You Don't Need to Reinvent Yourself. You Need a Translator.

One thing I’ve noticed after talking with athletes over the years is how many of us believe we have to become someone new once sport ends.

I understand why.

Life looks different.

The rules change.

The scoreboard disappears.

But I’m not convinced the answer is reinventing ourselves. I think we need to build on the person we’ve already spent years becoming.

Sport shaped us in countless ways, and many of the things it developed in us become tremendous advantages beyond sport. The challenge is learning how to translate what sport built into us so we can apply it in a new environment.

We need a translator.

As athletes, we have years of data about how we perform. We know the types of environments that allowed us to be at our best because sport is one of the few places in life where we receive years of structured feedback about our performance.

Most people have limited experience performing at a high level for extended periods of time while growing up inside an ecosystem intentionally designed to develop that performance. As athletes, we did. That gives us a huge advantage.

But...

The challenge is that all of those experiences happened in one ecosystem, and now we’re trying to figure out how they fit into another.

Sport taught us who we are. It just taught us in a language we’re still learning how to translate.

As athletes, we were put in countless situations that gave us insight into who we are, how we handle challenges, and what we need to perform well. We spent years receiving feedback, reflecting, adjusting, competing, failing, succeeding, and learning. That’s the kind of environment that develops self-awareness and emotional intelligence.

We don’t need to go searching for more data. We need a better way to interpret the clues we’ve already collected.

What we lack now is context and an understanding of how to translate what we learned in sport into this new ecosystem. We’ve spent years inside one operating system and now find ourselves in another with different rules, systems, expectations, and ways of measuring success.

Our challenge isn’t that we don’t know ourselves.

It’s that everything we’ve learned about ourselves was discovered inside the world of sport.

So we assume we have to reinvent ourselves. Figure out who we are outside of sport. Leave our athletic identity behind and become someone completely different.

I’m going to push back on that a little.

You don’t have to reinvent who you are.

You need to learn how to translate what your experiences have been trying to tell you all along.

Side note: This will also help when you try to explain how your previous experience prepared you for a new one. (Pretty sure that’s going to become its own post soon.)

Anyway... where in the world do we start?

Think back to a season where you felt like you were at your best.

What stands out first?

Was it the wins? The relationships with your teammates? The feeling of getting better at something? The challenge of working toward a difficult goal?

I’m sure all of those played a role, but if you really think about it, one of them probably rises to the top.

Because after many conversations with athletes, I’ve realized something.

Not all athletes are motivated the same way. We all stay in sport for different reasons.

We don’t stay in sport because it’s easy. We stay because it gives us something that keeps calling us back.

We sacrifice. We train. We lose. We fail. We get hurt. We question ourselves.

But underneath all of that, sport keeps giving us something that matters deeply to us. The interesting part is that it isn’t always the same thing.

Now think about your current environment.

Does it match the way you’re motivated?Is it tapping into the intrinsic motivator that primarily drives you?Are you in an environment that allows you to perform the way you did in sport?

Do you even know what that environment should look like in this new ecosystem?

Chances are, we don’t.

We just know that something feels off, or we know we’ll be leaving sport soon and are trying to figure out what comes next.

During that process, athletes are often told to “find their passion.”

That can feel like a tremendous amount of pressure because many of us already know what it feels like to be passionate. We experienced it every day in sport. Finding that again can seem daunting, to say the least.

But here’s the thing...

The challenge isn’t finding passion.

It’s understanding what created it.

Before you make your next move; whether it’s your first job, a career change, or simply trying to feel more fulfilled where you are, spend some time studying the environments where you’ve already done your best work.

Sport has already given you years of information about who you are when you’re at your best... and, let’s be honest, when you’re at your worst.

That’s an incredible advantage.

Most people spend years trying to figure out what motivates them.

Athletes have already lived it.

Now we just need to learn how to read it.

Cheering you on, Jill