Chasing Excellence

Chasing Excellence breaks down how world-class athletes achieve the mental strength they need to succeed, highlighting the steps required to achieve toughness, build resilience, and always push your limits for a purpose.

Athletes are some of the most committed people in the world. They train tirelessly, push their bodies to the absolute limit, and don’t allow anything or anyone to stand in their way. But how do they do it? What makes them so different from us? And how can we start to apply their principles to our own lives?

The book states that passion is the essential ingredient for being committed to your work, mastering a job, and coming out ahead—even when the odds aren’t exactly in your favour. Passion gives you the energy to keep pushing when things aren’t all pink and fun anymore.

However, there’s another major component of your success recipe along with talent or passion. Consistency in your hard work is what will get you to the top and help you get past troubled times. Being consistent is more of a mind game than anything else because it requires willpower to sustain.

Motivation is what will get you out of the bed, but consistency and habit will get you through the entire day – and in the long run, that’s what builds a career. For top athletes, consistent training, mental strength, and resilience – are all key ingredients to the secret sauce, and they’re not easy to get across.

In the world of athletics, mistakes happen. A lot. And when they do, athletes have to be able to move on quickly, or else they’ll never get anywhere. To do this, they use a mindset that’s rooted in stoicism: they focus only on what they can control, and try to let go of what they can’t. The author, which is a professional coach, tells his athletes to never spend more than five minutes on upsetting mistakes; instead, he advises them to practice breathwork to calm themselves down and keep their focus on the game. People often get so focused on their performance that they get overwhelmed by mistakes. But there are ways to stay calm, and even thrive off of mistakes! When you’re playing a sport, it’s easy to get caught up in the outcome of each game. You want to win and you want to do well. But when you’re playing, there are things that are out of your control. Things like the weather, how well your teammates play, and what other teams around the league are doing, they’re all in the background of their minds stealing their focus. So how do athletes stay focused on what they can control? It’s simple – they narrow…