The Fastest Way to Improve
We can’t afford to waste time and energy.
Somewhere out there, our competition is working their butt off trying to get better. We need to bring our highest quality effort to the table if we don’t want to get outpaced.
What I’ve learned after years of training, competing, and working with high level athletes is that
all effort isn’t created equal.
The athlete who grinds for hours at 100 mph doing the wrong stuff won’t be a match for the athlete who is smart, systematic, and is willing to put in high quality effort towards the right stuff.
Hard work won’t work if it’s not smart work
Smart Work
All performance domains, whether it’s sport or life, follow the same rhythm on repeat:
Prepare
Perform
Evaluate
Job 1 is all about preparation - learning and growing as much as you can to help create a solid foundation of physical, tactical, and mental skills.
Job 2 is all about performing - letting go of anything other than the present moment and the task at hand.
If you’re not practicing Strategic Evaluation, you’re not working smart and it becomes too easy to stall out.
Strategic Evaluation
Five minutes. That’s it.
In five minutes each day, you can create a systematic habit of evaluation that makes sure tomorrow’s gains get stacked on today’s progress.
You can create a systematic habit of evaluation that provides a backstop to make sure you’re moving towards your big picture dreams and not flailing in twelve different directions.
If you don’t have those five minutes to spare, you’re going to need to reorder your priorities ASAP.
The Ingredients
My personal routine follows a simple framework, called ‘Good, Better, How’.
Good
Write down all the of the wins you had during your session. Our human tendency is to minimize what we did well and instead focus on what we need to improve. Fight that habit, and retrain your mind, by making this the biggest section each time. By actively searching for the moments of quality you had, you teach yourself to be more attuned to when things are going well in the future.
If you find that you have trouble with this section, it’s a sign that you need MORE training here.
Better
Write down ONE aspect of your physical/tactical/mental performance that you could do better in your next session. Make sure that this is future-focused and phrased positively.
The tendency here is to pick anywhere from five to five thousand ways you want to improve. Remember that you can only focus on one thing at a time.
There's almost always one piece of your performance puzzle, that if you improved it, would help a bunch of other parts of your game too. If you need help, ask a coach or teammate for feedback. Whatever your highest point of leverage is - start there.
How
This is the most important part of the process. Here, outline the specific steps you can take (either in between or during your next training session) that will allow you to start getting better.
By making sure you have clear, manageable steps in this last section, you’ve already done a lot of the heavy lifting. Your mind and body will know what to focus on during your next training session or game, and you’ve made it much more likely that you’re going to get better on purpose.
I ask every athlete I work with to make a commitment to strategic evaluation.
