Mini-Series
We’re going to spend three weeks on one of the most important questions in an athlete’s life.
Not who you are as a competitor. Not what you’ve accomplished or what you’re capable of or what people think of you. The more fundamental question: who are you?
Today is the foundation. Everything else in this series builds on it.
Read this passage slowly.
For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Psalm 139:13–14 — NIVLet that sit for a second before you move.
The psalmist is making a statement about the nature of the self before any performance is possible. You were created. Knit together. Fearfully and wonderfully made — before anyone was watching, before any scoreboard existed, before any verdict from any coach or crowd or recruiting service had been rendered.
That prior reality is the foundation. The self that exists before any of the external evaluation is the self that is most fundamentally you. And the identity built on performance — the I am what I do, I am what I produce, I am what others see when they evaluate me version of self — is built on a much more unstable foundation than the one the psalmist is pointing to.
This series is an invitation to locate yourself in that more stable foundation. Not to stop caring about performance — compete with everything you have. But to know, with enough clarity that a losing streak or an injury or a demotion can’t reach it, who you are beneath all of that.
Three weeks. One question. Who are you?
The self that exists before any external evaluation is the most fundamentally true version of you. That’s the foundation worth building on.
If you stripped away everything related to your sport — the title, the record, the recognition — what would still be true about you? Who remains?
Foundation question for the series. The answers in week one become reference points for weeks two and three.
Week one foundation: you are fearfully and wonderfully made. That’s prior to everything else. Come back next week.
This is session 1 of 3. Establish the commitment to all three sessions at the outset. The series builds cumulatively and is less effective if sessions are skipped.