Raise Your Floor

I get it. You want to be your best. ALL THE TIME. So you spend a ton of time working to make your best even better. However, the greats are never at their best 100% of the time. In fact, they often have times in which they struggle. What is incredible, is that they have put in the work to improve their baseline, their average performances, so that it keeps creeping up which only pushes their best performances even higher.

This is what it means to Raise Your Floor.

The first step in raising your floor is to understand where you stand. Take the time to analyze your performance over time and identify patterns in your performance. What does a "normal" or "average" day of training look like for you? What makes a competition "ok" but not "great" for you? It's easy to identify your best and worst performances, but what falls in the middle?

The next step is to set goals and work to improve your baseline just a bit. How can you make your average performance just a step better? Remember, you are not pushing this to become your absolute best performance. You just want to inch forward. Maybe this is running a pace that is just a few seconds faster. Or maybe it is an increase of 3% in your free throw shooting. As always, the more controllable and specific, the better.

You are competitive and you WILL get pulled to focus on beating your PR. You know what you are capable of and every performance is focused on beating that mark. In competition, this is not always a bad thing to pull you forward. However, in training, you want to spend more time moving your average down the line. If you are capable of scoring 100, but the average is 50, we want to push your average up to 53, then 57, then 60. You push this up and what you are capable of will move forward too. Training a bit above your average is much more sustainable than trying to PR at every training session.

Make sure you are measuring your progress. If there isn't an easy way currently to measure how you are improving, create your own standard measurement so that you can see your floor being raised. You need this feedback so that you can keep going, address all areas that will help you raise your floor, and reevaluate over time. By measuring and recognizing this progress, you can focus more on the process than the outcome AND not get caught up in only chasing after your top performances.

Try it out this week in training. What can you do to raise your floor? How can you get your average performance to be 1% better?

Need help raising your floor? Want a custom mental skills training program? Connect with us today!