Travel Chaos

The Next Best Step: Performance Under Pressure & The Power of Adaptation 🇨🇦🇦🇺

Wheels Lost? The Single Question for Performance Under Pressure 🇦🇺

A 30-hour travel haul ends in disaster: a world-class team's wheelchair wheels are missing at the World Water Ski Championships.

This self-help playbook for high-stakes setbacks shows how one mindset shift—"What's the next best step forward?"—replaced a blame spiral with immediate resilience.

You'll master adaptation under pressure:

• The Crisis Question: "What's the next best step?" collapses frustration into aligned action.
• Community as Tool: Borrow competence from people, not objects, as local heroes sourced spare wheels.
• Accept Imperfection: Embrace the champion mindset: "different but doable."

Discover micro-tools like breathing resets to clear cognitive load and the essential shift to prioritizing people over equipment. Performance lives in your next decision.

Actionable Takeaways for Resilience & Focus:

• The Next Best Step: In crisis, ask the question to combat the blame spiral and simplify variables.
• Prioritize People Over Gear: Gear is replaceable; people are essential. Borrow competence from your community
• Embrace 'Different but Doable': Choose progress over perfection. An imperfect solution is the bridge to your goal.
• Mental Recovery is Key: Frustration increases cognitive load. Use quick breathing resets to redirect energy back to purpose.
• Chunk the Problem: Simplify when variables multiply. Conquer issues leg by leg (e.g., sharing chairs first).
• Value of Crisis: Performance lives in your next decision, not the chaos of the road behind (Believe in yourself).

Hit play to learn how champions steady their hands when disaster strikes!

• How to manage crisis when high stakes are involved.
• The role of community in managing personal setbacks.
• Adapting to imperfect solutions for goal achievement.
• The difference between blame and constructive action.
• "What is the best mindset shift for managing a high-stakes setback?"
• "How does asking 'What's the next best step?' help

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The 4 pillars of Living Lucky
Believe in yourself
Believe in the people around you
Believe in your circumstances and
Believe that God is working through you, for you, and always conspiring in your favor.

*Previously Recorded

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Scene In Australia
• 0:57 The Theme: Adaptation
• 1:08 The Canadian Wheel Loss Story
• 3:10 Frustration, Blame, And Travel Fatigue
• 4:27 Sharing Chairs And Making Do
• 5:36 Australian Team Steps Up To Help
• 6:43 Refocusing On Why We’re Here
• 7:55 Mental Game And Letting Go

Transcript

Setting The Scene In Australia

Jana Shelfer 0:00

Are you ready to create a life you crave? Let's spin that doom loop of negativity into an upward success cycle and start Living Lucky®.

Jason Shelfer 0:14

Good morning.

Jana Shelfer 0:15

I'm Jana. I'm Jason. And we are Living Lucky®. You are too live from Mulwala, Australia.

Jason Shelfer 0:23

Mulwala. Mulwala.

Jana Shelfer 0:26

Jason's making up little tunes. Little Diddies. I have a hard time understanding the language. Dialect. And I know that sounds so crazy.

Jason Shelfer 0:35

You should have been taking the Duolingo for Australia, like I have.

Jana Shelfer 0:40

When people tell me stories, the locals, I literally look at them like, please don't ask me a question at the end of this because I don't understand exactly what you're saying. Something about your Dundies? Yeah.

The Theme: Adaptation

Jason Shelfer 0:56

I got some of it.

Jana Shelfer 0:57

Anyway, today we are talking about adaptation.

Jason Shelfer 1:03

Adaptation.

The Canadian Wheel Loss Story

Jana Shelfer 1:04

You started before I even said that. Here's the story. The Canadian team came in yesterday. Now we trained with some of the Canadians. We had them at our house two weeks ago.

Jason Shelfer 1:17

Yeah, for a whole week.

Jana Shelfer 1:18

So we become good friends with them. Well, when they landed in Melbourne, they rented a trailer and of course a van and they put all of their equipment in the trailer. Somehow, on their three and a half hour drive here, the door to the trailer opened and wheels started falling out onto the interstate.

Jason Shelfer 1:45

So when they arrived here at the hotel in Mulwala, they got started unpacking their wheelchairs, and not all the wheelchairs had wheels. They're missing three wheels chairs.

Jana Shelfer 1:59

So imagine being in a foreign country being paralyzed and not having wheels for your chair.

Jason Shelfer 2:06

Yeah.

Jana Shelfer 2:07

That's a big deal. That's a problem.

Jason Shelfer 2:09

That's an issue. And you've got now a three and a half hour drive where any of this could have happened. So what do you do? And they're not cheap. Like these are spin-ergy wheels that run in the sometimes.

Jana Shelfer 2:26

I don't know what the current cost is, but I do know that they're quite pricey. Yeah. Depending on where you get them. So what do you do? Do you go by do you immediately drop people off, even though they they can't get around? So, or do you leave them in the car and turn the car around and go start looking for wheels? Is that what we do?

Jason Shelfer 2:47

Well, so I talked to Blake last night. I sat with him at dinner. Yes. And he I can tell you that there was a huge frustration level like right out of the gate.

Jana Shelfer 2:57

Of course. And I'm sure there was a the blame game starts, right?

Frustration, Blame, And Travel Fatigue

Jason Shelfer 3:01

Well, it was a compound. So there's this is a there's a lot compounding in here because first of all, you've just been in a three and a half hour car ride with um your teammates.

Jana Shelfer 3:14

Not only three and a half car ride, this is after after a 30-hour just travel trip, right?

Jason Shelfer 3:22

And all you want to do, like all we wanted to do when we got here was get into our rooms.

Jana Shelfer 3:26

I wanted to get horizontal.

Jason Shelfer 3:28

Literally, all we wanted to do was get out of the get out of the car, stretch our feet, get in the get horizontal, and just rest.

Jana Shelfer 3:35

Okay, so there's a frustration level, so you know tensions. Oh.

Jason Shelfer 3:44

And he goes, like he was just starting to fume more and more and more.

Jana Shelfer 3:49

Because they probably were searching every nook and cranny of that trailer, going, it's gotta be in here somewhere.

Jason Shelfer 3:54

And then how do you tell people that it made it through like the airplane, like the airport's luggage system, because that's what you worry about when you travel.

Jana Shelfer 4:04

I always worry about that.

Jason Shelfer 4:05

Worry about are they gonna lose it in the airport? Are the airport people gonna lose it? Because that's what you think.

Jana Shelfer 4:12

You're like Okay, so no, this was definitely one of their own people that left the trailer door unhitched, or somehow it broke, or something happened. Okay, so there's um we're in a situation here.

Jason Shelfer 4:27

Yeah.

Jana Shelfer 4:27

Now it's all about adapting.

Jason Shelfer 4:30

Yes.

Jana Shelfer 4:30

And going to plan B and not letting that affect your competition.

Jason Shelfer 4:40

What's the next best step forward? And that's what you were saying earlier. So what's that next thing we do?

Jana Shelfer 4:45

Here's the thing, though. Your wheelchair is almost like a pair of shoes.

Jason Shelfer 4:48

It's well, it's your legs and mobility.

Jana Shelfer 4:52

Yeah, that's even bigger. And so when you change out something like that, every little thing, whether it's just getting in and out of bed or going to the bathroom or or just pushing through the grass, like there's so many little things. And for the first day, they actually were sharing wheelchairs. So I know Ashley came up to breakfast, she transferred to a chair, and then someone took her wheelchair down to get the next person.

Jason Shelfer 5:20

Right. Musical wheelchairs. Which yeah, no fun.

Jana Shelfer 5:24

No thank you.

Jason Shelfer 5:26

But they made it first of all, they made it work.

Jana Shelfer 5:28

They made it work. So you have to give them credit there.

Australian Team Steps Up To Help

Jason Shelfer 5:31

And then the Canadian team came in and said Australian. Oh, sorry, the Australian, thank you. The Australian team came in and said, How how can we help? And that is incredible.

Jana Shelfer 5:46

They are the heroes, right? They come in and say, Hey, can we can we help you in some way? We have extra wheels. And they're the host country, so it's nice that I mean I would have helped, but I didn't travel with extra wheels.

Jason Shelfer 5:58

Well, why would you?

Jana Shelfer 5:59

Right.

Jason Shelfer 5:59

Right? It's hard enough to to pack the wheelchairs, but then so they have people that live locally, and we are not in a metropolis.

Jana Shelfer 6:08

No, no, no. We are you know we are literally in the outback.

Jason Shelfer 6:13

So people traveled from a a distance to get here in their wheelchairs from all like the Australian people, but they went back to wherever they drove in from, whether it was a five-hour trip, three-hour trip, or seven-hour trip, and they got their extra equipment and they brought it back for the Canadian team.

Refocusing On Why We’re Here

Jana Shelfer 6:31

Which is awesome. It's still different, but it is doable. Right. And I guess when I look at this from an outsider, I think, okay, are you gonna be able to let that go and concentrate on why we're here in the first place, which is water skiing, which has nothing to do with wheels.

Jason Shelfer 6:53

Right. We're on the water without our wheelchairs, however, it's just those compounding things that what's the comfort stir in the the your comfort zone and your recovery zone in that in that norm between being on the water. And and also the frustration level. So the mental space, this is a very mental and emotional throughout the whole um couple of weeks that we're here.

Jana Shelfer 7:21

You're right.

Jason Shelfer 7:22

You are right, you know, and I've watched people melt down. I'm one of them. I've watched people melt down, and it's like, okay, well, let's just breathe because everyone that's here is a champion.

Jana Shelfer 7:33

Yeah.

Jason Shelfer 7:34

Like this is the world series of water skiing, like the world championships. Like I'm in awe of watching people compete out here and just practice.

Mental Game And Letting Go

Jana Shelfer 7:45

Well, I have to give it to the Canadians, especially the ones that did lose their wheels because they have been showing up and moving on, letting it go, moving on. That's what you gotta do.

Jason Shelfer 7:58

Keep on moving, don't stop, keep on moving, don't stop.

Jana Shelfer 8:01

No, do you want me to stop him? I will stop him. Thanks for joining us. Keep Living Lucky®. Bye-bye. If the idea of Living Lucky® appeals to you, visit us at livinglucky.com.