Christophe Barriere-Varju has represented Australia four times in the toughest and most dangerous race on earth, the infamous Dakar Rally. The Dakar Rally is a 10,000 km race on motorbikes and Christophe has captured this in a film called DREAM RACER, which has won multiple awards worldwide.
In this article the Education Speaker who thinks of himself as just a regular guy explains how the sports challenges and failures have helped him develop ‘his ways’.
Success in life
I have been involved in sport and competition from the age of 6. Martial art (Judo) was my first encounter with how discipline and training can make you a better person both physically, mentally and emotionally. In Judo, precision is key and failure will bring you down on the floor in no time. Perhaps for that reason, I never really looked at failure as failure, but rather as an opportunity to learn and better myself.
In competition, for thousands of years crowds have been conditioned to see a winner and a loser. Not being on the top podium step is not pleasant but it also forces you to either give up on your hopes or it makes you work harder at your weaknesses. The route you decide to take is ultimately who you want to be as a person.
Your only competitor is yourself
In sport, in business or in life, it is so easy to blame someone or something else when things don’t go according to plan. We protect ourselves acting that way. But are we really?
People often ask me if racing 10,000kms or the equivalent effort of racing 3 marathons a day for 14 days straight is the hardest thing I have ever done, and my answer is NO. Yes it is hard, but I have learned how far I can push myself.
The day that happened was in 2006, I was racing in Brazil, one of the world championship rounds, and on the second day of the nine-day race I caught food poisoning. If you have ever caught food poisoning you know it is far from a pleasant experience and you just want to be at home.
I continued racing and lost 8 kg in the subsequent 4 days, unable to eat or drink anything. I raced up to 21 hours a day at 50 degrees temperature in the Sertoes Desert. Only when I started to swallow my own tongue I knew I was really in trouble. But I did not give up on myself for a number of reasons that I explain during my speeches with clients. I hung in there, got fluids from the medical helicopter into my veins and soldiered on. These were the hardest days of my life, physically, mentally, and emotionally. But when I came out of this experience, it made me a different person. I had won over myself, once and forever!
How you approach life is key to how you mould yourself as a person
Perhaps, to put things in context and draw analogies, ‘Self-Performance’ is like cooking.
First you need to know the meal you want to make (e.g. where you want to go or to be as a person). Then you have to decide the ingredients you want to use (and sometimes you need time to recognise and develop these elements as a person).
Once you have these ingredients, you need to make sure each of them are ready (if they are weak you need to work on them). Now you have everything you need but that does not imply automatic success – that would be too easy. When you start cooking each of these ingredients, each has its own unique art to it (again more failure learning). You then learn to cook these elements in an orderly fashion introducing them to each other in a coordinated and timely manner.
In the end, you end up with the best possible outcome, a tasty cooked meal,…or life (sport or business is just an application of your learning).
Like this from Christophe? Learn all about him here and be sure to watch his Award Winning Film, DREAM RACER (available at www.dreamracer.tv)