What Most Business Owners Can Learn About Success from Elite Athletes - EP # 262

This Summer, Sports Gave Me a Masterclass in Business

FIFA World Cup. Wimbledon. Blue Jays baseball. A live WNBA game with my daughter.

This summer, sports has been everywhere, and as I watched these incredible athletes compete, I kept seeing the same parallels to what we face as business owners every single day.

The grind. The setbacks. The comebacks. The quiet years before the big moment. The hard seasons nobody talks about.

In this episode, I'm sharing seven lessons from the world of elite sports that apply directly to building and scaling your business — drawn from athletes whose stories stopped me in my tracks this summer and connected to real moments from my own journey and my clients'.

Some of these will challenge how you see where you are right now. Some will give you permission to keep going. All of them are worth a listen.

In This Episode, You'll Hear About:

• A 40-year-old athlete who became one of the most talked-about figures at this year's FIFA World Cup — and what his story means for every entrepreneur who's ever doubted their timing
• What the world's current number one tennis player did after one of the most shocking losses of his career
• A Toronto Blue Jays star having the hardest season of his career — and the business lesson hiding in plain sight
• What my daughter and I witnessed live at a WNBA game that perfectly captures what building a business actually feels like

What You'll Walk Away With

• A mindset shift for wherever you are in your business journey right now
• Real perspective on comparison, hard seasons, and resilience
• The reminder you might need to keep going — and keep playing

Complimentary consultation with Maggie — if this episode resonated and you want to talk about where you are in your business, what's feeling hard, and what's possible, book your complimentary consult with maggie here - https://calendly.com/maggie-s2l/discovery-call-1

Or visit her website: https://stairwaytoleadership.com

Transcript

EP 262 - What Most Business Owners Can Learn About Success from Elite Athletes

[00:00:00] Welcome back to The Diamond Effect Podcast. I'm your host, Maggie Perotin, and today we're doing something a little different, and honestly, something I've been excited to record for a few weeks now

Honestly, I'm not a big sports fan in the traditional sense because I don't watch a lot of sports regularly. But I did grow up playing basketball in my primary school years competitively, and also I danced in the Polish folk dance group. We didn't compete a lot, but we traveled around Europe. We participated in festivals and occasional competition.

So I have always had a deep admiration for professional athletes, what they do, what it takes to get there, and what it takes to stay there. And it's always fascinates me. And this summer, sports [00:01:00] has been everywhere, so it's impossible not to think about it, be curious about what's going on.

We have FIFA World Cup 2026, and part of it is happening here in Canada. Wimbledon, we have our Canadian Blue Jays baseball team in Major League Baseball, and my husband is a big fan of the team. And also just recently, my daughter and I, with some visitors from Europe, we went to watch Toronto Tempo play Golden State Valkyries, which is the women's NBA league.

And Toronto Tempo is the first Canadian women's team, and it's very new. So it's very exciting to see them form the team and kinda compete in WNBA. So seeing the game live was such a great experience. My daughter is super excited. She wants to see more. So as [00:02:00] I was watching all of these events and listening to some of the stories, I keep thinking about the business, about my clients, and about the parallels between what these athletes go through and what we go through as business owners every single day.

And especially that I truly think of my clients as professionals in business. And my clients and myself, we're ambitious. We want to do well. Therefore, I do think we are like professional athletes, just in business

So today I wanna share with you seven lessons from the sporting world that apply directly to growing your business. Some of these are from the specific athletes and the stories that I've heard in the past month, and also moments I've been following. Some I will connect to stories from [00:03:00] my own journey or from my clients, and I hope that all of them will make you think differently about your own journey.

So let's get into it

Lesson one: You're never too old. So the first lesson comes from one of the most surprising and heartwarming stories of this World Cup. His name is Vozinha, full name Josimar José Evora Dias, and I hope I s- said it correctly. He's a goalkeeper of Cape Verde, a tiny island nation of just 500,000 people off the coast of West Africa, and this World Cup was Cape Verde's first ever appearance on the global stage.

And Vozinha is 40 years old. He didn't sign his first professional contract until he was 25 or 26, which you might think is late for a professional athlete, not to mention a [00:04:00] 40-year-old competing in the top event for his sports domain. And before that, he was working as an electrician while playing football on the side.

He spent nearly two decades grinding through clubs in Cape Verde, Angola, Moldova, Cyprus, Slovakia, and Portugal, really countries where most football fans have never followed, leagues that have never made headlines

And then he won exactly one trophy in his entire career before this World Cup. And then on June 15th, 2026, in Atlanta, Cape Verde faced Spain, who is the European champion and one of the favorites to win the whole tournament

And that was Cape Verde's the very first World [00:05:00] Cup match. Nobody gave them a chance. Nobody even knew who Vazina was. And as a goalkeeper, he faced 27 shots. He made seven saves, and he kept a clean sheet. And Spain, with all their superstars, including the brilliant young player Lamine Yamal, could not get the ball past this 40-year-old goalkeeper from a tiny island.

So the match ended 0-0, and Vazina was named the player of the match

And when the final whistle blew, he stood on that field and wept. And he said that, "I cried because I grew up with my grandparents, and unfortunately they weren't there. They died a few years ago. They were everything for me. I also cried because my mom didn't manage to be there for the game because of the visa [00:06:00] challenges."

And of course, he would love for her to be there. After that game, he went from 46,000 Instagram followers, and within hours he had millions of them. He became one of the most beloved figures of the entire tournament

And what was his message after the match? Here is what he says: "I have worked my whole life for this moment. I'm 40 years old. I thought about leaving, but I continued because of this dream." Now, why am I telling you this? Because as entrepreneurs, we also face those doubts. We work hard for our business to succeed.

We have a dream, and all of us at some point think about leaving and maybe quitting and thinking, "Is that really something I should be doing," right? Because it's hard. And also because I [00:07:00] hear often this idea that there is a perfect age to start something, that your 20s are the time to hustle and figure things out.

And maybe that's the case, but then it makes you think that if you haven't built something by a certain point, then you missed your window, and there's no point in trying, and I don't believe that's true. I was 39 years old when I had the idea for my coaching business, and I wasn't even sure if this could work And I had a lot of doubts over it, a lot of, my brain telling me, "Maybe you are too old.

Maybe you just should coast your corporate career and wait till you retire," right? But there are so many other successful people that started late in life. Like for example, Martha Stewart didn't launch her first catering business until late 30s.

And then Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, didn't open [00:08:00] his first Walmart until he was 44. Colonel Sanders of KFC franchise- of KFC franchised his chicken recipe at 62. So your age is not a barrier. It's a collection of everything that makes you ready. So with that lesson, I wanna tell you, don't let anyone, including your own brain, tell you that you're too old to start something, that your time is

Your time is not behind you. For the right dream, your time might be exactly now, and that's why you're having that dream. Okay. Lesson number two: Everything before prepares you. So the second lesson also comes from Vezina's story, but it's a little bit different angle and part of it. Think about what he was doing [00:09:00] all those years before the World Cup spotlight found him, right?

He played in Angola, in Moldova, in Cyprus, Slovakia, in leagues that nobody really was watching or not a lot of people were watching, winning almost nothing, moving his life from country to country

without having his big moment. And yet, every single save he made for those teams made him the goalkeeper he was on that day in Atlanta. Every hard match in half-empty stadium he had, every language he had to learn, every team dynamic he had to learn and navigate, all those years of showing up when it wasn't glamorous, he was being prepared.

He just didn't know it yet, right? And I think that about my life [00:10:00] and my clients' life a lot. I spent over 18 years in corporate, and most of that was in leadership positions, managing complex, fast-paced operations across North America. I was leading teams, navigating difficult stakeholders.

Then I had my burnout

And I was growing through that as a person, as a leader. And those experiences, not all of them I chose

But when I started my coaching business, I quickly realized that a lot of that was necessary for me to run my business. I brought a lot of that with me. The ability to read the team dynamics and turn the performance around, the understanding of what leaders face in business, the experience of building processes under [00:11:00] pressure of scaling with very demanding clients where decline in quality of service wasn't an option.

The empathy that also came from my own burnout and realization that we don't have to sacrifice other important parts of our life to be successful professionally, and we can have both

I wouldn't be the coach I am today without every single thing that came before So I also want you to hear this for your own journey. Nothing in your past is wasted. Every job you had, every difficult client you navigated, every failure you learned from, every event or marketing effort that you put in and it didn't give you the results you wanted, every skill you developed over your career is all preparing you [00:12:00] for the success you want for your business and your life

I never treat my failures are a waste of time or something that shouldn't have happened. I always look at them and think about what are they teaching me, how they're preparing me for the success that I want to achieve. And all your experiences are preparing you. So the question isn't whether your past was the right path It's actually whether you're willing to use it to your benefit and advantage

And from that we have lesson number three, your timing is perfect for you. So lesson three still stays with Bazzina because his story has so much to teach us. He didn't make his first World Cup debut at 25 or 30 or even 35. He made it at 40 [00:13:00] in Cape Verde's first ever World Cup

And I believe it was the exact moment the world was finally ready to see him, and that is his timing. Perfect for him. Not early, not late, not wrong, just perfect for him Now, in business, there is a thing that I see very often, especially with business owners who are ambitious and growth-oriented, where they fall into the comparison trap.

And don't get me wrong, I've been there as well, and I occasionally go there, but I'm able now to recognize it and pull myself out of there. Because very often you look at someone in your industry who seems to be 10 step ahead of you or who is a leader of your industry. They have a bigger audience, bigger team, better, bigger business, more clients, more revenue.

And then you start questioning your own journey, right? You [00:14:00] start asking yourself, "Why aren't I there yet? Why-- what am I doing wrong that I'm not there? I should be further along." Especially when you hear stories about people building six or seven-figure businesses in six months or a year, and here you are, working hard for the past three to five years and you're still not where you wanted to be.

So then you start to wonder what is wrong with you. And what I wanna say is nothing is wrong with you. Your path is not their path, and their path is not your path. Okay? You, your timing is yours, not anybody else's. And the factors that shape how quickly a business grows, like your starting point, your network, your resources, the economy, the season of life you're in, all of that is different for every single [00:15:00] person.

If you think about me, I started my business at 39. I started it on the side while still having a corporate job, small kids, and then COVID happened. I did not have any network to rely on because of the circumstances of my life, being an immigrant in Canada, losing the first network after my first divorce, and then really focusing on a corporate career or not really networking a lot.

All those circumstances created my starting point.

But what matters is you understanding that your circumstances are yours and your timing is yours, and it's perfect for you. And what I've seen over and over again with my clients is this: that the ones who stay the course, the ones who have clear strategy, who keep working and learning skills that they need to move to the next level and adapt to [00:16:00] changing circumstances, they get there.

They get where they wanna be. And maybe it's not the timeline that they originally imagined, but they still get there. And when they do, it's exactly right, the way it was meant to happen all along So don't let someone else's timeline become the measuring stick for your success. Only because you're taking longer than somebody else does not make you a failure.

Your timing is perfect for you, so stay in your lane, keep building, trust yourself, trust the process, and I promise you, you'll be successful

Now let's move to Wimbledon for lesson number four, don't take success for granted This lesson is brought to you by one of the most dominant players in tennis right now, Jannik Sinner

If you don't follow tennis, here is a little bit of background [00:17:00] behind the player. Sinner is 24 years old. He's Italian and currently ranked world number one and just won Wimbledon for the second consecutive time, and that's his fifth Grand Slam title overall. He beat a German player, Alexander Zverev And the final match lasted nearly four hours

But here is part of the story that I want to focus on. Just a few weeks before Wimbledon, Sinner had a shocking early exit at Roland Garros, which is the French Open, and he was the favorite, and he was up two sets and 5 to 1 in the third against a relatively unknown opponent. But then the conditions changed, the heat got to him, and he lost the match and had to, leave the tournament It was really a surprise for everybody. And [00:18:00] of course, the question everyone was asking for, like, how does he respond?

How does he get out of that by losing, to a player that was ranked way, way lower than him very unexpectedly? But he came to Wimbledon and

He skipped the traditional warm-up tournaments and then went straight to intensive training. He worked hard, and he won. So he rebounded to win the next Grand Slam. And so in his post, post-match conference, he said something that really resonated with me

He said, "There's no failure if you don't win a Grand Slam. There are, these are very rare days. Now I've had five in my whole life, but at the end of the day, it's five days out of so many other days." And then he [00:19:00] said, "I never take things for granted."

And if you think about it, in such a young person, that's a really mature thing to say and realize, that you can never take things for granted

Because nobody has a crystal ball to know how the next year, the next tournament, the next quarter in your business will look like just based on the past. There's always new things coming into the mix that you need to learn from and consider as you're in the moment, right? So here is the business lesson I want to draw from this.

One of my clients, who is a wonderful entrepreneur, has built a strong, established business for many, many years, and they've been doing well. They have great clients, very solid reputation, and [00:20:00] for the long time, their clients came largely through repetitive business, word of mouth, and just their brand being known, which worked really well.

And they didn't have to do much outside of that to keep the business successful and growing and then deliver, their offers. But then the economy slowed, and some of their long-lasting clients either slowed down as well with that or retired, closed their businesses, and that changed their results.

Referrals dried up. Clients started coming back less often with smaller orders, and suddenly they found themselves in a difficult position, not because their offers and then delivery has gotten worse, but because, in a way, they did take the pipeline of clients for granted, and they didn't do [00:21:00] anything outside of it to build it, right?

So we had to go back to building the pipeline, to getting in front of new potential clients in order for the business not only to maintain the sales they've had for many years, but also keep growing. So the way you build a business at one stage is not always the way that will sustain you for years to come till the end of times, or it's not also the way to grow to the next stage

What works right now when you're building doesn't automatically keep working when you're established or a few years from now when the economy changes, right? Markets change, clients change

If you go back to the athlete Sinner, he won Wimbledon last year, but he still showed up to this year's tournament with the mentality of someone who [00:22:00] has everything to prove

Not someone who I've been there, done that, I know everything and nobody can touch me. The match he played against the German player wasn't easy. He actually lost the first set, I think, right? So he had to stay on top of his game to win again. So your past success does not guarantee your future success.

You have to keep investing in your client acquisition, keep nurturing your network. You need to keep showing up as if you're building. You need to keep being innovative, pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone, because in some ways you always need to do that to stay in business. And as they say, if you're not growing, you're dying.

In business, you always need to be growing, and I think that's also true in sports. As an athlete, you also always need to be [00:23:00] growing, because if not, there will be somebody else who does, and they will come and win over you

Okay, lesson five. This one is inspired by both Sinner and Vozina, and I think it's a lesson that every entrepreneur needs to hear, and that's that success is never a solo sport. When even though if you think about tennis, you might think it is a solo sport, but when Sinner won Wimbledon, the first people he thanked were his team, his coach, Darren Cahill

His coach, Darren Cahill, called Sinner's ability to bounce back after Roland-Garros a sign of the maturity of the player we're working with. His whole team spent weeks in intensive training blocks in Monaco preparing specifically for Wimbledon. And then if you think about Vozinha he was-- when he was named the player of the match [00:24:00] after shutting out Spain, what he said was, "I was named Man of the Match, but this is for all of my teammates.

Without them, nothing would be possible."

These two amazing players in their respective sports that are at top of the game, and they have every reason to point at themselves and say, "Hey, look what I did." And yet they both immediately pointed at the people around them. Because the truth is that elite athletes know

Without support, they cannot get where they are. And I think too many business owners underestimate that. Your success is never just the product of your talent alone. It's a combination of your skills, your strategy, your innovation, and then the people who support you, challenge you, guide you, and push you forward.

So professional athletes at the top of their game, they have [00:25:00] coaches, nutritionists, psychologists, physiotherapists, analysts, a whole system of expertise around them so that the one person stepping onto the court or onto the field or the pitch can perform at their absolute best. And as a business owner, even if you're a solopreneur, even if you're the only person responsible for your results, you also need support.

And that might look like a business coach, a mentor, an accountability partner, or a virtual assistant who frees up your time, a bookkeeper who helps you with the finances, a community of peers who also understand what you're going through If you're trying to build alone, figure everything out alone, and carry the weight of every decision alone, that is not really [00:26:00] resilience.

That is unnecessary resistance and making your journey harder than it needs to be

The best in the world don't do it alone, and neither should you

Okay, let's move to baseball now and the story that has been very close to home here in Toronto, and that lesson is even the best have hard seasons. So in Blue Jays in Toronto, we have one of the best players, one of our best players named is Vladimir Guerrero Jr. We call him Vladi, and he's one of the most talented baseball players of his generation.

He's a five-time All-Star, a two-time Silver Slugger. Last season, he was absolutely amazing, like electric. He was leading the Blue Jays on an incredible postseason all the way to the World Series, and [00:27:00] there he actually won the league championship MVP and had a batting average of nearly four hundred. And you would think that the guy was unstoppable.

And then this season happened. So through the first half of twenty twenty-six season, as I'm recording it, it's still the case, Guerrero has just had four home runs, which is very low for his talent. His power sports numbers are at their lowest since his rookie year, and he's under a lot of pressure because Blue Jays signed him for a fourteen-year contract, five hundred million dollars as the n- face of the brand.

And right now he's struggling to find the version of himself that earned that deal Now, he's dealing with a back injury, and then the team is working with him through [00:28:00] it. And, most analysts and experts out there really think he will find his way back. But the point I wanna make is that even the best out there have hard seasons.

Even people who are exceptional at what they do, who have proven themselves over and over at the highest level, who have the talent, the work ethic, the track record, the team behind them, go through periods where nothing clicks, where the results don't reflect the hard work and effort they're putting in, where the very thing that they've been able to do feels suddenly super hard and out of reach.

And that happens in business as well I have worked with clients who were doing incredibly well for many years, growing revenue, landing great clients, feeling like they had finally figured things out, only to come to the [00:29:00] point when something shifts again. And whether it's the economy or the personal challenge, market changes, a period of burnout, and then suddenly they're not creating the results that they're used to creating, and then everything feels harder.

But that doesn't mean that when you're in that pre- period, something is fundamentally wrong. It just means you are in a hard season, and hard seasons are a normal thing. They're part of every business that lasts long enough to have them, right? Of course, if you run your business for a couple years, maybe you don't experience that.

But if you're in business for a long haul, hard seasons are a normal part of that journey. But what separates the business owners who come out on the other side from the ones who don't is resilience, the ability to stay in it and push through, the [00:30:00] ability to diagnose what's happening and address it, adjust, ask for help, and then keep showing up even when the results aren't what you expect

And the Blue Jays aren't giving up on Guerrero. They're working through it with him, right? So don't give up on yourself when you're in a hard season either. This is exactly when you need to double down, work on your mindset, rethink your strategy, rethink your systems, and get the support you need because that's where it matters the most

The final lesson comes from the most personal sporting experience I had this summer, and that was when my daughter and I, we went to watch Toronto Temple play the Golden State Valkyries in the women's NBA game along with family of mine from Europe [00:31:00] And it was just a great experience. And watching these incredible women play at such high level and just experiencing the feeling, the energy of the arena was awesome And what it reminded is that the game is always dynamic, and the business is dynamic, too.

The game, it was a rollercoaster, okay? The Tempo came out strong in the first quarter. They were leading, playing really well, looking sharp. And then in the second quarter, things shifted. They started falling behind. Mo- their momentum changed, and then Golden State team started finding their own rhythm because, of course, they weren't on the home turf.

And then the third quarter, the Tempo leveled up again. They caught up on the points. They came back in front again and looked like a different team. And then fourth quarter, the Tempo lost the lead again, [00:32:00] and they lost that particular game in the tournament. So it was very dynamic, constantly changing, and it reminded me of something like I always say to my clients, business is not a straight line.

It doesn't go up towards the right in a clean, predictable arc, right? It ebbs and flows. You have quarters where everything is clicking clients are coming, you know exactly how to create new clients, how to deliver, and then there's quarters where nothing is working or things are not clicking. You have months where clients find you easily and months when you're doing everything right, working hard, and still waiting, or still your results are not reflecting all the hard work you're doing There's moments of momentum and there's moments of resistance

And in all that [00:33:00] dynamic, the high moments, the low moments, what determines your long-term success is how consistently you do the things that matter, how consistently you show up and play the game, like taking care of yourself

Like for example, taking care of yourself. You are your business's biggest asset, so your energy, your mind, your health are key to your business success. Like investing in your skillset, right? Practicing those basics and then keep learning and growing on top of that foundation, becoming better and better at what you do understanding your clients deeply.

What they n- need now might be different from what they will need two years from now

And the ability to bounce back from harder times, the resilience isn't something you just have or you don't. You actually [00:34:00] build it. It's something you work on daily through your habits, through your mindset, through facing the challenges that you have and working through them. And just, keep showing up, keep playing no matter what the scoreboard is telling you in any given moment.

The game isn't over until you decide it's over

The Tampa team played all four quarters, right? That's the game of basketball. There's four quarters. They didn't walk off the court in the middle when they fell behind, right?

And that's the only chance you actually have to win, to keep playing. And in business, you truly can keep playing as long as you decide to, right? Nobody tells you there's only four quarters. You can keep going, stay in the game, keep playing, and the score can always change

So there we go, seven lessons from an incredible summer of [00:35:00] sports, and let me leave you with those highlights. Number one, you're never too old to start, to build, to pursue what matters to you. Vezina proved it at 40, and so many others even later. Number two, everything you've lived and learned before has been preparing you.

Don't discount it. Three, your timing is perfect for you. Stop measuring your chapter against someone else's. Lesson four, don't take your success for granted. Keep investing in your growth even when things are going well. Five, success is never solo. Build your support system like the professional athlete you are Lesson six, hard seasons are part of the every long journey.

Resilience is what carries you through. And seven, business is dynamic. Keep taking care of yourself, [00:36:00] keep showing up, and keep playing. I hope this episode brought you some energy and some perspective as we move through the summer. And if it resonated, I would love for you to share it with a fellow business owners who needs to hear one of those lessons right now And if you wanna talk about where you are in your own business journey, which season you're in, what's feeling hard, what's possible, my complimentary consultation is always a great place to talk about it and start.

I will leave the link in the show notes. As always, thank you very much for listening, and I will see you next week. Bye.