I guess, because we are both involved with high level sport, we see a lot of people with talent getting to wherever they want to go to with apparent ease. Sometimes you also cast your mind back to when you were in school - there was always the kid good at languages; the guy with the unbelievable talent for mental arithmetic; the person who could draw anything so well (that you were so jealous of); the person who always won the races on school sports day (well that was never going to be me!) and even the person who simply had the talent for looking the prettiest most demure thing who never, ever got into trouble.
In all of these things, I don’t think I showed an ounce of talent. I wasn’t stupid in school but I was never top of the class. I was useless at sports on the whole although I swam pretty well but never to an exceptional standard. In all of life I was competent, adequate and got by.
I look at those naturally gifted people though sometimes and I realise that their talent stops somewhere. They are often the people who have a meteoric rise to success but somehow can’t quite repeat it. They win until something goes just a bit wrong and then it completely derails them – when the going gets tough, they drop out because it’s no longer easy.
I guess this is where the people like me and countless others come into our own – our talent is there all right, it’s just that we don’t recognise it very often. Our talent is for sticking in there, for persevering, for being determined not to give up even when things aren’t perfect. You see, it is in this way that we continue to practice even when times are tough and in this way we are the people who come through in the end - you only have to look at Kelly Holmes to see that.
So, in answer to GOA, we are only limited by ourselves – not by our perceived talent or lack of it, but we only limit ourselves when we dream big but are not prepared to put in the work to get there….
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