While sports often serve as a poor metaphor for life, reflecting on recent sports experiences has shed valuable light for me, personally. As I talk to coaches, highly successful ones, I find that they constantly seek to add new things to WHAT they do. The WHAT is important... But, I have learned this...most of us basically already know WHAT to do. Think about it...WHAT to do to lose weight? Eat less, exercise more. Not much mystery there. I was once doing a motivational talk to a group of business owners, and remember on the spur of the moment saying, you dont need an outside speaker to tell you WHAT you should do to make your business go...work hard, make a quality product at a fair price, give great customer service, treat your employees well. There! You dont need someone to tell you WHAT to do, do you? (They laughed and applauded...) The WHAT is not REALLY where the challenge is, and not really the difference maker... So what is? There are two deeper levels than answering WHAT to do... The first is HOW. HOW do you do the important things? HOW, for example, would a coach choose to run the pick and roll? All coaches want to score a basket with that play...the WHAT is the same. It is the HOW that sets them apart. But the third level is the deepest, the toughest, the most challenging. Defining WHY? WHY are you doing what you do, WHY do you believe what you believe? This to me is what the great coaches search for...and successfully answer for themselves...AND THEIR TEAMS. There is an old saying, You never really change the habit until you change the heart. The great coaches are constantly striving to get their players to understand and embrace WHY they do what they are doing, and how they are doing it. Most coaches can MAKE players do things. But that rarely leads to greatness. Greatness comes when coaches get players to WANT to do things, who embrace the HOW and the WHY, not just the WHAT. It starts with the leaders, themselves. I have talked to about a half a dozen highly successful coaches in the last two months, who personally did some soul searching of their own. They wanted better answers to those last two questions...HOW am I doing things, and WHY am I doing them that way? They constantly add and adjust WHAT they do, but, basically, they already KNOW what to do...they wanted better answers on the HOW and WHY... I contend the fact they dig to get those answers is one of the great keys to their Hall of Fame successes. -------------- I think this has been the most meaningful thing I have learned in my journey and challenges in the last year. I was raised by wonderful parents. I listened and learned...I knew WHAT was important, WHAT I should do, WHAT I wanted...or thought I wanted. But when I began to examine HOW I was attempting to do these things, I found them lacking. Which led to examining WHY? WHY was I doing these things? WHY was I acting like I did? Its a painful, challenging process. You must put EVERYTHING about yourself in play, under scrutiny, in question. Thats not comfortable for most of us...its far easier to take a thats the way Ive always done it approach. But when something jars us, jolts us, maybe unpleasantly...we are then often spurred to undertake that painful challenge. For coaches, it may be fewer wins, for businessmen lower profits. For me, it was a divorce and a heart attack...but it need not be so dramatic, I suppose. It is simply the desire to get to the best you. And to do that you HAVE to find out who you really are. And that, dear friends, only comes when you have the courage to face HOW and WHY head on... Thats what I believe, anyway... It is DEFINITELY more difficult, but its where the good stuff is. Its where the great coaches, the successful leaders, spend their time, and it is where I now know the most important life answers lie, in issues of love and faith and happiness and solitude and friendship and spirit. Sports cant be life and death...if so, youd be dead an awful lot, but in this case their lessons serve as a conduit to navigating a challenging maze that winds through WHAT and HOW and WHY to get to...WHO. WHO am I? WHO do I want to be? The never ending journey, continues...but now, with more vibrant colors...
Posted on: Thu, 16 Jan 2014 13:22:25 +0000
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