18 life lessons for success from a professional sportsperson and 20 years in advertising

Rachel Alexander has been described as the Marketing Doyenne of advertising in the South Island. Before starting business Alexanders Advertising (now Alexanders Internet Marketing) 13 years ago, she represented New Zealand three times at World Hang Gliding Champs, was national Womens Champ for six years running, and was 13th at the Womens World Championships in Austria.
Rachel took time out after her success to understand what the “thinking” was that helped her achieve international acclaim, and how she could apply the same lessons from sport to be successful in business.

1. Dream – and then have the courage to turn your dream into a goal.
Take ownership of making your dream happen. Most people are afraid to step outside their comfort boundaries or to truly commit to a course of action. Break your course down into smaller goals and launch!
In hang gliding, when I said what my goals were, there were “nay slayers” who said “no, that’s too high, too hard, try something less…” I held firm to the premise that surely my goals weren’t impossible, and even if I didn’t know if I would achieve them, I would certainly give it a good go. Eight years later, I did achieve my goals and some of them (such as being fully sponsored) twice.
In business, I was in a safe job for a big firm (KPMG) and scared stiff of making the break. So I set a time goal about 8 months into the future and said “I’ll be out on my own in business by January 31st. I was there by February 13th, but had to read “Feel the fear and do it anyway” by Susan Jeffers to overcome my fears and make it happen.

2. Discover and chase your apricots, not bananas (what you are passionate about) – and focus on them.
At the end of my hang gliding career, the success did not sit well on my shoulders. I asked a friend why I was having trouble “owning” the accolades. He gave me this poem, called “The Apricot”:
You should learn that you can’t be loved by everyone
You may be the finest apricot in the world,
Succulent, juicy, huge and tasty
Offering yourself to all
…but there will be some people who do not like apricots
You must understand that if you are the world’s finest apricot and someone that you like doesn’t happen to like apricots, then you have the choice of acting like a banana.
…but you must be warned that if you become like a banana, there will always be people that do not like bananas.
Furthermore, you could spend your entire life trying to be the best banana, which is impossible because you are an apricot!
…or you can seek again to be the best apricot.
I realised hang gliding was a banana – that I’d always wanted to get into horses. So I sold my gear and immediately started riding lessons (it took me three years to learn to ride before they let me loose on a polo field and I played for two seasons. Now with kids aged two, four & stepdaughter seven, I get a “leave pass” to do a few hunts each season which is exhilarating).
I realised working for someone else was a banana for me, and resolved so set up on my own. And I realised my boyfriend at the time was a banana but that’s another story…
Your key markets are apricots. Sometimes we can overlook apricots because they’re our “staple” or “bread and butter.” Work out what your core competency is. Recognise tangents and avoid them as they take you off course. Recognise distractions and procrastination as such. What are your apricots?

3. Do your homework !
Research the rules, the route and calculate final glide. Plan strategic resting points. Work out what the basics areand become really good at them.
In hang gliding, choosing the right time to take off is essential, else you plummet to the ground and can’t complete your course. You have to know how to find updrafts and how to know which way the wind is blowing when you’re in the air so you don’t crash on landing.
In business, you have to know how to find new customers, keep them, deliver what they want, and then get money off them profitably. To do this, you need to do some market research. I reckon that if you can work out what the basics are of anything, and then master them, you’re ahead of the pack.

4. See set-backs as opportunities to re-focus.
Don’t blame people. Review your systems. Use mistakes as a way to identify short-comings in your systems. Review past mistakes for lessons, regularly. Identify your barriers and attack them one brick at a time. Learn from others’ mistakes.
I didn’t do enough prep when learning to paraglide, and hadn’t practised emergency procedures before jumping off a big hill. I spiralled into the ground from 300 feet in a negative spin. My body hit the ground so hard, it bounced two feet into the air.
Onlookers were sure I would be dead, but amazingly I survived. So I determined not to fly paragliders again, but concentrate instead on making my hang gliding goals.
In business early on, I discovered some invoices that I hadn’t charged onto clients that had slipped through. So realising our system wasn’t robust enough, I invested in a new accounting package.
Later on I realized I was so focused on achievement and completing tasks that I hadn’t invested enough time in empowering my employees. So I put in place daily and monthly touchpoints – and morale has never been better.

5. Watch conditions like a hawk and choose the time to take off carefully.
When the time is ripe, don’t hesitate. Don’t leave too late! Don’t fly too slowly or you’ll be overtaken. Be bold.
Timing is of the essence. If you want to expand, conquer your competitors, or launch a new venture, you need to fly soon, otherwise the opportunity may be lost.
I had the dream of having a knitwear company 10 years ago. I didn’t have the capital back then. Three years ago after a boomer year in the ad business, I gave it a shot. But the market had moved on – the consumer expected competitive prices from China even for luxury goods.
Whilst my styling and quality was pretty much on the mark, I couldn’t get it made at a low enough buy price to get enough margin. Catch 22: you need volume to get a cheap buy price, but need a cheap buy price to get volume! No one was owed money and I sold every last garment, but in hindsight my timing for take off was too late. It was also probably too much to take on with a young baby and ad agency to run at the same time!

6. Concentrate on the task at hand – one thermal at a time.
When competing, a fatal mistake was to think about winning and receiving the prize, when really I needed to work out where my next updraft was going to come from and how I could stay in the air.
Develop excellent concentration. Time management. Practice the art of relaxed concentration. Don’t get too complacent. If you are too “laissez-faire” you might be too slow to respond to opportunities. If you’re too wired, your productivity suffers as you run around like a chicken with your head chopped off. In sport I used breathing techniques, and in business I use regular goal setting, budgets and KPI’s to keep me tuned.
What is the most important thing you need to be doing right now? If you – like me – prioritise clients and deadlines very highly, then time for working ON the business suffers. I try and schedule an afternoon to work on initiatives that have huge long term potential to change future income streams.

7. Know when to change gear.
Recognise changing wind conditions. Know when you need to take lower risk diversions to maintain position. Be flexible in how you get to your goal.
For example, conditions were weak in the Spanish Nationals and I could see pilots landing out all over the place. So I found a “zero” or very light bubble of air that was neither rising, nor sinking. By turning in circles and staying in it, I was able to say a hundred feet above the ground and the wind drifted me to goal ten kilometres away. I came second that day and other pilots couldn’t believe it as they had seen me pass overhead very low with my feet out of the harness ready to land at any moment. How low can you go…..?!
In business, when your industry is in a lull, you need to find strategic safe points to use and wait for conditions to improve. This can mean retrenching or subleasing extra office space to keep afloat. We were overexposed in manufacturing for a while when the dollar was high and my major clients’ spend dropped dramatically. I didn’t see it coming and had to cull a few staff and sublet some spare office space.
These days our portfolio is much more balanced. Equally there is also a tipping point. When your gut tells you things are on the turn for the better, go hard out! That’s where we’re at this year and it’s an exciting time, bringing a future to fruition.

8. Get high before you enter tiger country.
Tiger country means terrain that is so hostile, there is nowhere to land safely. Always be prepared for tigers. Always have an emergency landing paddock in site, your chute repacked, spare radio batteries, spare food and know how to make an emergency landing. One day at the French Nationals, we had an 80km task and there was a 15km stretch of huge mountains with no roads or paddocks for safe landing.
I was sh*t scared but went anyway. Got across fine, but not so lucky coming back. No thermal on the last face and nowhere to land safely. Crash landed and smashed up a hang glider pretty badly, escaping luckily with a nasty gash on my face. “Oooo la la la,” the Frenchman said. “What a priiiitty face, ruined!” A long hard walk out with a heavy hang glider on my shoulder…Should I have gone? Perhaps I should have waited for another pilot to cross with, to have a bigger team to search for thermals.
In business, put your personal assets into a trust and take some money out and invest it elsewhere like shares or property. I have met several multi-millionaires who lost everything when their (formerly) very successful businesses went down the tube and they had all their eggs in the one basket – their business. On the other hand, another one fared very well through fluctuations who had salted away money and diversified his asset base.

9. Respect greater forces and watch them.
Don’t underestimate the effect that external weather patterns can make. The power of the New Zealand dollar to affect tourism business, the power of legislation changes to land you with extra costs, Kiwisaver impact on staff costs… I have been literally struck by lightning in France and no longer play roulette with thunder clouds. I was standing on take off with some Israeli pilots holding my side- and front-wires. Under persuasion with a looming thundercloud across the valley, I moved back ten paces and set the glider on the ground still clipped into my harness. Suddenly there was an almighty clap of thunder.
A pilot flying down to land looked up and saw a fork of lightening come out of the cloud, noting one fork struck the top of the hill where I was standing. Off course, my kingpost was the highest metal object. My glider was silhouetted by light as if a large spotlight was on us. The chap on my sidewire said he saw a flaash of light pass down the wire which he had only just released. I had just set the A frame on the ground when I felt a huge jolt in my ankle tendons, like someone getting a really sharp pointy rock and jabbing it in the side of my heel. My hair was all standing on end but luckily I was wearing rubber soled sneakers and had just let go of the metal downtubes. Amazingly we were unharmed. Sometimes greater forces don’t let you off so lightly – superceded technology, economic factors and trends can conspire to work against you.

10. Don’t break for the lead early.
Wait until you are in position before you play your shots. Use your ears to gather intelligence. Timing. In long hang gliding tasks (100km), you’d often do better if you flew with a gaggle of other pilots rather than set off on your own, to increase the chance of finding thermals. Then once the majority of distance was behind you, you could take more risks. In business, you may have “me too” products but at some point in your career invent something so fantastic that it’s worth being a tall poppy about it.

11. Harness the power of a team.
Teams outperform individuals. Communicate your vision, your essence, your policy then empower them. Support and coach them. 
In my former role as Chairman of Top 10 Holiday Parks, I said: “what would you do if you were the shortest boy in your Form 1 class? Rally together 10 other short boys, get together and all shout, in the same direction, at the same time, in your loudest voice, the same message.” The power of 42 holiday parks promoting the same brand (rather than their own) and the same signage has been enormous. We achieved 66% unprompted brand awareness among holiday park users when only two years prior, research showed even people staying in one of our parks didn’t know who Top 10 was!

12. Utilise mentors.
They will support and stand by you and give you alternatives when you’re stumped. Recognise being “kicked out” as graduation and find your own wings.
I have three business mentors – one for teamwork, one for growth strategies, and one retired ad agency guru on how to structure the organisation for success.
In hang gliding, I found the best operators, and hung off every word for a few years, constantly asking questions until they set me free and then I started to (occasionally) beat them!
In business, I have a business coach who keeps me accountable to my goals and stops me getting so engrossed in day to day detail that I forget about the opportunities at hand in the big picture.

13. Persistence
The mark of a champion is simply someone who wants the goal more badly than anyone else and is willing to keep trying until they achieve it. Hold fast to your dreams. Never give up. Success could be just around the corner.
I had spent hundreds of hours looking for sponsorship and one month before the World Champs, still had no money. I gave up. The next day I had $15,000 in my bank account.
Never lose faith that it’s possible. Dozens will try and dissuade you from taking risks. But you may have to sacrifice everything to get there. I had to give up my career, friends, stability, relationships, money, everything in my two-year full-time quest to get to the top of the world hang gliding rankings. Camping out in Europe, taking work to keep going, never knowing where my next meal was coming from or how I’d get to the next event – it was sometimes really tough. But I wanted it so badly that I was willing to stick at it. I had to grit my teeth and stick in there in the face of immense personal anguish, but eventually got there.
In business, I hit a downer when I had my second baby on the same day I took possession of a new house, had to project manage major renovations, sell my other house and keep it tidy for open days, hold down two mortgages while going backwards, shift house and unpack with a young baby, get by with no hot water in the kitchen for three weeks, and handle the death of my mum, when sales at the business plummeted in October, a critical month. I knew I didn’t have enough stashed away to pay wages through Christmas (another lesson!). I also, not surprisingly, got depressed! Incredibly I managed to sell 75% of the business which injected capital through a lean period.
It didn’t work out with the new owners and I wondered if I had what it took. I held onto the thread that I’d managed to grow the business at 100% a year for three years in a row a few years earlier until a rotten egg came along, and thought I had the grain of an idea that could be the break of my career. So a few months later when I was on top of things, I bought the business back for less than I sold it and after a six month period of consolidation and reflection, we have had amazing growth, just like the old days – and I’m having more fun than I’ve had in years. I’m so glad I stuck it out.

14. Don’t measure yourself against others.
Like yourself based on your unique values, not performance rankings. I was really down after two years when I came 80th out of 135 at the French Nationals. I thought I’d get in the top ten. I went to London, despondent and my best friend Hillary said “Rachel, I don’t give a damn whether you come 1st or 80th. I don’t measure your self-worth on scores, but on personal qualities.” I thought of the people I admire, and realise the qualities I like in them aren’t based on scores but on personal traits. I learned that you should never base self-esteem on rankings, but on values such as honesty, integrity etc. Competition became about self-comparison not social comparison. Internal goals not external goals.
Keep things in perspective. If you get frustrated, slow down! Success involves a series of plateaus & troughs

15. Control your mind.
Manage Voice No 1 (“you’re great”) and Voice No 2 (“but you’ll never…”). Visualise a confident you reassuring yourself. Visualise the goal and use positive self talk to say “it’s not impossible”.
Our mind is so fickle. I read up on sports psychology and learned to control negative thoughts, questioned whether my fears were founded: were they “true, false or don’t know” outcomes? Many self-doubts were generated by insecurities which when looked at frankly, didn’t stand up to scrutiny. I rehearsed positive self-talk in the mirror each morning, willing myself to overcome mental obstacles. Landmark forum and Life Training are great programmes for managing your thought processes.

16. If you make an excuse, you’ve just discovered another area that needs working on.
Recognise procrastination as a task in waiting. One competition used line-drawn topographic maps instead of the ones with shading that illustrated easily ridgelines and recognizable features. I said to Blenkie “I won’t be able to do well because I can’t read maps like that. How will I find the turnpoints?” He told me to buck up: that I was procrastinating and it was a sure signal there was a lesson there that needed learning.
Sure enough, I quickly learned how to read line maps and scored passably in the comp.

17. Concentrate on the overall objective but be flexible in how you go about getting there.
Same goes for staff! I’ve had to learn that you can’t always expect all staff (especially Gen Y) to fit into your processes and rules. Sometimes you have to bend them to the staff.

18. Trust your instincts.
Have faith in your own decisions. Don’t blindly follow others. Don’t bother with Bluebeards (read “Women who run with the wolves”). Maybe it’s because I’m a chick, but if a little voice says “warning, warning,” I listen up because almost invariably it’s right. Often this is a client that turns out to be a nit-picking waste of time and profit. I always kick myself later and wish I’d had the fortitude to trust my gut and turn them down.
Also goes for doing business with friends – we did a gorgeous logo and biz card for a “friend” Tarn Mulally who disappeared off the face of the earth and never paid the bill. Didn’t have the guts to even tell me to my face her business had gone sideways.
Phew – there are always more lessons in the offing. Life never stops teaching us! I hope you’ve enjoyed these and that there is at least one that can help bring new perspective to something you’re facing now!