Blog / Time Management
Bill Sweetenham, Preparing for Success
People performance specialist Bill Sweetenham, is one of Australia’s most successful swimming coaches. Bill has trained some of Australia’s and the world’s most outstanding swimmers to Olympic success and is now one of the world’s leading experts on coaching people to perform to the max.
Bill knows what it takes to prepare for and perform at the greatest show in the world – the Olympics. He knows what it takes to achieve in and out of the pool. Bill knows that success is all about anticipation and preparation.
He said, “The Olympics is the end of the line, it’s the pinnacle for us in sport. If you as a coach or an athlete or any team member haven’t prepared for that second day in the Olympic Village, when all the questions and doubts come pounding around your head and throat, if you haven’t been invincible in your preparation, if your preparation hasn’t been above what you’re prepared to do in the Olympic race, failure is all but certainly guaranteed.”
Be the best prepared person in the game
Bill knows that winging it doesn’t cut it. He knows that having a natural ability or skill isn’t enough either. He thinks that great athletes make success look easy. But it’s never easy. “It’s only easy because their preparation is clinical, it’s precise, it’s rehearsal and rehearsal and then more rehearsal. You don’t have to be the best person in the game but you’ve got to be the best prepared person in the game.”
Believing that great achievement and great success come to people who are predatory in their ability to seize the moment and take advantage of opportunity, Bill added that, “The only way you can do that is to be the best prepared athlete, coach or team in the game.” He said, “You have to be superior in your preparation to every other athlete or team that you’re coming up against. If you can be superior in preparation that develops a self confidence, self belief and personal pride.”
Bill sees personal pride as a great motivator. As he explained, “If you’ve done things that other people have only thought about, they haven’t really dotted their I’s or crossed their T’s, you will then have the ability to convert the nerves - and everybody’s going to get nerves under that sort of spotlight - into excitement,” adding that excitement counters nerves and allows greatness to be achieved. “Flawless preparation allows the athlete the ability to initially get nerves but very quickly convert them to excitement of the challenge. And that’s why you have gladiators in sport who can stand up and know that they’ve done the preparation, everything that can possibly be done has been done.” Preparation brings freedom. It enables elite athletes to switch onto automatic pilot to do all the little things right without thinking about them.
Believe that you can be the best
In addition to preparation, Bill also thinks self-belief is critical. He said, “You have to have great self belief that you can be the best but never, ever believe you are the best. I think the opportunity to be the best is always there. Juan Fangio, a great Formula One driver always said, ‘Never believe you are the best; always believe you can be the best’.”
Practice performing under pressure
A final crucial element for success Bill believes is for athletes to be comfortable with the fact that success means that they have to learn to deal with pressure and high-stakes/abnormal environments.
He explained, “I remember my first time at the Olympic Games when I walked into the arena and a thought hit me. I was aware - acutely aware - that the presence of abnormal was there and there was a lack of normal.” Time and time again, Bill has seen that success will come down to an athlete’s ability to deal with the presence of the abnormal.
Bill has a particular approach that helps athletes become comfortable with the abnormal: he schedules performance days. A performance day may be a particular swim meet, or an exam or a driving test – essentially anything that is a challenge.
“Performance day happens once a week where the athlete picks a day of the week. They get up early in the morning, do some stretching, they have a checklist and they get ready for their perfect performance,” he explained. “Whatever the performance is, they have a strategy to prepare their mind first and their body second for a performance.
“If that’s rehearsed on a weekly basis it means that it becomes very much the brain leading the body rather than the body trying to lead the brain. So that’s a strategy that I put in place for every young person that I deal with.
It’s a lifestyle of habits that has to be put in place very early in an athlete or a young person’s life so that they are conditioned to being under pressure. They are conditioned to accepting and acknowledging that pressure’s going to come with any performance and therefore they can do it better.”
Bill has learnt that top performers have to become comfortable with stress. He said, “Performance is a lifestyle and the facts are that one of the things that is not going to decrease in our life, for young people as it goes forward is stress, in all forms.” Bill is emphatic that “If you only prepare a young person for physical stress in sport you do them a great disservice. You have to prepare them for the emotional stress that will come from dealing with parents, school teachers, other students, the environment and then you have mental stress that will come from the self inflicted pressure that they put on themselves, their self expectation.”
Success is something that you can train for. Pressure is something you have to master. Sage advice from one of the world’s greatest coaches.
Update:
Bill attended the Olympics, and also participated in the Global Coaches House event hosted by the International Council for Coaching Excellence as part of the official program of the 2012 Olympic Games. Please see: www.globalcoacheshouse.net/ He also interviewed international expert, Professor Vin Walsh, from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University College London.
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