The Wheelhouse of Performance: Self Awareness & Steering Clear of Autopilot

All Aboard. The day to day demands of being a student-athlete is an exhaustive list of to-do’s. Doing what is asked and needed is difficult to navigate especially when under a high stress to perform.

Perform in sport is not the only goal.

It's important to understand performing in life at our highest level is the true goal.

With the list of “trying” to be our best in practice, film, meeting with coaches, competition, academics, meeting with professors, friendships, and work it can force you into approaching it all with the mindset of checking the boxes.

We must be the PILOTS. Engaged and actively involved in making our decisions.

The opposite is autopilot. When we check boxes just to get it over with and with the only hope being we make it to tomorrow. We then finally snap out of autopilot and it is senior year graduation day. “Damn that went fast.”

Building the skill of self awareness with your teammates to be more actively engaged in your life is vital. Self awareness can be applied in many different ways. One is using it to catch yourself, pause, and hit the switch to turn off autopilot.

With this example schedule below it can easily pull a student-athlete into autopilot where our life and our identity is altered. It is changed into checking boxes instead of actively making the life we want to live.

• Weight Room Session

• Breakfast

• Class

• Study Hall

• Class

• Lunch

• Early Work

• Practice

• Dinner

• Homework

• Hang Out With Friends

• Go To Bed

• Repeat Something Similar.

Take control of your choices by pausing, being intentional, engaged, and leveraging your self awareness.

This is not only for student-athletes this can be applied to coaches or anyone for that matter. Checking boxes and moving through the weeks as means to get to tomorrow. This way in which we live is not getting the most out of ourselves or the most out of the life we want to create. I currently am a Performance Coach at the University of Portland where our mascot is a (Maritime) Pilot. I was fascinated to find that the definition was “A mariner who maneuvers ships through dangerous or congested waters”. Greater self awareness and full engagement, being a pilot, can put us in a better position to maneuver through the “dangerous waters” of day to day life. Rising to the occasion of stress, increased demands, hardships, and adversity.

Autopilot can be helpful, but we must be strategic in when we active our autopilot to ensure it does not become our norm.

Less autopilot. More PILOTS.