Resilience

If you Expect to win every race, and every training session to be the best one you have ever done, then think again. There will be highs, lows and periods where it just doesn’t seem to be coming together. As an athlete I had to lose a lot of races in the process of learning to win.

Question, were the lost races failures? For me it was just part of the process. In an 800m race there are lots of things that can go wrong, go off to quick thinking you will sustain that 50m lead over the chasing pack, set off too slow, getting boxed in, leaving it too late to kick for home, kicking too early for home, lapse in concentration, break to early off the first bend and so many more.

Guess what, I and every other 800m runner have done all of the above and many more. For me these are just part of the journey, every time we make mistakes, we take valuable lessons into the next race or training session, ‘No such thing as failure, only feedback’. We have to be prepared to make mistakes and we need to be able to bounce back from them. Now in sport the trick is making the mistakes when it doesn’t matter, saving our best performance for the championships, and to do that we rely on some of the other key traits we have as athletes..

Now of course making mistakes in business can be costly, so we need to have the right systems in place to spot them early on, it’s about constant evaluation and using the data we get to make changes. For me it was the stopwatch in training, for business you will have your own metrics. The importance is using the information rather than just chalking that one up as a bad day.

Even with all this in place you may still loose out on that contract that would secure your business for the next 10yrs, just like I didn’t deliver the performance I strived for at every championships, but the more you strive for success the more potential some things may not work out. So, when this happens, I believe you have two choices, sit back and dwell on what could have been, or learn from any mistakes and move on, I know which one I choose.

Contact me to find out how I can help your business become champions in your arena.