I hope you had the chance to watch last week’s college football National Championship between Alabama and Clemson, but not for the reason you might imagine. As a fan I was as thrilled as anyone to watch the two best teams in the country go back and forth, with the game coming down to the final seconds. But that’s not what is still with me a week later. 

I still have Clemson coach Dabo Swinney’s post-game words ringing in my ears: “I told my guys tonight, that the difference in the game was gonna be love...tonight, we’re gonna win it because we love each other.”

You didn't have to be a baseball fan to appreciate and enjoy the epic World Series Game 7 between Chicago and Cleveland. Two teams with tortured fan bases going back and forth, with players from both teams stepping up in the most pressure-packed moments and delivering performances that will be talked about for years to come. A perfect example of why sport is so compelling. 

With the Cubs ending a World Series championship drought of 108 years, we would be wise to dive into how they did it. And the way they did it starts with their manager, Joe Maddon. I offer up three lessons taken from Maddon's mantras: 

Regardless of your sport or the level you are competing (or coaching), there is one thing we are all in search of - the next level in performance. Performance is the bottom line. So I'm hoping that title catches your eye.

Attention is the currency of performance. For the athletes I work with we are constantly looking back at previous performances, and the clues to what led to a certain result are found in where attention was directed. 

I want to make one distinction - attention is not thought. Attention is where you choose to place your focus. Sometimes that may be on your thoughts, but at other times your attention will be directed to how you feel, what an opponent is doing, what happened last hole/play/game, etc. Think of attention as a spotlight shining on where you choose to focus.

So with that in mind, here are some ways to practically apply your new knowledge:

Our answer to this question plays a critical role in determining how close we get to reaching our potential, both on and off the field. If we understand failure only as a noun - a thing that happens to us or, even worse, a defining characteristic of who we are - then failure is something to be feared. Those who attach fear to failure will avoid taking meaningful risks, and as a result their growth will always be stifled.

The most powerful way we can understand failure is as a verb and not a noun. Failure is an action word - it involves doing, trying, making mistakes, learning and persevering. It's this process that gets repeated over and over leading to incremental growth, that makes it possible for us to reach the outer edges of our abilities. Simply making this shift in mindset can have a profound impact on our performance.

If you want to take the next step toward your goals, or you are simply looking for a competitive edge, then you would do well to change the way you define, view, and respond to failure. So let's take a quick look at those three keys when it comes to failure:

The most common challenge I help people address, across every sport, is the difficulty transferring skills from practice to competition.

For some it's a complete mystery: How can I hit everything perfectly on the practice range and then fall apart on the course?  How can I be so comfortable in practice and so uncomfortable when it comes time to compete on a bigger stage?  What is so different? 

The answer to these complex questions is a simple word – noise.  The difference between practice and competition is the mental and physical “noise” associated with performing when it matters most. 
 
To keep the analogy going, as athletes what we’re really after is the signal.  The signal is your purpose, your process, your execution.  So just like most things when it comes to the mental game, this is simple…but not easy.  It’s as simple as focusing on the execution of the task at hand, but it’s not easy due to the noise involved when we move from training to competing.