Posted on 21 Jul, 2010 -
6 Secrets of Success from one of the world’s leading coaches
6 secrets of success and a life lived well - from one of the world’s leading sports coaches
How to motivate yourself, have faith in your own abilities and achieve your dreams
Why simple things like the way you put your socks on could make all the difference!
With the World Cup safely passed, I finally feel able to add my two-pennyworth of layman’s punditry.
The thing that astounded me (and you’ve got to remember that I’m not a regular follower and I’m a woman) is how so much apparently depends on the psychology of the players.
Surely a bit of pressure and nerves can’t stop world class football players from finding somebody from their own team to pass the ball to? Surely the pressure of playing against Slovenia - a Nation with a population of just two million - can’t have reduced our men to the knackered, depressed group of losers they gave the impression of being by the end?
But I am told that it can - and I saw it for myself. When teams are feeling confident they do indeed seem to play a lot better. (Or was our failure all down to Rio Ferdinand’s absence as my husband claims?)
Give yourself this team talk from one of the best coaches in the world to throw off lack of confidence and achieve whatever you want to achieve
The same, of course, is true for our mere mortal selves. When you’re feeling confident in your own abilities, your abilities improve. When you don’t feel like you can do something, there’s a good chance that you can’t.
So perhaps the thing that we all need is the right coach? The right team talks? And the right frame of mind when we head out onto the pitch of life.
A little bit of Googling later and I have managed to find for us 6 Secrets of Success from one of the top sports coaches in the world. He’s the American basketball coach John Wooden who has helped the teams he’s coached win 10 National Championships (while no other coach has won more than 4!).
So perhaps we should listen! Here are my own adaptions of 6 of the secrets of success that appear in Brian D. Biro’s book on John Wooten, ‘Beyond Success: The 15 Secrets of Effective Leadership and Life’:
Secret No. 1. Industriousness
Industrious for Wooden is more about focus than working long hours. Don’t wear yourself out but work well when you do. Plan and review what you do carefully to make your efforts count.
Always be clear about what it is you want to achieve and know what steps need to be taken to achieve it. Deal with problems in a free-flowing manner and embrace opportunities and solutions quickly and positively.
Decide carefully what you need to do and get on and do it. Always recognise your achievements at each step of the process.
Secret No. 2. Enthusiasm
Wooden always said that an average team is willing to give its best while a great team is eager to do so. You are unlikely to give your best unless you feel excited and enthusiastic.
To keep yourself highly motivated in this way, two things are important.
First of all, even the smallest details and the most mundane tasks need to feel important to your mission. When new players joined Wooden’s team, for example, he always lectured them on how to put on their socks. Why? Because if they put them on wrongly they would get sore feet and wouldn’t be able to play so well.
Secondly is the importance of being in a constant state of learning. Even if you think you know a lot already, study another area to re-fire your enthusiasm.
Secret No. 3. Determination
Achieving our goals… succeeding in our endeavours… can take a lot of bravery and determination in the face of setbacks, failures and challenging times.
Wooden always told his players that their greatest challenge wasn’t the opposing team or the limitations of their talent - but overcoming their own self-doubt.
One important key to maintaining your determination is to make sure that the questions you ask yourself can have a positive answer instead of a negative one.
Instead of ‘Will I be able to do this?’, for example, say ‘How will I do this?’ Instead of asking yourself ‘Will I be able to cope with this challenge?’, ask yourself ‘What will my future look like once I’ve overcome this challenge?’
Secret No. 4. Alertness
In any situation, keep your mind open to a multitude of possibilities. Listen carefully to everyone you talk to and reply to them carefully as well.
Do not allow your brain to get lazy. The brain likes habitual action and thought patterns because it makes it feel comfortable. So get in the habit of challenging and pushing it further!
Secret No. 5. Confidence
I liked this quotation sent to me by a reader recently on the subject of confidence:
“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.”
Theodore Seuss Giesel
Confidence is an emotion or state of mind that can be just as fleeting as any other. Even the most confident people suffer a lot of hours of self-doubt. Even the most self-doubting have moments of confidence.
To conjure of feeling of confidence when you need it, try to think back to a similar situation where you did feel confident and preferably where you performed really well. Really think back to that time and feel how you felt then.
Wooden would get his players to have a list of moments of victory and personal achievement that they could return to whenever they needed a boost.
Secret No. 6. Competitive greatness
To take his players to an even higher level, Wooden taught them that success was not so much about winning all their games but more of a peaceful state of mind that they could enjoy every day if they kept it replenished.
In order to replenish this peaceful state of mind, players were encouraged to see the opposition not so much as a threat but as an opportunity to enable them to release their own greatness, energy and talent. The better the opposition, the greater the high you can experience from the challenge.
Do not be afraid of aiming high. By aiming high you can enjoy the feeling of being the best that you can be… of overcoming your obstacles… and bravely and confidently reaching for success.
Look for success not just for your own ends but for the ends in themselves… for other people… and the progress of the human race…
A final thought on football and life
In an interesting article I read recently about why football (soccer) will never be big in the US, the author said that US fans expect games to have big scores. Only in Europe would we be happy to watch an hour and a half of a game that might end in a score of 0:0.
It’s always good to get scores, I guess. But at the end of the day, the importance of the game is having FUN as a player.
