Building your business requires a strong “inner game.”
Every winning sports coach has put his own spin on what he considers crucial to success. Each has made his or her mark with what it takes to dominate their sport.
Don Shula's Everyone's a Coach: The Business Secrets of High Performance Coaching is an excellent book on leadership and winning from an extremely successful businessman and NFL coach.
In his book, Shula lays out what he considers the five most important qualities of a leader using a simple acronym COACH:
Confidence-driven (never compromise your beliefs)
Over-learning (practice until it's perfect)
Audible-ready (know when to change)
Consistency (respond predictably to performance)
Honesty-based (walk your talk)
Interestingly, there is a connection between the inner game in sport and the inner game in business.
I love to play golf. I mean...
I LOVE to play golf! I even invested in property on the 16th green to build our retirement home...while in my 30's. It's my way of clearing my head and completely shifting my focus from business for a few hours.
But I'm just as competitive in my golf game as I am in the game of business.
And if you've ever played golf, it's a head game...just like business is.
Surveys, studies and research consistently reaffirm that 85% of your success will depend on attitude, 15% on aptitude. Yet in formal education, the emphasis is on the opposite - 15% on attitude, 85% on aptitude.
So what is the inner game? The way I see it, the inner game can be broken down into three major components:
Self-esteem
Self-image
Self-discipline
I'm certainly not a psychologist...but sales is all about psychology. And being able to read people and get into the heads of prospective clients has served me very well in my career.
Everyone has insecurities that at times rear their head and mess with their ability to be productive. Here are a few practical things I remind myself to do when my ego takes a beating - yeah I've got a healthy ego 🙂
1. GET YOUR OWN FINANCIAL HOUSE IN ORDER
If you currently have massive debt, take massive action. Reduce debt, bring expenses under income, and invest every single month. I could go on a real rant here but will restrain myself.
2. MANAGE YOUR TIME PRODUCTIVELY
Cheryl seems to be able to multi-task better than I can, but I know myself - I have to focus on one thing at a time and block out everything else.
3. ASSOCIATE WITH POSITIVE-MINDED, PRO-ACTIVE PEOPLE
Spend your time who people who encourage and motivate you. Don't hang out with folks who are negative, critical, or jealous or your success.
4. CONTINUALLY INVEST TIME AND MONEY ON EDUCATING YOURSELF
I always have a marketing or sales related book that I'm working through. At the moment I'm deep into Built To Sell by John Warrillow
Your self-image is controlled mostly by self-imposed limits. Very few people ever perform beyond those self-imposed limits.
Perry Marshall has called this "rainmaker head trash" - it's the mental garbage that people who have the POTENTIAL to be rainmakers that causes them to sabotage themselves by thinking small.
A salesman whose father never earned more than $35,000 a year in his life may well see himself as a $35,000 a year guy. And he will subconsciously screw up the opportunities to earn more that come his way.
Self-Disciple, the third piece of the inner game, is in my humble opinion the most important.
Success and motivational author/speaker Jim Rohn says that most people do not associate lack of discipline with lack of success.
Most people think of failure as one earth-shattering event, such as a company going out of business or a home being foreclosed on.
Failure is rarely the result of some event; rather, it is what comes out of a long list of accumulated little failures which happen as a result of not having enough discipline. I agree. I find that most people understandably tend to look everywhere but in the mirror for the sources of their failures as well as the victories.
I'm here to tell you - from experience - it's not where you live, not the present state of the economy, not bad luck, not your competitors - it's your own discipline that makes the difference between excellence or mediocrity, between getting by or getting rich.
For 20 years, I rarely took a complete weekend off. I worked on my business. And then that business (my mortgage company) crumbled before my eyes. Did I feel like crap? Sure. Did I feel like a failure? No - I knew that I had the discipline to do it all over again. Now, I rarely work on the weekends.
"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed." ~ Michael Jordan
Select those areas that you know are your weakest links, your personal stumbling blocks - paperwork, daily self-investment study, answering emails, project management - and tackle those areas first.
What if a typical business day in your life was recorded?
A pro ball player knows that every single moment of his on-the-job performance is recorded on film, to be replayed and reviewed later in stop-action slow motion, for critique by his coaches and team members.
Of course, the professional football players who have to put up with this sort of thing are highly paid.
If your day was filmed and reviewed, how would you feel during the replay?
Yep, the inner game stuff is tough. If being successful were easy, everybody would be. You've got to decide what you really want to be, do, have, accomplish - and decide whether or not you're willing to be disciplined enough to make it happen.
Seize the day!
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[Image supplied by deltaMike]
