Keep Showing Up

December 19, 2017

Everyday there is a choice to create opportunities and to take advantage of opportunities presented to you. Each day is an opportunity to compete with yourself to align actions with intentions. It's no secret if you have lofty goals and dreams then you better believe it will take a lot consistent action to get where you want to be. We take on the ultimate challenge of competing with ourselves day in and day out. Greatness truly is a decision.

I want to highlight an important message from the book “The Carpenter” by Jon Gordon..

"They think I became an overnight success. But I tell them, there’s no such thing as an overnight success. The way to success is the way of the craftsman, where you work really hard for years. You show up every day. You do the work. You see yourself as an artist dedicated to your craft with a desire to get better every day. You put your heart and soul into your work as you strive for excellence. You desire to create perfection, knowing you’ll never truly achieve it but hoping to get close to it. You try new things. You fail. You improve. You grow. You face countless challenges and tons of rejection that make you doubt yourself and cause you to want to quit. But you don’t. You keep working hard, stay positive, and persevere through it all with resilience, determination, and a lot of hope and faith. Then you make it! Everyone wants to work with you. And the world says, “where have you been?” And you say, I’ve been here all along hopefully getting better day by day. To the world, you are an overnight success. To you, the journey continues."

So much can be taken away from the above paragraph, but what stands out to me is to show up. Showing up was a piece of advice that was given to me by my mentor Graham Betchart as I started my journey, it’s something I continually work on and remind myself all the time.

A lot of what makes the best players, coaches, and trainers great is they are incredibly consistent with their actions. They keep showing up for the work even when they don’t feel like it or even after a major moment of success.

Show up when things are going your way, just because you have some success doesn’t mean the work stops. Show up after a failure. There will be times when we make mistakes. But those failures don’t stop you unless you allow it to.

You have the choice to keep showing up each day and when an opportunity comes about again you have the choice to take action or back down. It’s all about not stopping yourself and the beautiful thing about the mental game is there is always a choice.

To gain more clarity you can ask yourself why am I showing up? What is my purpose for training? For coaching? For playing? When your purpose outweighs your challenges it makes showing up a lot easier.

Keep showing up and you will be amazed by what shows up for you.

If you want a deeper dive on learning the mental game make sure you check out the new Mental Game Masterclass being taught by myself (Mike Franco) and NBA Mental Skills Coach Graham Betchart