Be Brilliant

Facet 6 Behaviour

My niece Emily started swimming 200-metre backstroke competitively when she was 10 years old. She recalls one race, when she was 12, when she was standing in the marshalling room and feeling so nervous that she started crying. It was only her mum shouting, ‘You can do it, Em' that made her jump in the pool, push through and achieve a personal best race time of 3:03:78 and with this a qualification for the Adelaide State Championship. Her subsequent feeling of euphoria ignited a passion to keep swimming.

Two years later, Emily was swimming 2:24.60 and was ranked seventh in the state of Victoria, Australia, with a goal of achieving a national time to compete at a higher level again. While her big-picture vision is well and truly planted in her psyche, it is her commitment to daily actions and behaviours that ensures her incremental improvements. She trains 11 times a week, three of those in the gym and eight in the pool, and has to sacrifice a lot along the way. As Emily shares, ‘Usually I get friends asking to catch up or go out on the weekend or to a party but most of the time I have a swim meet and as hard as it is to say no I have to because I know that I have a goal to reach and to reach that goal I have to train'.

Success isn't something you simply stumble upon. It's a reward for having ceaseless tenacity and a consistent and repetitive commitment to the right behaviours.

According to self-development speaker Brian Tracy (who has authored over 70 books!) ...