This article originally appeared in May 2010.

One of the benefits of (largely) living in public is reducing the grip that fear has over my goals. When we set a challenging goal, there’s often a little voice that says, “What if you don’t achieve it?” As well, some folks will use your goals “against you” to try to perk themselves up.

When I ask myself, “What if I don’t achieve it?” the answer is nearly always, “So what?” I’ll do a lot to achieve my goals but I play the game within my personal values, as well as the constraints of my larger life goals. Giving you a real life example: I’d quite like to go sub-4 in a half ironman race. However, I play that game within the constraints of my key life goals (live long and prosper, love Monica, financial prudence, maintain personal freedom). When I stray from the path of athletic excellence, it is mostly due to a higher goal overriding.

I accept that the reality of my life situation will often require compromise towards my goals. It is often said that compromise is a bad thing for achievement — that’s true but… disharmony is even worse! As a working athlete, I promise you that finding athletic harmony in your work/family/marriage will go a long, long way towards achieving your goals.

Start by admitting your goals to yourself. Write them down and discuss them with a few people that are close to you. My wife knows me better than anyone and she likes me to have goals for my life. She likes these written down — more accurately… she knows that I like to have them written down. Monica is my reality check on how I am living, as well as where I am spending my time. Get your team onside for where you want to go.

But it takes more than commitment to achieve!

I was talking with a young woman about reaching the Olympics and asked her two key questions:

• Where do you spend your time?
• Who do you spend your time with?

The purpose of the questions being to figure out:

• Are you training like an Olympian?
• Do you have Olympians in your peer group?

Do you need goals at all in sport?
To figure that out, I like to return to first principles. Why did I start in the first place? For me, being true to my original principles is a requirement to gain satisfaction required from the work required to succeed. Jonas Colting has talked about this in the past — his endurance values: adventure; consistent with health; limited misery! Those are Colting’s, we each need to find our own. Within my own athletic career, when I strayed from my endurance values — that’s when I lost my satisfaction from my performances.

My take home point: the goals that most satisfy me are the ones that sit in harmony with my marriage and support the lessons that I’ve learned (so far) about athletics in my life.

Sometimes I need to trade a little bit of speed to be the man I want to be.