The journey has begun … (Beach Flags – Part 4)
You will recall that a friend of mine who had read my book, wanted some more information and examples of how I actually goal-set and go about following my dreams and achieving my goals. To do this I used as the example my latest goal – to become World Champion in beach flags as a perfect example of this. Here is the 4th instalment of my journey to become World Champion and links to the three previous posts.
http://www.jeremyrolleston.com/the-journey-has-begun-beach-flags-part-1/
http://www.jeremyrolleston.com/the-journey-has-begun-beach-flags-part-2/
http://www.jeremyrolleston.com/the-journey-has-begun-beach-flags-part-3/
You may recall that I went into my first Australian Championships after three months in the sport with no real expectations – more to perform to the best of my ability and see what happens. Well … I won silver and it gave me a taste for more. So the focus turned to Australian Championships a year later and then the World Championships six months after that. Here’s some of the things around my goal-setting that I did in that 12-18 months.
Continue to make the vision big, exciting and motivating – I already had the dream and was motivated towards it. But redoing my vision board, having it on the wall in my room, and seeing it all the time is always very powerful. Vision boards are a powerful tool to make that dream come alive (Read more about this in my book A Life That Counts). You need to see it, before you can believe it, before you can achieve it. Sounds cliche doesn’t it. But it’s true.
Belief – I’d now had a taste of it and knew I could do it. If I could come second in the Australian titles after 3 months, then with a concerted focus, with a good training base, and with time to learn and improve in flags … I knew I could win if things went right. But to develop a deep unshakeable belief, I developed a visualisation CD with Craig Townsend whom I have worked with before. (If you want to know more on this I also talk about visualisation and hypnosis/visualisation CDs in my book A Life That Counts).
Reset my goals for the upcoming year – basically I needed to be fitter, faster, stronger, and lose some weight (to improve my power to weight). That meant reassessing, critiquing and resetting my goals. (That’s the thing most people don’t realise – goal-setting is not a once off thing – it’s a dynamic process. You’re always looking at them and writing new little milestone goals along the way – even while the big goal remains unchanged).
Improve my nutrition – my training was good and always has been. But now my eating needed to be equally good. And for me this was haaaarrd – I have a sweet tooth like no other! During my bobsleigh and rugby days I could get away with it as I needed to be big and strong. But now I couldn’t hide these bad habits – well not if I wanted to be lean for beach flags!
Training – this is pretty obvious isn’t it. But I needed to do two things. Firstly, I had to do more specific flags training as technique is so important in this sport. And second, I needed to learn from the best. So in the last 6 months before World titles I committed to flying up to the Gold Coast and training with Australian flags legend (9 times Australian champion and four-time World Champion – Simon Harris). And of course, there’s no substitute for hard work!
Competitions – practice makes perfect. I went in all the competitions I could. And thank goodness I did as I made many mistakes – from false-starting and being disqualified. To tripping. To missing the flag when I dived for it. To being too tense and that affecting my get-up. To realising I wasn’t fit enough. To not having peripheral vision to see what other people were doing. I had some success and won branch titles and State championships.
Preparation and focus – for me the goal was winning that World title. So training was a chance to try some things out and Australian Championships was a dress rehearsal and a good opportunity to try everything out in competition. Then I’d either replicate what I did or take the learnings from it and make improvements. In particular that mean getting organised about the gear I took onto the beach for the various events (as you’re on the beach for a lot of the day and need to have clothes to warm up in, feel relaxed in, be warm in, be protected from the sun in). It also meant getting organised about my food and what I would eat in the morning, as well as throughout the day.
Australian Titles – I flew over to Perth in April to compete in Australian Championships and unfortunately didn’t get the result I wanted. I was bumped out in the final flag and ended up with silver. What it did do though – was flame that fire inside me for that original goal – to win that world title in six months time in France. There was lots of work to do. I now had a good base to work off, but I was going to be faster, stronger, technically better at flags, really lean and ready !
Stay tuned for the final chapter – World Championships
