knew many very talented young boys and girls in school who were competing at a good level. In fact they had a great deal more natural talent than me. But at the highest level in any walk of life, natural talent is not enough. Training made the difference to what I was able to do. When natural talent runs out, what else do you have to fall back on? You need the ability to push yourself as hard as you can, and you need to be able to pick yourself up from disasters. You get the confidence to do this from working to the highest level that you can.

Sport and life are full of ups and downs. There is rarely an easy path open to anyone. Even for those who are seen to be the most successful, there are usually things thrown in their path which would test anyone's resolve.

For me, a big part of my life has been about dealing with what I have got, good or bad, and then trying to move on, to get to a point where I can reach my goals.