Taking responsibility

I saw on a teams website about what it takes to be in the pre-senior type group. I saw on there something that I have preached about before, but I feel like we need to do more of with our advanced age groupers and pre-seniors. It was to take responsibility for their own swims.

One of my former coaches use to say to me, "good swim, good swimmer; bad swim, bad coach." We just laughed about it, but we saw it all the time. This mentality creates the path to not taking responsibility for ones swims.

Taking responsibility is big for me. It was one of the biggest things I did when I changed myself for the better during my sophomore in high school. With that experience, I truly believe that taking responsibility for ones actions is such an important thing to do.

I include taking responsibility in the goal setting process I talk about. One step is to review the season. If you didn't accomplish your goal, you need to look at the choices you made that might have prevented you from accomplishing the goal. You don't make an excuse and put it on someone else, but recognize that those practices you missed to do another activity might have been what prevented you from accomplishing the goal. Accept that you made the choice, and realize that to accomplish your goal you may not be able to make such decisions.

I do like quotes, and when I was going through the change of being person of excuses to a person who accepted that the results were merely a culminating result of my many choices. I had a quote always with me, "I am the only one responsible for my success and failure. I accept the challenge."