Cast your mind back to a time where you kept on telling yourself “I must win the game at all costs; I must absolutely win the championship; and you repeated this to yourself thousands of times”
…All you could think about was the goal you set yourself, the victory you so desperately craved.
Perhaps you did this because you were told to keep focusing on your goal. “Never lose sight of it”. “Think about it all the time”
Or perhaps it’s because the fear of not reaching it kept it in your mind all the time.
Either way, did you actually win?
Think about this:
If you wanted to grow an apple tree so you could enjoy harvesting an abundance of delicious apples, you’d plant the apple seed but then you wouldn’t obsessively keep thinking of apples all the time would you?
You’d kind of naturally forget about all the apples you intend to eat and focus instead on agriculture: watering, potassium, selenium, pruning, protecting the tree from frost or insects, weeding and so forth.
And if you did all those correctly and in a timely manner, then you’d most likely eventually get a tree full of delicious apples.
This is called “contextual winning”. Creating the precise context for winning to show up as a consequence of “good husbandry”
So what is the agriculture of your sport relative to the goals and outcomes you desire? Figure that out and focus relentlessly on those activities and the context for successfully carrying out those activities; “forget” for now about the medals or trophies. They will show up in good time if you got the agriculture right.
Apples or gold medals, it’s all about creating the context and conditions for a good harvest!