Principle 3: Expect to Win!

Champions expect to win.

Michael Johnson, the great 200m and 400m Olympic Champion, a 4-time Olympic Gold Medalist and 8-time World Champion, used to wear specially made gold shoes by Nike.  These shoes were paper thin and super light, designed for single use only.  They cost a lot of money, and Michael threw them into the crowd after each race.

A reporter once asked him, “Michael, how come you are wearing gold shoes? What if you lose?  Won’t you be embarrassed?”

Michael replied “I run to win. I don’t think about losing, I think about winning.”

That says it all.

My mentor Olympic Champion Mark McKoy once told me that whenever he expected to win, he invariably won. Whenever he just hoped to win, he almost never won.

I was fascinated by this! I asked him “Mark, what was the difference between when you knew you were going to win and when you just hoped you would win? Those are two very different states!”

His answer startled me. “It was all a function of my level of preparation. Whenever I had done the work to be fully prepared, I knew I was going to win.  Whenever I hadn’t, I just hoped I would win.”

That makes so much sense! Have you ever experienced being so well-prepared for something, be it a test at school, a sales presentation, a competition, or an interview, where you just felt in your cells that you were going to ace it? That’s what Mark is talking about.  Contrast this with times when you knew you were unprepared, and were just winging it. You were a lot less confident that you would be victorious, weren’t you?

Is your preparation at the level that it needs to be in order for you to be able to expect to win?

Most people don’t expect to win. They expect to do okay, or get a decent result, and as a result of that type of thinking, that’s the best they can ever do.

How can you take your preparation to such a level that you routinely expect to win?

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