Hello, and welcome back to Brain in the Game. Brain in the Game is a podcast that's been specifically designed for athletes, coaches, and parents who are out there looking to do their sport just that little bit smarter. Brain in the Game makes you think, even if you think you don't need to. And I'm your host, Dave Diggle.
In this episode 54, I'm going to ask you a question. How do you gauge success? So let's get into that this week, and we're going to ask that question, and we're going to unpack what happens when people gauge their successes. I was listening to a lecture recently, and the professor turned around and made a comment that made me think. The comment was, you can gauge a man's success by the number of coins he has in his pocket. Now, this pulled me up really quickly because I thought, you know what? I don't ever have any money in my pocket. I never carry cash, much to the dismay of my family, I only ever use my cards. So does that mean I'm not successful? I thought it's an interesting question. His perception of success was the amount of money you have available to you in your pocket at any one given time.
That evening, I went out and I had dinner with some close friends of mine. We gather together around about once a month, and we traditionally just reminisce about the old days. We're all ex-athletes, either coaches or ex-coaches. We're now business owners, or we work for other people in government departments or for ourselves in private enterprise. And we get together and we just talk about different coaching, different sports around the world, and we just have a really cool time. This night, I sat down and I tried to ask them what their thoughts were and ask them what their take on success is. So I told them about my experience with this professor. I told him a lecture I was in and asked them what they thought, what their initial reaction was to that statement. And there was so many different responses. Everybody in the room had a different gauge on what they thought success was. One guy jumped up and said, it's the amount of free time you have. Not for me. I have very little free time. I'm quite a busy person. Does that mean I'm not successful? Another one turn around and said, the size of your house, which I just equate to the size of the mortgage.
One said, the car you drive for me, I mean, I drive a really nice car, but my gauge on where I live, I live at the beach in Australia as opposed to where I grew up, which is in Harlow in England, very different places. So does that mean I am successful? I'm not successful. Another one turned happiness. And I thought, how on earth do you gauge happiness? There was peer acknowledgement, there's social acceptance. Again, these are things that I don't tend to follow the herd. So again, does that mean I'm not a successful person? And the amount of holidays, these were some of the things that everyone threw out and in their mind was clearly an important thing. They all believed what they said to me. They all believed that these were clear gauges on success. Of course, everybody turned around and talked about money. We have a social understanding of what a gauge of successes and it normally is the things that we accumulate which in reality terms maybe isn't the best gauge. Again, if you live somewhere where the cost of living is quite low, then you would have more accumulative things. If you live here in Sydney and Australia, the cost of living is quite high.
However, doesn't mean I'm less or more successful. It was clear that there was no one answer for here. Everybody had their own individual interpretations and they were all very willing to throw them in. And I'm assuming it's because it gauges their own successes. So I then sat down with the group and I said, look, I want to tell you about my week last week. I had three major clients I worked with that week. One of them was going for a world attempt, a world title attempt. One of them was going for a national title, one that they had been trying to get for many years and always fallen one place short. They always come second. And one was a young athlete who was trying to overcome her fear of a skill. At the end of the week, the world title was won, my client became the world champion, the national championships was decided, my client became national champion. And this young athlete had overcome her fear of this specific skill. So my point is, which one was more successful? And I'm sure the number of people sitting listening to this podcast would all have a very different take on what their gauge of success was.
As was everybody in that room. Some turned round and said, of course, the one who is a world champion because they are the best in the world. Another one turned around and said, the one who became national champion because they just kept at it. They had been striving for that for years and years and years and they became the national champion. Another turned around and said, of course, the little girl who had overcome her own adversity and overcome that skill that had just been holding her back for so long. So what is your take? Ask yourself which one would you crown the most successful in that week? So it is clear there is no one currency for success. Everybody has a different take on it. Everybody has a different gauge on what they class as being successful. We know our confidence. It's the number one ingredient athletes assign to being able to be able to compete and to perform the way they want to perform. They talk about confidence as though it's the currency of any athlete. And we also know that confidence is just a history of success. So if we don't know what constitutes success, then we impact our ability to be confident, surely.
So our gauge on success has more to do with us just crowning ourselves at the end of an objective. It has a lot to do with how we approach things, has an awful lot to do with our emotional association and take on certain things. So if we want to be confident in what we do, we need to gauge our success. If we want to progress, great traction and momentum, then we've got to understand success. But if we have no one currency for success, then how do we do that efficiently and effectively? And that's what we're going to talk about. So success can be a multiple different things. We can look at success as a tangible place that we get to or a thing that we achieve. Or we can look at it from a chemical perspective, which is the serotonin and dopamine. They both are interlinked. When I talk to athletes about gauging success, one of the things that I want them to be able to do is create so many touch points that create an understanding of what success is and achievement of that success. Because success is incredibly important to us to be able to create momentum and traction.
We want to create that understanding that once we do something, we're going to want to do it again. It's going to give us something in return. And that's what success does. That's what makes us feel good. It makes us want to go out and do it. It makes us socially feel as though we've achieved something within our group dynamic. All of these things are important and incredibly usable for us as a coach and as an athlete. So when I'm working with an athlete, one of the first things we sit down and talk about is what's my big objective? How do I then get to that objective? And those of you who have listened to my podcast in the past know that we work backwards, we work all the way back. So we not only have stepping stones to get there, we then embed the action steps. What do I need to do to go from this step to that step? But we also embed rewards. Now, those rewards are not there just to make it feel cool and exciting that we are going to do that. They're there for a purpose. They're there to add the instructoral integrity to the process, to create the fuel to keep us on our journey.
When we talk about rewards, we're talking about that instant acknowledgment of success being, I achieve something, this should make me feel good. That serotonin in the body that makes us go, wow, that was awesome. We then add dopamine to the equation, which makes us go, you know what, I want that again. I anticipate that's going to be great next time. So these being embedded within our decision matrix, which is what we use to build to an objective, are designed specifically to create momentum, to create that sense of success, that reward that makes me feel great and that anticipation. If I do this again, I'll get that same kind of acknowledgment and sense of success buzz. So how do we do that? We need to understand what our objective is. We need to be clear, concise and decisive on that's exactly what I want. And then, obviously, because we're talking about once, we need to talk about the why. Why do we want it? What's our emotional buy in to that, to get that for us? How does me achieving that equate to the next step or becoming what we want to become, or achieving that end goal that we set ourselves?
Why is it important? What does it give us? What does it enable us to do? That's all the parts of the fuel that we need to create movement. We also need to know exactly when do we achieve it? If we get to a point, how do we know we've got it? What's that tipping point between almost having it and having it? So we need to be very clear about the final step. Once we achieve this, it means that we've achieved that successfully. So the clarity on that tipping point is imperative to us to be able to create that sense of achievement. We've talked about rewards and the size of the reward doesn't equate always to the size of the achievement. I often tell my clients that I've got a bucket full of medals under my bed that mean absolutely nothing to me other than I can go through them and I can look at them and go, yeah, I remember winning that one, or I remember coming second there, or whatever the metal is. However, there are times in my life where people have said specific things to me about my achievements, that I remember where I was, what was happening, what they were wearing, what I was wearing, what was going on in the crowd, who was on the TV, whatever it was at the time.
So those things mean more to me than the hunk of a metal. So it's a recognition of what that specific reward is and what reward makes you feel better. Is it acknowledgment? Is it in the middle. I also had a client I was working with and we did the Decision Matrix. And I turn around, I'm talking about rewards, and he's gone, Dave, I don't think I need to buy any more TVs. In his mind, the whole success was okay. Every time I win something or I get into one of these steps in my objective, you know what, I'm going to buy myself a new TV. And he'd gone out and he bought a couple of TVs. And in his mind, that was what his idea of success was, being able to reward himself with some big plasma. We want to become those success junkies, and in order to do that, we want to embed the amount of dopamine in our brain that makes us go, wow, that was awesome. And I look forward to the next one and I know the next time it's going to be even better because I'm going to go real hard, I'm going to achieve even more.
So that sense of success is going to be even greater. So what do we get from this? We recognise that success isn't a generic one size fits all for everybody. Success is unique to us. It's as individual to us as the objective is. We also know that success can only be gauged when we know we've actually achieved it. Not when we're in the ballpark, not when we're almost there. It's that tipping point. When we get it, we go, that's it. It's mine. I own it. And we also know that the reward process plays a massive part to wanting to not only to achieve, but then create more achievements. So we create traction and momentum forwards. So let's come back to the original question, which was, how do you gauge? Success is such an individual thing. For me, in what I do today, it's about supplying the environment and the lifestyle. For my family, it's about living in an awesome place. We live right by the beach, and it's about being able to do my job and do what I love doing and helping other people achieve their outcomes. So when I look at that week where we had a world champion, we had a national champion and we had an individual and overcame a fear, they're successful, all of them.
In my mind, in what I do with them, they were all successful and equally successful. So ask yourself, what's your gauge on success? What is success mean to you? How do you gauge it and do you use it? Do you use it to use momentum forward for the next success? Or do you just avoid it and go, yeah, I'm here, what's next objective? And you don't reward yourself, because if that happens, you'll get to a point where your brain will go, man, this is a lot of hard work. Why on earth would I want to continue to do all this hard work when I don't get acknowledged? So set objectives, set goals along the way. Reward those goals. And when you reward those goals, we create traction forwards. Hope you've enjoyed this episode of Brain in the Game and giving you something different to think about until the next episode, train smart and enjoy the ride. My name's Dave Diggle, and I'm the mind coach.
