As players competing at Wimbledon enter the tunnel to Centre Court, surely one of the most famous landmarks in all of sport, they pass under two lines from Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “If”.

If you can meet with triumph and disaster

   And treat those two impostors just the same

While there’s no shortage of books, TED Talks, podcasts, and speeches offering up a positive spin on failure (and even calling it an impostor, no doubt), I have yet to come across anything that puts it in the same bucket as success. Now, with any poem we can’t be certain our interpretation captures the intent of the poet, but with Kipling’s famous prose I feel confident in taking my shot.

When he calls triumph an “impostor”, I have to imagine he’s attempting to shed some light on the dangers of success. Again, plenty has been written and spoken about the dangers of failure and not letting it define you, sap your energy, kill your spirit...fill in the blank. But we are in new territory when we consider the dangers of accomplishment:

Beautiful pain. To understand the power and significance of this phrase, we must appreciate the journey that transpired, from beginning to end. Kyle Guy’s basketball career certainly didn’t begin last March, but one can imagine that represented a sort of beginning.

For those unfamiliar with the context, Guy’s University of Virginia entered the 2018 NCAA Tournament as the #1 overall seed out of 68 teams. The #68 seed? The University of Maryland - Baltimore County Retrievers. 135 times, a 1 seed had gone up against a 16 seed. 135 times, a 1 seed had prevailed. But UMBC pulled off an upset of historic proportions -- in the argument for the greatest upset in the history of sport.

PAIN.

Fast forward 386 days. Guy hits 3 free throws with 0.6 seconds left to lift Virginia to an improbable national semifinal victory and then two days later scores 24 points as the Cavaliers win the school’s first ever national title.

BEAUTY.

It’s a journey that begs a powerful question for anyone pursuing mastery in their field: Would this year’s championship have happened without last year’s epic loss? While I realize this is impossible to answer, I believe there’s value in the thought experiment.

A significant challenge in the field of applied sport psychology is taking things that are intangible and making them as tangible as possible. Perhaps the best example of this challenge is confidence -- universally accepted as one of the primary drivers of performance, but difficult to define, measure, and improve.

Is confidence a feeling? A skill? Is it a choice? Or is it possible that it’s the byproduct of feelings, skills, and choices, complicated and multi-layered?

While I can’t give a definitive answer to these questions, I can offer some perspective and practical tips for those who are seeking their next level of performance.

If this post had a subtitle, it would be, "What we can learn from 320-lb men running at full speed." It turns out, we can learn a lot.  

This post is about one of the primary hurdles to peak performance -- uncertainty. When we are faced with uncertainty, which in sport is essentially all the time, we have a few options:

1) Doubt, which leads to hesitation, which makes peak performance nearly impossible.
2) Anxiety/Fear, which looks and sounds like asking a series of "what if?" questions. These questions are distracting at best, and paralyzing at worst.
3) Avoidance of mistakes and failure. The problem here is, playing not to lose is a highly effective strategy for...losing.
4) Lean into the uncertainty. Acknowledge it, accept it, embrace it, let go of the outcome and let it rip.

Consider a familiar scenario: A team dominates the early stages of a competition, jumping out to a big lead - only to watch that lead gradually shrink as the other team makes their comeback. The leaders start to falter and make mistakes while the opponent seizes the momentum and can do no wrong.

What is happening in this scenario? Why does it happen? And why is it so common?
If you’ve ever wondered why it’s easier to play from behind and more difficult to play in the lead, then today is your day.