Stage 5: Creating a Winning Process

Everything has a process. You could be baking a cake, writing a book, or building a house. No matter what you are creating, there is a process to it. To win in life, you need to be on track to achieving your goal, but since winning can be defined in many ways, answer the question below to start the winning process. 

A championship banner does not appear overnight; it rises one practice, one play-call, one film session at a time. Whether you’re frosting a cake, framing a house, or sculpting a personal best, process is the invisible scaffolding that makes the visible masterpiece possible.

The Blueprint of Any Build

Vision — See the finished product before the first brick.

Blueprint — Break the vision into measurable steps.

Foundation — Lay the habits that carry the load.

Framing — Sequence tasks in logical order.

Finishing — Inspect, tweak, and polish before you call it complete.

When I rebuilt my knee, this same arc applied: envision dunking again, draft a rehab timeline, strengthen stabilizers, progress to jump mechanics, and finally refine height and hang-time.  The process protected me from guesswork.

Answer this question: What does “winning in your life look like?

 

How to Win

The key to winning is not just a matter of luck, hours of practice, or willpower. It combines all three meshed together like a piece of braided hair.

You cannot win a race just by focusing on the finish line. You must know how many strides it takes to win and master every single stride so that winning will become a habit and not a goal.

After you have mastered every stride, you must put yourself in the correct position to win. You rarely see a sprinter setting up to throw the javelin and vice versa. Both athletes must master two different processes to win and set themselves up for victory by applying their talents in the correct areas.

The willpower to win should not need to be explained. If you do not have the will to win, you can only go as far as your natural talent can take you.

A few extra steps can be achieved through practice, but willpower is how you prevail in the end. Willpower is the difference in sports between conference and league champions. That’s why we hear about so many underdog success stories. The underdog goes through the same process as the favored person. They practice just as hard; they may even have just enough talent to compete, but that willpower ultimately leads them to victory.

The key to winning is to intertwine willpower with practice and luck. Intertwining these three elements means you have to want to work hard, commit to working hard, and be ready for the opportunity to let your hard work carry you to success.

Much like a braided piece of hair, the more strands of hair you have to intertwine, the stronger the braid.

Acknowledge the process.

Trust the process.

Embrace the process.

 

Training to Win

Winning in life can be interpreted in many ways. I once thought that winning was making large sums of money playing basketball. I wanted to be rich and famous, and I wanted to be a star athlete. I took pride in being the underdog my entire life, and I realized that I was looking to be the underdog and not the champion these last few years. I avoided success, and much like a dog that chases cars, I was chasing a dream instead of living one.

Answer this question: Are you chasing your dream or living It?

In life, we don’t look for small victories. We look for tremendous accomplishments, and while we look for these vast wins, we forget about the little victories that allowed us to win big. As a personal trainer, I instruct my clients to focus on upcoming measurements and weigh-ins instead of their overall fitness goals. Focusing on these short-term goals helps them to experience these small victories and develop a sense of self-motivation. When my clients focus all their energy on losing 2 pounds, they tend to overlook that in the fight to lose 2lbs, they lose 3 inches off their waist. They forget that they feel, can move, and look better.

I watched this type of self-motivation develop in one of my favorite clients. She was a former professional dancer and now works as a yoga instructor and director of the arts for schools. She walked into the gym, skeptical about her fitness level. She had bad knees, was pushing 60 years old, and had never lifted a weight in her entire life. She spent years as a dancer and figured her joints were done.

She assumed she was too old to get in shape and would exercise just enough to keep herself from falling apart.

My sales advisor convinced her to do five sessions with me. I had never met this lady before, and at the time, she was going to be another client that I would eventually move to one of my other trainers.

After all, I was the fitness manager, and after hearing the breakdown of this client from my sales advisor, I assumed one of my other trainers would be more suited for her. I didn’t feel like training a client who wasn’t motivated, and I figured I had too much work on my plate anyway. At the time, I was a new fitness manager, still trying to prove that I could run a team. I felt I had established myself as a trainer, so I didn’t want to take on this task.

To my surprise, I met one of my favorite clients that day. During our first session, we went over her goals. She told me about her ailments, how her knees were shot, and how she only bought training to be nice to my sales advisor. She wanted to lose 20 pounds, which wasn’t a tall order for me because I had helped hundreds of people reach their goals at this stage in my training career.

She didn’t believe it would work.

I told my new client we would not focus on the past or the distant future, focusing on 2 pounds at a time. She believed she was too old to win. Her lack of confidence in herself motivated me to help her even more. I took her through the session. Nothing major. A lot of bodyweight drills and small weightlifting.

She was dead tired but also inspired. During the session, I proved to her that age was just the amount of expertise she had and that its main benefit was the opportunity to gain more experience every year.

She purchased 20 more sessions with me that day.

In the next six months, my client would lose 24 pounds.

Four pounds more than her goal.

She was doing box jumps, battle rope drills, and sled pushes. She tripled her strength and even looked like she could perform back onstage. Her mindset was a winning mindset. We had stuck to the process, and she was now accustomed to winning. She also taught me a lot. She showed me that you can change careers later in life and still be successful. She switched gears from being a professional dancer to an ambassador for theater arts and a great yoga instructor, and she started it all at the age of 40.

I switched from an aspiring pro basketball player to a master fitness trainer, and now I am a fitness manager. I was only 30 at the time. My client taught me that winning is inevitable if you trust the process.

She still trains with me to this day. 

Blueprint break: Write three ways you can win in your life.

Next, write down how you will hold yourself accountable for this process.

Answer these five questions and meditate on the answers by taking a moment to evaluate them.

1.     What have you gotten over from your past?

2.     How are you going to start fresh?

3.     How will you prepare for success in your life?

4.     What is your role in this world?

5.     What is your winning process to fulfill your role in this world?

Winning, however you define it, is simply the moment your process meets its proof. So before you close this book, answer one question in ink:

What single outcome would convince you that you’ve won?

Date it. Tape it somewhere stubborn. Then return to the blueprints you’ve drawn through these pages and lay the first brick today.

Because everything has a process—and now, so do you.