Prepare for Your Event Like a Professional Athlete: Be Consistent

Now that you've learned how to warm up for your event like a professional athlete, it’s time for the second leg of our series. Warming up is important, but so is staying consistent. Do you expect a professional athlete to only work out on days when they feel great? No way. One of the reasons athletes are able to win is because they work on becoming better every day, even on days when they don’t feel like putting on their skates or picking up a barbell. If you want your event to be successful, bring this same mentality to your planning.

1. Proper warm-up
   1. Stretch
   2. Set an Achievable Goal
   3. Start Slow
2. Be Consistent
   1. Set a Pace (and be consistent)
   2. Visualize Your Victory
   3. Maintain Proper Nutrition 
3. Surround Yourself with the Right People
   1. Coach
   2. Attendees
   3. Training Buddy
4. Variety
   1. Take Time Off/Sleep/Recover
   2. Use a Range of Different Exercises and Training Methods

Be Consistent

Set a Pace (and Be Consistent)

Not everything needs to be a sprint. A great way to think about your event is to look at it as a marathon. In order for athletes to be successful, they need to set a pace and maintain it throughout the race. Starting with a sprint may result in an early lead, but they'll quickly burn out and fall behind. The same goes for your event planning efforts. If you go full force at first, you'll burn out and won’t have anything left to give later on. That doesn’t mean you should wait until the very last minute to sprint to the finish though, as you probably won’t be able to catch up and finish in time. The best way to organize your event is by setting a pace and staying consistent all the way through. There may still be a few little sprints, but sticking to your pace will help you stay organized and stress less.

Visualize Your Victory

This isn’t just something coaches say to underdog high school teams to give them hope. Victory visualization is a very powerful and widely used technique among professional athletes. The idea behind victory visualization is pretty simple – imagine the best possible outcome and exactly what you need to do in order to get there. For a basketball player, this could mean imagining the way you hold the ball as you shoot (and score). For a skier, this could mean visualizing the slalom course and feeling the ways you’d shift your body to successfully complete the course. And for an event planner, this could mean seeing a perfect event from start to finish and every single detail that went into making it great. By imagining the best possible outcome, you set yourself on the right trajectory. You also give yourself a goal to aspire to. If instead, you imagine failure, you set yourself on a bad trajectory, and it can be hard to pull yourself away from imagining all the ways your event could go wrong.

Maintain Proper Nutrition

Do you think world-class athletes eat pizza and ice cream every day? Although they may indulge every once in a while, for the most part, these athletes maintain a balanced, high protein diet during their training to help them recover and fuel up for their next workout. Similarly, when planning for an event you need to maintain a balanced diet. This might sound like a funny way to prepare for an event, but the nutrition I’m referring to isn’t the edible kind. Instead, the term nutrition here refers to the content and tools you feed your event. Providing your event with the right nutrition enables it to grow and build up the strength to be amazing. Don’t wait until the end to feed your event great content. Feeding your event the right tools from the start enables it to be that much stronger and more successful. For example, a mobile event app such as CrowdCompass by Cvent is an amazing tool you can implement. Although you may believe mobile event apps are onsite tools, you shouldn’t wait until day-of-event to start using the app. Instead, if you build the app and release it before the event starts, you can engage with your attendees early on. This enables attendees to build their ideal schedules and provides you with valuable data about their interests and goals before the event starts. This pre-event feedback allows you to adjust to better suit your attendees wants and needs before they arrive, creating a better experience for everyone.