How To Give Yourself The Best Chances Of Success

People are not born as high performers, its not a genetic trait that we do or do not have when we are born. It all starts with a choice.

Andrew Charter is the most capped Goalkeeper of the Australian Hockey Team, a.k.a. the Kookaburras. After winning a Silver Medal at the last Tokyo Olympics (and a few other Golds at World Cups and Commonwealth Games), Andrew joined the Soar team as a Master Coach with the mission to bring his lessons of Elite Performance to as many professionals as he could.

In this article, he shares his experiences with the three most powerful things that will make an elite athlete: a supportive team, a skilled coach and your commitment to improve.

The Supportive Team

The team is a group of individuals with the same shared goal or desire, in sport it’s a simple definition but on your journey, it may be more abstract. It could consist of friends, classmates, mentors/mentees and essentially anyone you share your journey or goal with.

The team is your community its where you will harness collective intelligence, you will share your successes and failures and you will define your values and beliefs. Each of these play an integral part in your performance.

The power of collective intelligence is immense so use it, it’s impossible to know everything even if you are the smartest person in the room. In 2017 the Kookaburras changed the way they played tactically, and it led to a real period of under performance but inside the team it was a symbiotic iterative learning process. Reviewing each game, listening to everyone’s opinions (the coaches guided and led discussions) but the real breakthroughs came from listening to the playing group and forging the thoughts into a consolidated strategy that lead to a real growth period.

The second most important factor of the team is shared values and goals. We all know how hard it is to break a habit, stop eating so much chocolate, start going to the gym in the morning and so on. Forging a team environment around you that enables and holds you to account when your values or habits slip is essential, because if you let that habit slip 3 times its almost certain you’ll fall back into it.

A simple example of this was during a conditioning session, we were running trails in the bush and had one last rep. The group took off and one guy stayed at the bottom, he was done didn’t think he had anything left. The group reached the top to realise he didn’t make it, rather than calling it a day one of the captains went down found him and made him get up and run the rep. This may seem like a small thing, but it shows a commitment to our values goals. Maybe if it slid through then next session 3 people don’t run the rep. small details count.

The Skilled Coach

The Coach/Mentor needs to be an individual that you respect that has some level of expertise in the direction you want to direct your career. It could be a higher-level co-worker; it could be a family friend, or it could be simply a career/life coach.

During my journey I have found that the most impactful coaches need to have 2 important traits. The first one is obviously a desire to want you to get better and the skills to help you on that path of improvement. The second is much harder to find, it’s the ability to have open, honest, and difficult conversations with you.

These are the conversations that have real impact on your growth and performance, you might not be aware you are cruising, you might think you are much better at something than you really are. These conversations will bring them to light, and they need to be formed based on trust that you are both committed to your improvement.

A simple example of this on my journey was having recently moved to Perth and being invited down to train with the Australian Team and training well (in my opinion). I was called into the coaches (Ric Charlesworth) office and was simply told “Your physical condition is extremely poor” and that was essentially the entire meeting. But he was right, I was so complacent with my ability that I didn’t consider the improvement I could gain from my physical conditioning and because we had a mutual trust in the improvement of myself and the team, we were able to be open about it. This resulted in me losing a significant amount of body fat, increasing muscle mass and robustness resulting in a substantial amount of improvement.

Your Commitment To Improve

The last aspect is your commitment to yourself this after all is your journey and you need to own it.

There are going to be periods of uncertainty and self-doubt, but you need to reflect on why you are doing this and why you think you could start doing it. You need to trust and believe in you.

I remember one clear example of this in my career about 3 years in. We were playing a small tournament in Malaysia, and we were reviewing some games and I had started to doubt myself and the decisions I had been making because as they should the coaches were questioning them to the point I was second guessing them on the field. I had all the thoughts of self-doubt “Should I be here?”, “Just bench me then” so I just walked out of the meeting (not my finest hour).

They approached me a couple of hours later when things had cooled down and I was openly honest with them, explaining that because of this constant questioning I was doubting myself. And suggested they just give me freedom, for the remainder of the tournament let me play how I play after all this is why they selected me, and they agreed. It was a defining moment in my career, I took ownership of all the failures that may lay ahead, and it was my responsibility and I accepted it.

I had trust in my ability and my awareness that I would accept it when there was a mistake, but I played and made decisions with freedom.

Andrew and the Kookaburras proud of their Olympic Medal in Tokyo

Final Lesson: Choose the best structure to support you

You can choose to start a company, follow a specific career, or get that promotion to put your kid into that nice school down the road.

But the choice to follow your dream is just the start. By ourselves, we quickly falter the self-doubt, the imposter syndrome starts to set in and often we retreat back to the safety of what we know. This is the part self-help books and 10-minute biographies of todays visionaries overlook.

Most real cases of success are built on utilising the groups around us, the team, the coach/mentor, and the support networks.

I made my choice 15 years ago when I decided to move to Perth, to try and make the Australian Hockey Team and then take on the world. And I'm certain that my medals would not have come without the support structures I chose to put in place for myself.

Over these 15 years of high performance, every period of rapid growth has been built on those around me questioning, challenging and supporting me and not just my individual desire to be better. This is where coached team learning has a distinct advantage.

Ultimately it is your journey to high performance, but with a team around you, a coach you can respect and your own individual belief, you are going to set yourself up with the best chance of success.

Give yourself the best chances of success. Join a High Performance Sprint now.