I have an overarching question in my life and it’s not just one I use when I’m running through one year goal setting.
It’s all the time because human brains are wired for answering questions and the quality of our life is determined by the quality of the questions that we ask ourselves.
I start off with my overarching question; “If I was the gold medallist in what I’m doing right now, what would I do?”
If you’re not an athlete, a good substitute question is; “If I’m the best in the world at what I’m trying to do right now what would I do?”
That’s the question to ask yourself first when you’re on the journey to living a gold medal life.
Following that mindset, I set every goal for my year knowing that it is possible. “If I was best in the world, how would I do this thing?” Because the best in the world never assumes we can’t achieve that.
When something goes wrong, then we just go ‘that way didn’t work’. What’s another way we could do instead? Every problem has a solution.
If we keep asking ourselves ‘what else could go wrong?’, we’ll get the answer. We just might not enjoy the answer.
So, if it’s not working, it doesn’t mean you’re a failure, or something isn’t possible. It’s just we didn’t find the right way yet.
When you think about athletes, they have training once or twice a day, every day for maybe 10 years before getting to their first big competition. If you think about it in terms of failing, then we will be failing at least twice a day, every day for 10 years.
But we weren’t! What we were doing was the reverse. We became champions by learning and finding things that we could improve on, bit by bit.
So when I set a goal I wanted to go to the Paralympics, I only managed that years later. If you look back, you can deconstruct it into little goals backwards.
The takeaway here is that every problem has a solution and setbacks are not failures, they are learning milestones.
So ask yourself that overarching question – “If I’m the best in the world at what I’m trying to do right now what would I do?” It’s the first step to living your gold medal life.
