The Will to Win

Are you a senior leader who regularly reads this newsletter, loves talking about leadership, culture creation, and team building, and is trying to improve the performance of your team? Our small, private group of leaders in sports and business is growing at the end of the summer. Learn more here or after today’s newsletter. 

Tomorrow is the opening of the 29th Olympic summer games in Paris, where 45 competitions are held with 10,500 athletes competing across 329 events. 

Each one of the Olympic athletes arriving in “The City of Light” will have expectations to stand on the platform, hearing their national anthem and putting a medal around their necks. 

Their self-confidence entering the games will be justified as the selection methods to represent their home country is highly competitive and grueling. 

From our confidence comes expectations.The higher our beliefs in our talents, the more our minds fuel our expectations. 

We need a strong sense of confidence to compete at the highest level; yet, when those confident beliefs infuse our expectations, it can become counterproductive to our performance. Having confidence is great, allowing expectations to creep into our minds is not. 

When we are confident in our talent, we have a sharp sense of focus, we also have the courage to take on difficult challenges. The trust we place in ourselves; then allows us to raise the bar each day. Our mindset is moving forward with positive gains. Then our mind expects us to always outperform yesterday, we believe we can reach perfection, simply by doing the work. The pending outcome fuels our expectations. Because of those expectations, we shift from the present and into the future, which then forces us to make judgements on the outcome. If we fail to achieve our pre-determined expectations, we then lose confidence in our ability. It’s a dangerous slope balancing internal confidence with internal and external expectations. 

What every athlete and leader must understand when balancing confidence and expectations is we are more than our performance. We are more than our one-time achievements. Each day is a new challenge, a new mountain to climb, a new goal to achieve. And we have to expect greatness will elude us. Vince Lombardi the former coach of the Packers is famous for saying “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” Yet, he would often remind his team “The Will to Win.” far outweighs the outcome. 

American poet Berton Braley is best known for his poem, “The Will to Win”

If you want a thing bad enough
To go out and fight for it,
Work day and night for it,
Give up your time and your peace and
your sleep for it

If only desire of it
Makes you quite mad enough
Never to tire of it,
Makes you hold all other things tawdry
and cheap for it

If life seems all empty and useless without it
And all that you scheme and you dream is about it,

If gladly you'll sweat for it,
Fret for it, Plan for it,
Lose all your terror of God or man for it,

If you'll simply go after that thing that you want.
With all your capacity,
Strength and sagacity,
Faith, hope and confidence, stern pertinacity,

If neither cold poverty, famished and gaunt,
Nor sickness nor pain
Of body or brain
Can turn you away from the thing that you want,

If dogged and grim you besiege and beset it,
You'll get it!

To ensure expectations never derails confidence, we as athletes or leaders must stress the will, not the outcome. We must follow Braley’s words, ignore the pitfalls of expectations and focus solely on the will. 

The “will” eliminates expectations. 

We’re slowly growing the size of the Daily Coach Network, adding up to 15 new members at the end of the summer. Applications to join are due tomorrow - July 26th. 

The Daily Coach Network was created to give senior sports execs, coaches, and business leaders a small, private group where they can discuss ideas and challenges leading their teams and themselves, without a big time commitment.

Missed our New Member Info Session last week? You can watch the recording here.  

Let us know what you think...

Want to Advertise with us? Click here.