I have known many successful athletes.

I have also known athletes with remarkable achievements.

And I have known others for whom success slipped through their fingers, like sand on the beach in childhood.

At this time of year, filled with greetings and good wishes, we all tend to look back. We remember what once was: our family, our life, our expectations, our dreams for the future. Christmas has a quiet way of opening drawers of memory that remain closed for most of the year.

At times, our mind strongly seeks patterns and overrepresents isolated moments. And the problem is not that it remembers them—leaving a gentle scent of nostalgia in our mood—but that it sometimes tortures us by focusing on what seems to have been there before and is no longer.

But that impression is just that: an impression. Psychology clearly shows that we tend to magnify memories and turn into habits what may have happened only once or twice. We also tend to focus more on the context surrounding success than on the actual process that made it possible.

Something very similar happens in sport. I have seen many athletes attribute a great season to entirely wrong parameters, simply because certain elements of the environment appeared to be related to the outcome. At the same time, their minds turned isolated events into supposed habits that never truly existed.

The consequence is significant: athletes chasing scenarios, routines, or rituals that had little or nothing to do with their success, trying to repeat formulas that existed only in memory.

Athlete, this Christmas and at the start of a new year, my wish for you is not only that you perform at your best again, but that you make a sound diagnosis of your past successes: that you distinguish context from process, the circumstantial from the reproducible, the emotional from the essential. If you need it, seek help with this analysis—do not fall into a mysticism that will lead you nowhere.

It is there—and not in nostalgia—that the true path back is usually found.

Merry Christmas!