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Author/Athlete/Professional
Speaker "Think of yourself as an athlete. I guarantee you it will change the way you walk, the way you work, and the decisions you make about leadership, teamwork, and success."- MBN |
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 Introduction
to We Are All Athletes I am an athlete. I competed in my first swimming meet at age six; played backyard baseball with big brother Pete until Little League said "no girls"; lettered in five sports (lacrosse, field hockey, tennis, volleyball, and the best sport -- basketball) in two high schools; starred as the leading scorer and rebounder on the Stanford basketball team all four years; then played in France and also in the first US women's pro basketball league, which I now think of as the L.N.E.H. -- the League Nobody's Ever Heard of. Later I played water polo in an all-men-except-Mariah league and rowed on the Potomac River. Now I play golf every chance I get, ride my bike around town, lift weights, and swim two miles most mornings, waking at 5:20 to immerse myself in that watery world where I first learned to love my long, strong body, and where I first learned to appreciate the unparalleled ecstasy of physical exertion. Even if I awaken some day and find myself too sick or disabled to move, I'll still be an athlete. It's part of my identity, as essential and cherished as "woman" and "writer." It's an attitude that affects everything I do: how I walk, how I eat, how I rest, how I respond to invitations to try new things, how I discipline myself to sit at my desk and write, how I kid around with colleagues and friends, how I encourage any and all "teammates," how I ask for advice from "coaches," how I pursue my writing, speaking, and business goals, and how I celebrate success. It's a way of life that lifts me and carries me through each day, even those days filled with disappointments and defeats. There's something about swimming faster today than yesterday, something about summoning the nerve to do a flip off the diving board, something about rowing in perfect harmony with seven other people, that leads one to believe she is capable of anything. Everything I know about goals, discipline, teamwork, leadership, and competition, I first learned on the basketball courts, on the tennis courts, in pools and rivers and oceans. These lessons are available to all of us. The dictionary defines "athlete" as "one who is trained or skilled in exercises, sports, or games requiring physical strength, agility or stamina." People generally use the word to refer to those who compete in sports, and who are fairly successful at it. I want to broaden the definition. I want us to think of "athletes" as people who make a lifelong commitment to implementing athletic essentials in everyday life. What matters in this context is not so much physical strength, agility, or stamina, but an athletic mentality: emotional strength, agility, and stamina. The "exercises, sports, and games" might be traditional ones: badminton, triathlon, hockey, scuba diving, surfing, volleyball. Or they might be the kinds of exercises, sports, and games that take place on a construction site, in a realtor's office, in a nursing home, in a law firm, or on Wall Street. By my definition, regardless of how physically fit you are, and regardless of what kinds of sports or games you play or don't play, you're an athlete if you apply athletic essentials to your life. Really? Doesn't an "athlete" need to actually play sports? Can you be an athlete and also a couch potato? Here's the beauty of this proposition: If you think of yourself as an athlete, you begin to have experiences that reinforce that identity. "We are who we are because of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves," wrote Tom Spanbauer in The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon. If you tell yourself an "I am a klutz" story, for instance, you'll keep bumping into things. No surprise there. If, on the other hand, you're willing to declare "I am an athlete," even for a little while, you'll notice a change in how you see the world and how you move through it. You'll start feeling excited, rather than scared, when someone challenges you to a contest. You'll understand that no one wins all the time, and that being "good" isn't half as important as being there, eager to learn and enjoy. Your relationship with your body will change. Perhaps your posture will be the first transformation. Then your expectations. When you think of yourself as an athlete, it might begin to seem perfectly normal -- imperative, even -- to devote time each day to physical fitness. After all, that's what athletes do. You'll begin to make more conscious choices about nutrition, stretching, strengthening, resting. You'll begin to feel competent to join a yoga class or bowling league or neighborhood Ping-Pong game -- even if you don't win, even if you weigh more than you should, even if you're too embarrassed to say "I am an athlete" out loud. Over time, you might even become someone who is "trained or skilled in exercises, sports, or games requiring physical strength, agility or stamina." (See "K is for Knowledge" and "S is for Strength.") But this is not really a book about joining a gym or starting a walking program. This is a book about how to approach life with an athletic sense of purpose, power, and possibility. It's about bringing athletic discipline, humility, and integrity into your everyday life. It's about claiming -- or, for starters, simply trying on -- an athletic identity, the way one might start to think of oneself as a singer, artist, healer, or smart, good, or loving person. "Athlete" is a useful, empowering identity. I know that not only because of my own experience, but because of feedback I receive from thousands of audience members who have heard me share this message. Exactly how that athletic mentality changes individuals -- our perspective, our behavior, and perhaps also our bodies -- is up to each of us. The essentials En route to lacrosse, field hockey, and basketball games while attending Shady Grove Junior High in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, my teammates and I would sing on the bus. In this way, we amused ourselves on long rides all over eastern Pennsylvania, psyched ourselves up for games, and simply enjoyed being together. One of our standards was a chant: "S-U-C-C-E-S-S. That's the way you spell success!" As a young writer, I took that more literally than most. Okay, so that's how you spell it, I thought, taking mental notes on those two "c's" and two final "s's." Having chanted it for hours, I felt confident I'd never spell it wrong. But I also asked myself, even then, sitting on that yellow school bus, how do you "spell" success? I now believe that, just as a writer needs twenty-six letters of the alphabet, we need twenty-six athletic essentials to excel in everyday life. "Essential" means "so important as to be indispensable." These A to Z essentials are time-tested athletic methods for achieving peak performance. Here's my promise: athletic essentials can help any person achieve success in any field: sports, media, politics, law, science, service, sales, entertainment, government, medicine, religion, teaching, trades, training, and more. Once you master them, you can spell success any way you wish. Ten questions Like athletes, all of us are playing a game with a clock. One day, our game will be over. The clock will stop. The lights will be turned off. Everyone will go home. Exactly how much time do we have left in the game of our lives? We don't have control over that. We do have control over how we will play that game: how much joy and enthusiasm we will bring to the experience, what rules we will play by, and how we will treat our teammates, opponents, and fans. Like athletes, all of us have bodies that need care and attention. We all have physical, intellectual, emotional, or spiritual dreams and goals. We all face situations in which we are tested. And we are all role models and leaders, whether we know it or not. Here are ten questions to ask yourself about your game of life:
How to use this book Throughout this book, you will be asked to think of yourself as an athlete, and to decide for yourself how to spend these precious moments that are still left in your game of life. You will be asked to define for yourself what your goals are, who your teammates are, who your opponents are, how you want to relate to your body, what rules you're choosing to play by, and how you will keep score and measure success. At the end of each chapter, you'll find a "Time Out for Reflection" section, where you'll be asked questions that will help you create a game plan for success. All of the questions, stories, and quotes in the book are designed to help you maximize your performance -- and maximize your enjoyment of the game of life. This book can be read by individuals, of course. It can also be used in a structured setting, as part of a leadership development program for professionals, athletes, students, or others who want to enhance their leadership skills. Each of the 26 chapters focuses on one quality essential not only to athletic success, but to success as a responsible mentor, teacher, manager, executive, or student leader. Learning to think like and act like an athlete is one way to think like and act like a leader. Few of us think of ourselves as athletes. Even those who claim that identity often fail to bring those essentials into classrooms, emergency rooms, board rooms, boiler rooms, or rooms full of dinner guests. If you already think of yourself as an athlete, this book will remind you what you have learned on the playing fields, and will show you how to apply these skills and concepts to anything you do. If you do not think of yourself as an athlete, it's not too late to start. But if "athlete" still seems too wildly divergent from your self-perception, that's okay, too. Read on. Even if you were picked last for teams, even if you feel uncoordinated or out of shape, even if you're not particularly interested in your own physical potential, try integrating these 26 athletic essentials into your life on a daily basis. Before long, you'll be experiencing life as an athlete, behaving as an athlete -- and having that much fun ***. What happens next in We Are All Athletes? 26 short, inspirational chapters, including: A is for Athlete and much more!
To contact Mariah about her presentations, call 703/276-8323 or write to her at Mariah@MariahBurtonNelson.com Home ©
2000-2002 Mariah Burton Nelson 2002
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