The audience was silent while Steve Mesler talked about the moment that changed his life.
He had just graduated from UF’s College of Health and Human Performance, and he was looking back at an athletic career that, due to consecutive injuries, had gone nowhere.
Ten years later, he found himself on the podium at the 2010 Winter Olympics with his fellow bobsledding teammates and a gold medal around his neck.
How did he do it?
Mesler said an intense feeling of failure fueled his success, and anybody can take those feelings and turn them around for the better.
This is what his presentation, The Science of Success, was all about.
Designed by Mesler and his friend Jayson Krause, the program talks about how to take one’s personal and professional success through the stages of failure, rebuilding, practicing and believing.
It uses the science of an Olympic athlete’s physical training and relates it to the social and mental realities of everyday life, according to Krause.
Krause, of Calgary, Alberta, is a former member of the Canadian bobsledding team and has been a Success Coach with the company Driven By Passion Inc. for four years.
The two men presented their program to a group of about 30 students and staff members Monday morning in Hough Hall.
To keep things interesting, they used a juggling exercise with two random students to stress the importance of practicing a skill. One student also came up to do a pushup test to help demonstrate a point about pushing one’s limits.
“We’ve turned this into something we feel like we can help people with,” Mesler said.
The program has three steps: first, how to push oneself to the limit and recover from failure; second, how to acquire skills in one’s chosen field through practice and repetition; and third, how to believe one can continue to change for the better.
Naderge Bissainthe, a fourth-year finance major, said she found the presentation to be relevant to her major.
She said practice and repetition helped her make it through some of her more difficult classes.
“It was really hard for me to understand what I was doing and why I was doing it,” she said. “But it really becomes second nature.”
The event was open to anybody, but business students occupied most of the seats.
The target audience, according to Mesler, is the business world. They’ve already worked with big names, such as MassMutual Financial Group.
Dr. John Banko, of the Warrington College of Business Administration, organized the visit. He said this approach to life is different from what students learn in their classes.
“What will make you happy in life is very different from what we teach here,” Banko said.
