posted Aug 3rd, 2012 - The NSL News introduced Dan BC's book ABOVE ALL ELSE for the first time with the story on 29 April 2011 and followed up with more information on 29 September 2011.

The P3 POWER PLAY story on 25 July 2012 mentioned that the book is now also available in the NSL Shop. The same story mentioned how important 4way training is to develop individual physical and mental skills, which have made Dan BC's POWER PLAY events so successful.

Dan BC now gave the NSL News permission to copy some chapters in the second part of his book. The first part is his own fascinating life story "ABOVE ALL ELSE", which is followed by "PLAYING TO WIN", where he provides guidance for teams and competitors on the way to their best performance. This part of the book will be offered by the NSL News in a series of articles.

The Goal of Personal and Team Best

We are not always competing against other people, but we should always be competing against ourselves. Each day, whether in the morning or evening, tired, sick, or wishing we were somewhere else, we should be challenging ourselves to deliver our personal and team’s best performance. If we are disciplined enough to demand this from ourselves in practice, we will be ready to deliver our best performance whenever it is required from us in “competition” (whatever our field defines that to be).

That personal and team best, even above winning, should be our primary goal. Few things are more rewarding than training hard all year long for the big “meet,” raising our abilities to a level we had only dreamt of, and actually delivering our best performance in competition. As the clock runs out on a formation skydiving competition jump, we know immediately if we just did our best.

We don’t yet know the score, but we absolutely know if we just “tore up” that jump. When tracking away (breaking apart) from my team at the end of a great jump like that, I knew we had done our best and I’d dare any other team to try to match it. Sometimes they did. Sometimes they beat us.

If you do your best in competition but are beaten by a better team, you still walk away proud of your performance. You may be disappointed by the outcome; it’s always preferable to win. But if you do the best you can, you can’t help but be happy with your performance. There were also a few meets when my team fell short of delivering our best performance. The jumps were okay, nothing terrible, but we didn’t track off with a “Beat that!” feeling.

Our performance was average. But we won. We didn’t quite do our best, but we were the best. We were victorious in our battle against the competition, but the victory was less rewarding than it could have been. We came up short in the battle against ourselves, the personal challenge to do our best at the meet.

Looking back on it now, doing our best was more fulfilling than being the best. But doing either one on its own is no comparison to doing both, especially when the race is tight and the heat is on. For competitors, there is no greater moment than doing your best when you have to, and having your best be the best.

Written by Dan BC - To be continued with: "The Skill of Performing Your Best"