Crossing The Chasm Of Competence

If you’ve played a sport competitively, you know the frustration of being beaten by an opponent that you feel you can beat, but for whatever reason you can’t.

I call that being on the wrong side of the Chasm Of Competence™.

It’s when you don’t have the skill or ability to overcome your adversary… but you know you’re close, so close in fact you feel you could reach out and touch it.

In my case, that watershed moment occurred at the 2009 Australian Masters Games when I lost the Gold Medal match to ‘win’ the Silver.

First, I believe we’re either REASONS or we’re RESULTS.

So when I was losing and then lost the Gold Medal match, I made sure to make a complete list of all the REASONS I was losing as it was happening.

I say while I was losing because I knew that with such a bad ref and an opponent who was exploiting the bad calls (not on purpose, but due to lack of ability on his part), the match was over early on.

At the time, I wasn’t good enough to overcome my opponent AND the bad ref. I had never contemplated the extreme role a bad ref can have on a match. I was totally unprepared.

So I made my list of REASONS and one by one, I solved them. It took two years to get the result (The Australian Masters Games are played every second year), but I knew I did everything to create the RESULT I wanted by removing all the REASONS.

The Chasm Of Competence™ simply means getting rid
of all the REASONS that prevent your desired RESULT from happening

Once you’ve crossed the Chasm Of Competence™, you have the skills, abilities and thus the competence to produce the RESULT.

I call it a chasm because it’s an obstacle most social athletes never cross. The discipline, perseverance and tenacity needed to cross it either pushes them beyond their comfort zone or the resources (time, effort, money, drive, ambition) they’re willing to devote to their sport.

One of the greatest misconceptions about excellence is talent. There is no such thing. Talent is an acquired skill or ability – NO ONE IS BORN WITH IT.

Some of us develop it, while others don’t. It’s as simple as that.

Malcolm Gladwell explained the various concepts involved in his bestselling book Outliers.

If you want to learn more about how to cross the Chasm Of Competence™, you can read Bounce by Matthem Syed and Flow In Sports by Jackson and Csikszentmihalyi.

Fundamentally though, the books don’t reveal what YOU need to do to cross YOUR chasm. Each athlete’s chasm is different and specific.

For one it might be movement, for another racket skills and for a third fitness and endurance.

The key to unlock what I call your Exponential Potential™ is  self-awareness. Without it, you can’t identify the REASONS for your non-success. With unfiltered, honest self awareness, the REASONS become self-evident and crystal clear.

The challenge is being honest with yourself – to see yourself as you ARE, not as you wish you were.

Easier said than done.

So in closing, if you want to excel in sport (or any other endeavour), all you need to do is figure out all the REASONS you’re not achieving, deal with each one and watch your RESULTS improve. To know if what you’re doing is working or not, you need to monitor your progress and development. In business I call that Management By Metrics™.

In sport, you use tournaments and other point-based rankings, but you also need qualitative and intermediary measures. One easy way to assess your progress is with video analysis. Record yourself playing and then watch yourself – assess and evaluate what you’re doing. Having a coach to give you insight helps a lot.

One final point – Before you start on your quest to cross the Chasm of Competence™, you need to have what I call a Decision Making Horizon™. A clearly defined timeline to make the transition, transformation and metamorphosis. It needs to be reasonable, but short enough to create pressure. Without a sense of urgency, you simply won’t create the momentum you need to overcome your current inertia – That’s a discussion for another day.

If you’d like to know more about how you can acquire the Mindset Of A Champion, <- Click here.