If you follow high-performance sports competitions, such as the Olympic Games, you must have noticed that, in order to become Olympic athletes , those people needed a lot of skills. After all, it is not that simple to break records, stand out and qualify for an event of this magnitude.
Becoming an Olympic athlete requires a series of essential skills. However, did you know that these skills are not limited to athletes? We are talking about many “skills” that make a difference in any and all professional journeys.
So, as much as they make a huge difference for those who compete at a high level, they will also impact your career. This is regardless of your field, profession and ambitions for the future. In short, if you want to be a well-positioned and capable professional, it is worth taking inspiration from athletes to work on your personal development and achieve professional success.
So, to help you, we have listed the main skills that will help you in this process. After learning them, you will watch the Olympics with different eyes.
6 Skills of Olympic Athletes to Inspire You
1 – Self-knowledge
First of all, conscious success requires a lot of self-knowledge. For example, today’s high-performance athletes are children who one day realized they had a talent for sports, or started practicing sports as a hobby, and identified potential for a career.
Likewise, as a professional, you need to know yourself and identify your talents, interests, strengths, areas for improvement, and goals for the future. Without this, you may get lost and never reach your true potential. After all, how can you be successful in your career in something you don’t know what it is?
2 – Dedication and focus on the objective
The road to the Olympic Games can be quite long. Many athletes start their sports careers as children, and little by little, they start training, start competing, and grow and develop as the years go by. However, this is only possible with a lot of dedication and focus on the goal.
Sporting success is only achieved in the long term, since overcoming obstacles is constant and requires overcoming several barriers. Therefore, there is no “Olympic dream” that can survive athletes who are not dedicated and do not have a focus on the final goal. Dedicating yourself every day and knowing what you want are two important keys to a professional career, both inside and outside the Olympics.
3 – Discipline
So how do you stay dedicated and focused? The answer lies in one simple word, which is another valuable skill for all professions: discipline.
We won’t always be motivated and willing to learn more, train, overcome our limits and reach a new level of personal and professional development. However, with discipline, everything becomes simpler. Because it reminds us, every day, that the process is long, and only by following the planned steps will we achieve professional success.
4 – Emotional intelligence for adversity
Have you ever stopped to think that in sports, there is always one athlete or team that will win, and dozens of others that will invariably lose? Competitions are exciting and interesting because of the spirit of overcoming and the pursuit of victory. However, they also have the side of those who will come out without the victory, which will happen hundreds of times with all high-performance athletes.
This generates enormous pressure and emotional tension in athletes, who need a lot of mental preparation and emotional intelligence to deal with moments of defeat and frustration, which are inevitable.
In your professional life, it is likely that moments of “defeat” will not be that frequent. However, developing the same emotional intelligence as athletes will help you a lot to deal with adverse situations, negative scenarios and even more complex periods, such as job placement.
5 – Resilience
In fact, emotional intelligence is not the only fundamental factor for an Olympic athlete. Along with it, it is essential to have a lot of resilience. In short, it is the ability to resist problems and not give up. This is the core of all high-impact activities.
All athletes go through periods of growth, injuries, difficult situations, periods of impaired performance, and so on. So, if under normal circumstances dealing with the constant possibility of losing is difficult enough, just imagine when the tide is not in your favor?
So, add resilience to your list of soft skills to develop. You will see how your way of seeing work and personal development will change, making your personality a little more “Olympian”.
6 – Patience
Finally, having patience is good for all human beings, in any situation. After all, few things in life will happen the way we want and when we want them to. In general, we go through some frustrations and processes until we reach success.
No journey is simple or short. They all require a lot of patience to go through all the situations we mentioned above, whether it’s to reach the highest place on the podium at the Olympic Games, or to reach the level you want in your corporate career.