What Our Sporting Heroes Can Teach Us About Winning

Recruitment careers, much like sporting careers, have triumphs and tragedies, good days and bad.  There are periods where your work life seems charmed, yet times where your recruitment career appears as if it has plateaued, is having a bad run, or has even gone downhill over time.

Most sporting stars can identify with this rocky road, as their paths to sporting greatness are rarely smooth – perhaps because of injury, perhaps because of a mental block or personal issue, perhaps because someone ‘better’ came along and bumped them from the top spot or team.

Yet the true champions, those that become sporting heroes remembered for generations, have something different about them. What is it that separates them from the ‘almost-ran’, from the rest of the pack? Is it sheer natural ability?

You might think so, yet the sporting world is littered with examples of those who showed exceptional talent, yet faltered and fell when things went wrong for them. The tennis players who choked under pressure in the final set, or footballers who didn’t bounce back from injury despite having a clean bill of health.  The cricketers that couldn’t bear criticism so stopped improving, or the rising stars that thought they didn’t need to train or show effort so fell behind in fitness and new techniques.

So what really separates the champions from the rest? And what can we, as recruitment consultants, learn from the leaders of the pack?

The path to success – either in sport or career- is not so much about natural ability, but more in how you think.

Success comes from:

1. Mental toughness. Learning to thrive when the pressure is on, and getting back up and fighting on when the odds are stacked against you.

2. Learning from recent failures and then moving on. Success comes from breaking negative thinking habits- that horrible loop where it seems that your past mistakes have somehow tainted future projects and you become fearful of taking steps forward.

3. Intense training and preparation– Success comes from preparing well for that new business pitch or using your training to know exactly how to act when a candidate is not working out.

4. Feeling the fear, and doing it anyway. Like sport, the recruitment game is often high pressure. So learn from your sporting heroes about recognising those butterflies, that tightness in your chest, and turning it into adrenaline.

Yes, easier said than done. So how do you learn this mental toughness and ability to bounce back from defeat? The key is in cultivating a ‘growth mindset’, rather than a ‘fixed mindset’.

Research by Psychology Professor Carol Dweck has shown that both on the sporting field and off, that those who exhibit growth mindsets have ‘the mindset of a champion’.

Fixed mindsets

People with fixed mindsets believe that  abilities are natural, or ‘God-given’, and that they can’t be improved with effort or training. Fixed mindsets generally struggle with criticism and often hide their failures- because they believe their natural stock of talent is all they have and cannot be improved upon. Criticism is then perceived as someone pointing out a ‘fatal flaw’. Fixed mindsets will often avoid learning opportunities in case it reveals something they are not naturally good at.

Growth mindsets

Growth mindsets, on the other hand, believe skills can improve with learning and perseverance, and perceive effort as important and failures as opportunities to get better. Over time, the fixed mindset ‘stars’ often fade as they resist learning opportunities, and are often overtaken by those with growth mindsets- who may in fact have less  natural talent, but kept on applying themselves.

All of these things, of course, can be applied to our working life. From the floodlit stadiums to the office cubicle, the path to winning consistently and bouncing back from failure is the same. The key lies in having a growth mindset.

Do you have a fixed mindset or a growth mindset?  The good news is that if you have a fixed mindset, you can change it, through viewing each hiccup in life and work as an opportunity to grow.

Our working life is often a rollercoaster, and you certainly can’t control all variables. All you can do is make yourself tough enough to learn to roll with the punches and keep on winning.

Until next time,

Cheryl