Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Jackie Joyner-Kersee talked herself through an asthma attack during her last world championship. She was in the 800-meter race, the last event of the heptathlon, when she felt the attack coming on. “Just keep pumping your arms,” she instructed herself. “It’s not that bad, so keep going. You can make it. You’re not going to have a full-blown attack. You have enough air. You’ve got this thing won.… Just run as hard as you can in this last 200 meters, Jackie.” She instructed herself all the way to victory. “I have to say this is my greatest triumph, considering the competition and the ups and downs I was going through.… If I really wanted it, I had to pull it together.”

In her last Olympics, the dreaded thing happened. A serious hamstring injury forced her to drop out of the heptathlon. She was devastated. She was no longer a contender in her signature event, but would she be a contender in the long jump a few days later? Her first five jumps said no. They were nowhere near medal level. But the sixth jump won her a bronze medal, more precious than her gold ones. “The strength for that sixth jump came from my assorted heartbreaks over the years … I’d collected all my pains and turned them into one mighty performance.”

Joyner-Kersee, too, displayed all the qualities of a hero: the: ts, the vulnerability near defeat, then a comeback and a final triumph.

Character, Heart, Will, and the Mind of a Champion

It goes by different names, but it’s the same thing. It’s what makes you practice, and it’s what allows you to dig down and pull it out when you most need it.

Remember how McEnroe told us all the things that went wrong to make him lose each match he lost? There was the time it was cold and the time it was hot, the time he was jealous and the times he was upset, and the many, many times he was distracted. But, as Billie Jean King tells us, the mark of a champion is the ability to win when things are not quite right—when you’re not playing well and your emotions are not the right ones. Here’s how she learned what being a champion meant.

King was in the finals at Forest Hills playing against Margaret Smith (later Margaret Smith Court), who was at the peak of her greatness. King had played her more than a dozen times and had beaten her only once. In the first set, King played fabulously. She didn’t miss a volley and built a nice lead. Suddenly, the set was over. Smith had won it.

In the second set, King again built a commanding lead and was serving to win the set. Before she knew it, Smith had won the set and the match.

At first, King was perplexed. She had never built such a commanding lead in such an important match. But then she had a Eureka! moment. All at once, she understood what a champion was: someone who could raise their level of play when they needed to. When the match is on the line, they suddenly “get around three times tougher.”

Jackie Joyner-Kersee had her Eureka! moment too. She was fifteen years old and competing in the heptathlon at the AAU Junior Olympics. Everything now depended on the last event, the 800-meter race, an event she dreaded. She was exhausted and she was competing against an expert distance runner whose times she had never matched. She did this time. “I felt a kind of high. I’d proven that I could win if I wanted it badly enough.… That win showed me that I could not only compete with the best athletes in the country, I could will

myself to win.”

Often called the best woman soccer player in the world, Mia Hamm says she was always asked, “Mia, what is the most important thing for a soccer player to have?” With no hesitation, she answered, “Mental toughness.” And she didn’t mean some innate trait. When eleven players want to knock you down, when you’re tired or injured, when the referees are against you, you can’t let any of it affect your focus. How do you do that? You have to learn how. “It is,” said Hamm, “one of the most difficult aspects of soccer and the one I struggle with every game and every practice.”

By the way, did Hamm think she was the greatest player in the world? No. “And because of that,” she said, “someday I just might be.”

In sports, there are always do-or-die situations, when a player must come through or it’s all over. Jack Nicklaus, the famed golfer, was in these situations many times in his long professional career on the PGA Tour—where the tournament rested on his making a must-have shot. If you had to guess, how many of these shots do you think he missed? The answer is one. One!