Toward Personal Excellence
01.2005

A couple of years ago, I was on the USOC Coaching Committee and I was fortunate enough to attend a meeting in Colorado Springs where Anson Dorrance was guest speaker. He is the head coach of multi-National Champion Women’s Soccer team from University of North Carolina. His teams have consistently won national titles with outstanding team play and a strong focus on excellence. His teams’ “Commitment to Excellence” brought me to purchasing a book that he co-authored called “The Vision of a Champion”. Although it is geared toward a soccer audience, the lessons to be learned for developing champion athletes is outstanding.

In one chapter entitled, “Toward Personal Excellence”, Anson presents some points from which all of us can learn. The points are paraphrased from notes from Daniel F. Chambliss in his “Sociological Theory” presented in 1989.

Excellence is Actually Mundane!! Excellence is accomplished through deliberate actions, ordinary in themselves, performed consistently and carefully, made into habits, compounded together, added up over time. Since it is mundane, it is within the reach of everyone, all the time!!

So, here are some points to develop excellence in all YOU do:

• Through what you do in training consistently
• There are no real secrets to developing excellence
• The acts of excellence are performed a regular, consistent basis
• The acts of excellence are performed with high standards and consummate focus
• Excellence develops into habits (coached into physical, psychological and emotional fabric
• Added up over time on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis

Are you doing all YOU can do to work toward excellence?? Why not, it is really a pretty mundane, ordinary way of doing things!! Get in that habit NOW!