To be a championship athlete you need to hold on to opposing ideas at the same time. Many people can think of worry warriors who spend all of their days thinking of the worst things that could happen that often never do. On the other hand, you have the people who are confident and always expect things to go there way even though they rarely do.
The best athletes in the world prepare for the worst and expect the best. By doing both these things at the same time life presents no surprises. The reason doing this can be so hard is because most people see themselves as being either negative or positive people. The negative people will have an easy time preparing for the worst.
The positive people will have an easy time expecting the best. Neither will want to change and adapt their ways to the way the other does things. The difficulty in doing this is why so few athletes are great.
How to Prepare for The Worst and Expect the Best
When you prepare for the worst in life, the critical word is prepared. Being an athlete is all about preparation. It is why in sports coaches will practice with loud boom boxes to simulate crowd noise or practice in very harsh weather. The reason coaches do these things is that they want to prepare for the worse. Any coach that always expected the best would assume every play they do will work and each player will still do everything that is asked of them and that there will never be any mistakes. Sounds like a fairy tale right? Preparing for the worst comes from an understanding that something will go wrong at some point. When it does, there will be a game plan in place, and you will be so used to this situation that it will not bother you at all.
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List Out Everything That Can Go Wrong
It is easy to explain this from a coaches point of view, but it works when you are an athlete as well. By writing out everything that can go wrong, you are not inviting it into your life. Often when we prepare for the worst, those things never happen. That is a good thing! A great example of this is an athletic injury. It is a worst case scenario because it could end your season or even your career. Why wait for that to happen?
The best thing you can do is work your butt off and do everything you can to stay healthy. Will you look back and say you wasted that time because you never got hurt? Of course not, you will be happy to know that you never got hurt.
Once you have your list of things that can go wrong, your next job is to create an action plan to make sure that they never happen. Get as detailed as possible and make sure you follow through with the plan. It’s the same reason that we carry a spare tire in the car. It is a plan for the worst-case scenario, but we still expect not to have to use it.
Preparation is Not Negativity
Being negative would be expecting the worst after the preparation takes place. If you prepare by going to practice every day, and you study film and do everything you can to be the best, and you still expect the worst to happen, that is being negative. Preparing for the worst is being a realist because the reality of life is that things go wrong.
If you look back on your life to what you planned and what happened this will be easy to see. Thinking of the worst case scenario and having a plan is that spare tire that sits in most cars. It will save your butt when things don’t get as you want them too. People who do this also tend to quit less. The reason is that they are not surprised by any happenings of life. Instead, they are prepared and ready to engage with whatever life presents.
Only Expecting The Best
The problem today you see more than anything else is that most people expect the best to happen all of the time and they never actually sit down and prepare for anything as best as they can. The reason athletes train so hard to win is because they realize losing is a possibility.
You have to reflect on that feeling that you will have when you lose a championship game. That feeling alone will be enough to drive you into doing the great things you need to do to succeed. When you expect the best you see no point in rehab, you see no point in extra film study; you see no point in do anything to your fullest effort. Why bother when you just expect to win all of the time? You don’t need to put in all of that work.
How to Expect The Best
Great athletes expect the best because their work ethic backs them up. They spend so many hours putting in work that success is inevitable for them. When Kobe Bryant was putting up 3000 shots a day, it was because he knew that the worst case scenario was him missing the shot he needed to make, so he worked to make sure that didn’t happen. When Kobe stepped out on the court every game, he was confident that he could expect the best. He knew he could make the shots because he was fully prepared to do so. Work ethic + Confidence = Expecting The Best The formula is simple, put in more work and prevent the disasters and negatives in life. The more of this that you do, the more success that you will be able to find for yourself. If you find yourself not expecting the best, just come back to this formula. Are you confident? Have you been working hard in the right areas? One of those questions will bring forth a no and an area that needs fixing to expect the best.
In Conclusion
To prepare for the worst and expect the best it starts with falling in love with preparation. You must be the athlete that loves to train and get better. The reward for being this athlete is an increase in confidence, or it matches the confidence you already have, and it gives you the ability to expect the best. No matter what happens at this point you win because you are prepared for it all.
KHO Health was acquired by was acquire by 9INE POINT in the summer of 2019 and is now referred to as 9INE POINT Health.
