The CommsHub

Most athletes have had to deal with injuries, missed selections, changing coaches, job loss, relationship breakups, late assignments, etc. Most of us have developed some effective systems and routines to cope with these unwelcome distractions.  But very few would have ever had to deal with something as challenging as the COVID-19 situation.

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"I've climbed that mountain twice" said Australian golf legend Bruce Crampton when asked a few years after retiring from the Senior Tour about having a round at his alma mater, NSW Golf Club in Sydney. Bruce had climbed the mountain through his highly successful PGA Tour career, then retired from competitive play in his forties. After a few years away from the game developing businesses and joint ventures, his thinking turned to the growing PGA Senior Tour. Bruce started to climb th mountain again, working not only on his game but also on his fitness and strength. These were features of his game on the regular Tour and he knew the demands of the tour life. The climb produced results, accumulated sponsors and supporters, his own strength & conditioning video for golf, and eventually the #1 ranking on the PGA Seniors Tour.

 

How many mountains have you climbed in your Tokyo Campaign? Are you feeling like you don't have that many climbs left in you? It can be challenging to get past any career disruption, but what about 2020's "kick in the guts"?

 

Its always good to have a mentor, someone to look to for advice. Its great if you can learn from someone else's career and experience. But who in sport has had the experience of being "that ready", only weeks to go to final Olympic preparations, feeling comfortable that the bulk of the hard work has been done, only to be told to put the car in neutral, given no idea how long final preparations would be on hold, with no firm understanding of when and if the Games will actually be held, locked in at home, with no access to training venues, teammates or maybe even coaches?

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Well, we need to go looking for performers who have had such experiences. We need to find people who might have even been trained in how to deal with such a disrupted or hard to predict lead up to their next event. We need to find some people who are very good at deploying with very short notice who have been able to retain a sense of being fully ready to go once out of the plane. These people exist, and most of them are in the armed services or the emergency services.

 

This section of the Comms Hub gathers messages from "deployment ready" or "rapid deployment" professionals and is aimed at helping affected individuals to develop their own strategies of dealing with the next mountain they have to climb. 

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