When your are active in a professional sporting career, you have priorities that optimize your ability to compete. You would have priorities around health, fitness, team and perhaps even money and winning. How you rank your priorities will determine your level of success on and off the field.
Your priorities are determined by your values which act as a sort of rule book for your life. They guide the choices you make and how you spend your time AND your money. As Tony Robbins says, values are “like a compass that direct your life.”
When you retire from sport you need to be pro-active with determining your priorities for your life and business beyond sport. Your success depends on it.
WHOSE RULES ARE YOU PLAYING BY?
A value is simply what is important to you in life or various aspects of life. Values tend to be words or phrases like “love,” “honesty,” “fame,” “financial security,” “living life to the fullest,” “playing 100%” etc. You can have a separate set of values operating within the area of career compared with your relationship values or your broader life values.
The problem for me in my post-volleyball years was that I was still living my life by the same “rule book” I had previous to retiring from sport. It had served me during my sporting career, but it wasn’t what I needed to help me move forward into business or relationship or family, etc.
When I first learned about the impact of values I took an in-depth look at what was in my personal rule book and I saw that “independence” had been at the top of my list for a very long time. The independence helped me to forge ahead with my Olympic dream with or without support but it also got in the way of working effectively with a team, networking, collaborating and even finding a partner to share my life with.
Money or financial reward was far down on the list in terms of my priorities – which explained why I didn’t have much. It was time to change.
If your current values are not serving you and the results you want, then you can take steps to make changes.
This is a big step in my signature Success beyond Sport program – to take on new, positive values and shift those that sabotage your success or drop them altogether. It’s your chance to rewrite your own rules of the game.
How do you want to play out the rest of your life and your career? The first step to change involves awareness.
Identify your current values and see if they will help you get the results you want in your second career beyond sport. Your top 5 values will have the biggest influence on your actions and decisions so determine what they are.
What’s a priority for you? Hardwork or having a good time? Financial security or having flashy cars? Is it more important to be seen to be rich, or to BE rich?
I give these as examples, because you see in the media many athletes going bankrupt post-sport and their value system may be part of the problem.
My life changed when I put higher value on personal growth and continued learning. It opened up my mind, and my life, to professional and personal opportunities.
The biggest change for me came when I placed a higher value on LOVE. That caused me to create time and space for a loved one. I met my now-husband later that year, and we have been married over 4 years. Love continues to have a big influence on my decisions.
What’s influencing your decisions?
“When your values are clear to you, making decisions becomes easier.” ~ Roy E. Disney
