Actualizing a Personal Next
Coaching Tip #5
I’m pleased to say that my book Personal Next has been pre-released on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, with the publication date set for April 21, 2020.
In 2013 I set a goal for myself: interview 100 individuals who had successfully navigated a life of peak achievements and then worked to pursue different forms and meanings of success. As an Olympian, and a professional coach, I was deeply interested in how athletes face this difficult period after reaching what seems to be the height of their careers or lives.
My primary interview group was high-performance athletes. As an Olympian in 1984, I had experienced these challenges first-hand. As a coach, I wanted to learn from as many people as possible about how they had navigated their experience. (I picked the number 100 as a challenge. It was daunting number but not outrageously large.)
Over 18 months I interviewed professional and amateur elite athletes from over 25 different sports. It soon became evident that what I was learning could be applied to other individuals going through their own life-altering events. What information about the process of positive transition could non-athletes give? I decided to interview a selection of non-athletes.
What might a top executive at a company have learned from getting packaged out? What about someone who put their heart and soul into a career and then must discover who they really are, and what they really want, outside of that protective and familiar cocoon? What about the individual who one day walks into a doctor’s office and leaves with a diagnosis that means they have to put on their boxing gloves for the fight of their life? How do people continue on when a child, spouse, sister, brother, father, mother dies? And to exacerbate an already horrible situation, when one of those loved ones dies by suicide? I wondered how these scenarios would be similar to or different from athlete transitions. For some of these interviewees, discovering a personal next was essential to their continued existence.
I completed 103 interviews. Through them, I saw a larger story, a series of interlocking experiences that form the shape of an arc. The arc speaks to success. It is framed as an ascent to a personal best; the messiness of change; and the process to find a personal next, including new goals, new meaning, and a forward direction.
As an Olympian, I am deeply proud of my swimming career and the experiences it provided me. Like all such events, however, once it was complete it lives only in a place called the past. I now know that holding on to past personal bests as a definition of the current self can be a disservice to unlocking potential new versions of the self, including as-yet undiscovered opportunities and successes that exist only in the future.
I’ll be sharing more details about my book in posts to follow.