Your Commitment to Preparation Positions You for Sustained Success

By Matthew Mitchell

A great career in sports or business is never based on one outcome or result alone, or even a handful of them. Real success should never be defined by short-term results. 

Before my recently landed role as coach of the University of Houston’s women’s basketball team, I was the head coach of the University of Kentucky women’s basketball team for 13 seasons. It was a terrific ride that included three visits to the Elite 8 of the NCAA tournament, a Southeastern Conference (SEC) championship, and three SEC coach of the year awards. Of course, like any team, we learned all about game winning shots that refused to fall. It’s part of basketball and is bound to happen. 

At heart, I’m a coach, whether it be basketball, business, or life. And what a coach always wants to do is make a real impact on lives. As a coach I’ve also found that preparation is key to success. No amount of talent or performance under pressure is going to save you unless you’ve put in the work that translates into maximum preparation.

While a well-prepared leader and his team may lose individual battles, overall, a consistently prepared team literally can’t lose. Focused, constant preparers achieve sustained success.

When you’re around greatness, what you see is the consistency. I suppose you could call that a secret to success, but I don’t think of it as some mysterious code. There isn’t some otherworldly knowledge that’s been cracked by the great coaches. Instead, it’s their everyday habits. It’s believing in being the best prepared person on the court, or at the office, or on a sales call. Wherever you ply your craft, if you do that, it’s going to lead to amazing success.

Any journey to sustained success is centered around great preparation. And great preparation is broken into two parts. The first part is about the mindset you need to develop. The second involves a three-step method to achieve championship-level preparation.

Let’s start by unpacking the mindset necessary for success:

Imagine a mindset as a filter you put on your thought processes. A healthy mental filter is one that screens out unproductive thoughts and keeps you grounded in reality.

Mindset Exercise: Pay close attention to the conversation going on in your head. Over the next week, make a conscious effort to look at how you process challenges that arise. Take note of how much time you spend complaining, either out loud or in your head. How much time do you spend worrying about circumstances that you can’t control? Do you work through problems piecemeal, as if you’re fighting one brush fire after another?

If these are your habits of mind, you’re convincing yourself that circumstances outside your control are in charge of your life instead of you.

The way out is to stop the negative thoughts. Interrupt those thought

patterns and retrain your brain in new habits. Tell yourself, “Enough!” By paying attention, you can choose different thoughts. It just takes some effort.

Next, the steps to achieve championship-level preparation involve:

1. Getting crystal clear on your goals. Think of a clear goal as a lens that helps you better see what’s a useless diversion versus what’s a positive change or addition. Goal clarity also gives you energy and excitement. As you set your goal, however, you want to be realistic and reasonable. Do this using the SMART framework – make your goal Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely. This leads to accountability.

2. Creating a strategy for preparing to meet those goals. It’s crucial to put as much thought into the milestone accomplishments as it is to your overall preparation goal. The key is to use reverse engineering. Walk back step by step to determine what it takes to arrive at that goal. 

3. Executing the details of your preparation strategy. One way to set out accomplishing your goal of excellent preparation is to set short-term, incremental subgoals that are do-able. Subgoals create a chain of preparation steps that lead you to the doorstep of your main goal — achieving success. 

The most successful leaders don’t fly by the seat of their pants. They recognize that they have to lift their preparation game or they’ll fail. Follow their lead to raise your game by homing in on and refocusing your mindset, and defining and carrying out a strategy to achieve your goals.

It’s amazing what you can do for yourself professionally and personally when you’re a master of preparation. You separate yourself in a way that gives you confidence and sustained success.

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Matthew Mitchell is a Wall Street Journal and USA Today best-selling author, speaker, three-time SEC Coach of the Year, and the winningest head coach in the history of the University of Kentucky women’s basketball program. He now coaches the University of Houston’s women’s division 1 basketball team. Mitchell’s book, Ready to Win: How Great Leaders Succeed Through Preparation (Winning Tools, November 19, 2024) — a USA Today bestseller — shares proven principles that lead to resilience, preparation, and growth. Learn more at www.coachmatthewmitchell.com.