The Athlete Mindset: How Building in Public Requires Doing the Work in Private
🗓️ LEX NIKO POSTED TO THE GROUP CHAT MAR 26, 2026
CAREER & PERSONAL BRANDING | LEADERSHIP & IDENTITY | COMMUNITY, NETWORKS & SOCIAL CAPITAL
Let me just break the fourth wall for you off the top: Building in public requires doing the work in private. And that’s the part we don’t talk enough about.
We love the screenshot of the sold-out launch. The viral tweet. The “I just hit 100K!” post. We love the podium moment: the medal around the neck, the flag draped over shoulders, the tears, the anthem swelling in the background.
The recent Olympic and Paralympic Games gave us weeks of those moments. We watched athletes stand tall, crying, smiling, absorbing a lifetime into a few seconds of global attention. It felt cinematic because it was. But what makes it cinematic is the contrast.
For every podium shot, there were 5 AM alarms that no camera captured.
There were training sessions in half-empty gyms. There were heats they didn’t win. Competitions they bombed. Birthdays, social events and life they simply missed out on. Years of progress measured in milliseconds or millimeters. Years where no one knew their name.
The broadcast shows the race. It doesn’t show the mornings when quitting would have been easier.
And that’s the part that matters.
When an athlete steps onto the Olympic stage, they’re not performing for the first time. They’re revealing what they’ve already rehearsed thousands of times in private. The medal ceremony is not the work. It’s the receipt.
So when we say we want to “build in public,” oftentimes what we mean is we want to win in public.
Yet if you’re building something, whether it’s an audience, a business or a body of work, you have to do the work, commit to the process and internalize that rhythm.
Because the real work? It’s the Tuesday afternoon when you publish even though engagement is down. It’s the draft you rewrite instead of posting something half-baked. It’s the spreadsheet you update when no one is asking for it. It’s choosing depth over dopamine.
Athletes train regardless of the outcome. They don’t perform only when there’s a crowd. They put in the hours even when it’s boring. Even when it’s repetitive. Even when the gains are invisible.
This is where the Athlete Mindset comes in. And it’s a process that we can all adopt habits from, whether we’re working toward that next race or that next career step.
Here are three ways to bring that athlete mindset into how you build, lead, and grow.
1. Stop Performing. Start Training.
There's a difference between an athlete who trains and a performer who rehearses. The performer prepares for the spotlight. The athlete prepares for every condition and trains so thoroughly that if pressure shows up, her preparation takes over.
Most women in business are rehearsing. They're polishing the pitch, perfecting the Instagram caption, preparing for the room they think they're walking into. What they're not doing is training: building the foundational strength that makes them dangerous in any room, under any condition.
Training looks like this: It's the Sunday evening you spend studying your financials when no one asked you to. It's the sales call you debrief alone, even when you closed it, asking yourself what you could have done sharper. It's reading the contract twice or developing the skill before you need to use it.
Athletes don't train for the game they played last season. They train for the game that's coming. Shift your private work from reactive to proactive, and watch how differently you show up when it counts.
2. Protect Your Practice Like It's Sacred. Because It Is.
Elite athletes guard their training time with a ferocity that borders on obsessive. No, they can't grab lunch during practice. No, they won't skip the morning session for a meeting that "shouldn't take long." Their training block is non-negotiable because they understand something fundamental: you cannot perform at a level you have never practiced.
Women in business are notorious for letting their private work get demoted by everyone else's urgency. The inbox. The Slack message. The favor. The fire. And then they wonder why they feel reactive instead of intentional, busy instead of built.
Your private work is your practice. It is the CEO hour before the team wakes up. It is the weekly review where you measure what's actually moving the needle. It is the uncomfortable internal audit of where your business is soft and you haven't wanted to look. This is not self-care. This is competitive preparation.
Athletes treat practice as the most important appointment on the calendar. Your deep work deserves the same protection you give your best client meeting. Block it. Defend it. Show up to it like someone's watching, because in a way, future YOU is.
3. Measure Your Reps, Not Just Your Results.
Here's what separates good athletes from great ones: great athletes are obsessed with their inputs. They track the reps, their form and the recovery. They don't wait for the game to tell them where they stand. They already know.
Most founders are measuring outputs and ignoring inputs. They're watching revenue, watching follower counts, watching conversion rates. And when the numbers go flat, they're surprised. But the athlete already knew it was coming. She felt it in the quality of her training. She noticed when she started cutting corners on the fundamentals. She didn't wait for the loss to tell her something was wrong.
This is the shift: start measuring the reps no one sees. How many meaningful conversations did you have with potential clients this week? Not posts, not emails, but actual conversations? How many hours did you spend in genuine strategic thinking versus operational busywork? How consistent were you with the inputs that you know drive your best results?
When you start measuring inputs with the same rigor you measure outcomes, you stop being surprised by your results. You start being able to predict them.
One Last Thing on the Athlete Mindset
The public wins are real. The launch, the contract and the revenue growth are all real and they're worth celebrating! But they are the output of a private practice most people never see and even fewer have the discipline to maintain.
The women who are quietly winning aren't luckier than you. They're just doing the reps.
The question isn't whether you want to win. It's what you're willing to do when nobody's watching.
