Coaching little league football this year brought me back to when I used to play the game.  It was not what I was remembering about the game that shook me so much as it was that I had forgotten about my days as a competitive athlete.

With a few years under my belt since my playing days, I found myself looking at the game with a new perspective. I couldn’t help but admire the simplicity of football, especially when compared to what I go through in business every day.

I felt a little jealousy over the fact that in football you know exactly when the game starts, exactly how much time is left and exactly what the score is. How would your day change if you had a large game clock on your office wall letting you know exactly what the score was and how much time was left in the game?  Would your daily priorities change with this type of clarity of purpose? Of course they would. If you reframe the way you approach your job, you can create this type of environment and tap into some of the basic lessons of any competitive sport.

A person cannot adequately prepare to win when he is not sure what winning looks like. The simplest, most powerful lesson you can learn in business is how to properly frame your day. You must construct your day before the day starts, so that you know exactly what you are setting out to do. At the end of the day, you must be able to look back and see if you won or lost the day.

How can you determine whether you won or lost the day?  That is the beauty of this type of approach to your day; it hinges on your ability to determine what your goal is. You must start your day with a game plan and you must be able to determine if you succeeded or failed by the end of the day.  At the end of every football game, there is a winning team and a losing team.

Set a goal for yourself in much the same fashion and then work backward to accomplish your goal.  If the goal is to score a certain number of “points,” then back up and ask yourself what actions are required to score those points.  If the actions include talking to a certain number of people, then setting your daily goal to talk to a particular number of people would set up a win/lose situation over which you have complete control.

If your goal is to finish a 20-page report, and you have one week to do it, then simply break the goal down into the steps required to complete it. One step equals one goal; you either win or lose.

You must not get down on yourself in this game. If you lose one day, dust yourself off, make appropriate adjustments and get back in there for the next play. Repeat this same process when you are successful, and day after day, week after week, you will be molding yourself into a rugged mountain of personal productivity, winning life one day at a time.

Tom Richard, a Toledo-based sales trainer, gives seminars, runs sales meetings and provides coaching for salespeople. Visit www.TomRichard.com, call (419) 441-1005 or e-mail tom@tomrichard.com.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 24th, 2008 at 1:27 am and is filed under Selling Points, Toledo Business Link.
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