Imagine being Caitlin Clark.

You’re a WNBA rookie, doing well considering your lack of professional experience, but currently ranked 15th among all WNBA players on offense.
Yet you’re the biggest star in women’s basketball, and it often feels like you have the future of women’s sports on your shoulders. Also, maybe related, you’re a magnet for hard fouls.
Final ingredient: You’re playing on a team, the Indiana Fever, that wasn’t expected to be very good. You lost your first five games in the league, and went 2-8 to start the season.

Then, you start winning. And people lose their minds.

This is the latest chapter in the Caitlin Clark saga, and it’s one of the most interesting yet, because over the weekend, Clark’s Fever won their fourth game in a row. The scrutiny only intensified.

It’s part of the cost of being the game’s player of the future. But it’s also a test of Clark’s poise and focus, just as she’s facing her toughest tests yet on the court.

In short, we’ve gone from Clark fielding nonstop questions like, “How do you feel playing for the worst team in the league?” to questions like, “Do you think you guys are good enough to win the WNBA championship?” in the space of just a few days.

It would be quite a storybook ending, wouldn’t it, Caitlin? 

Winning a professional championship in your first year, after failing ever to win the NCAA championship?

After the Fever got their fourth-in-a-row victory Friday, over the Atlanta Dream, 91-79, Clark had an answer for all of the hype. And it was pure emotional intelligence:

I think everybody just loves instant satisfaction in our world.

No one came in here and said we were going to be WNBA Champions from day one in our locker room. That was never our goal. Our goal was to get back to the playoffs and we’re fighting for that every single night.

This is the first time we’ve won four home games in a row since 2015. You have to have perspective on things, and that goes for life too. Like, have perspective on life. And there just needs to be solid perspective on what this team can accomplish. And I think everybody in our locker room had that.

Nobody ever hung our heads. We had the hardest schedule to start. We didn’t get to practice much and we’re playing with the most inexperienced team in the WNBA. So, I mean, I think this group is starting to click and build some chemistry and it’s one day at a time.

But like I said, everybody loves instant satisfaction.

That’s the key: Everbody just loves instant satisfaction.

It’s simply too much to expect Clark to land in the league and win a championship right away.

It took Michael Jordan seven years to win his first NBA championship, and it took nine years for LeBron James to win a trophy.

It’s a different sport, obviously, but it took Serena Williams four years after turning pro to win her first major open championship.

In that context, think about what Clark’s answer did:

First, it turned the tables — making the idea of “everybody just loves instant satisfaction” seem like a human failing that we need to improve.
Second, she was even-keeled, tempering the lows that she said she and the Fever felt as they started the season with the highs that they felt after winning.
Finally, she focused on long-term goals: getting the Fever into the playoffs this year, and (we presume) winning the WNBA championship somewhere down the road.

As Clark correctly pointed out, the philosophy she shared applies to life — and business, as well.

As I write in my free e-book 9 Smart Habits of People With Very High Emotional Intelligence, the entire point of building emotional intelligence is to learn to leverage emotions — both yours and other people’s — in a way that makes it easier to achieve your goals.

I think Clark demonstrated it very well here — along with resilience and balance.

Which is a good thing, because the Fever actually saw their winning streak come to an end in their next game: an 88 to 87 loss yesterday against the Chicago Sky.

That was an emotionally draining game, but afterward, Clark seemed to display the same even keel she did when her team came off a victory.

Some people love instant satisfaction.

Instead, the emotionally inteligent people among us — the ones who who achieve success — learn to develop a little more patience. And fight to achieve their goals, every single night.