Another tennis lesson, another life lesson or two.
My tennis coach Nick Matthews is a great player and an amateur psychologist as well. When I woke up this morning, I felt groggy and my legs weighed a ton. When I showed up at the court at 10:00am, I worried that I'd half to quit the lesson in less than the allotted hour. Well, I hung in there, played seventy minutes and gained some confidence at the end of the session in my swing and physical stick-to-it-ness. That alone, was a lesson learned about finishing what I commit to (watch The Wheezer Story for more).
But the bigger lesson came when I half way swung at a shot and ended up with a bloopy winner. Rare point! Nick came up to the net and motioned for me to join him. "You'll never get confidence by winning a point the wrong way. That shot wasn't in form, you pinged it." The victory dance stopped. He was right.
When you play a game, there are rules that you abide by and form that you adhere to. Good form in tennis is about hitting through the ball, using your big muscles. When I swat at the ball with only my right arm only involved, I'm not doing it right. And at a subconscious level, I know very well that I'm not doing it right. When I hit one perfectly, I feel it, and Nick's right, I grow in confidence from my good form and positive results. When I hit a funky shot without regard to form, and I win the point, I know that it was a lucky-stroke - unlikely to ever happen again.
This isn't just a sports lesson, we'd all do well to take that into our professional life as well. There are rules for your business, industry or vocation. You agree to them when you hang out your shingle or agree to take the job. If you don't like the rules, don't agree to them.
Same goes for form. That's the process that's been built over time, a proven system for success. You are likely taught this early on by your boss or a mentor. There's a right way and a wrong way to do any job from administration to sales to management. In the world of business services, for example, a good sales person knows to have a conversation with the client instead of just showing some power points or a brochure and going for the close. When you short circuit that form, and get the occasional slam dunk sale, you don't feel like you earned it and you know deep in your heart that you've just had a once-in-a-hundred experience. You don't get any swagger from it, and the temptation to do it again calls into account the credibility of the system.
Your company culture may say that when a manager is upset at an employee, he should remain calm and focus on business results. When he, instead, screams at the person in question in front of the entire office, he's not in good form. The offending employee may apologize, scramble to fix the problem and swear he'll never do it again. This will not cause the manager to feel confident in himself, the company culture and advice he'd been given about dealing with his people. If others in the office observe this success through screaming tirade, they may begin to question the system too. No one wins.
Deep confidence at work requires self-belief, trust in others, and faith in the system. If you do anything to raise your buy-in to the system (rules and form), you general feelings of confidence will soar. That's why, when I follow Nick Morgan's process of writing a keynote speech, and it works, I'm confident at every level. If I give a talk that works, but don't take all the steps that I know I should, bad things happen. I get lazy or even worse, decide that the system isn't worth sticking to. Mostly, my integrity eats away at any feeling of accomplishment, pointing out how much better I would have done had I done it right. In any situation, my confidence will shrivel over time.
Next week, before you go to work, review: What are the rules, and am I following them? What is good-form for my role and am I following it? If you've started to just get by instead of considering yourself always striving for excellence, you might be shocked to find that you need to brush up on the basics again and humble down to obeying them. When you do it like your leaders suggest, and it works, you'll find that you are relaxing a bit, feeling more sure of success, because the system works! You also start to believe in yourself too as a good student that is highly capable of executing agreed upon plans. You believe you'll get it right the next time too. Any investment you make in form is an investment in the system - and rocket fuel for your confident outlook.
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This is a concept that's included in my next book, Today We Are Rich. Visit the book page and you can pre-order a copy and receive a free eBook excerpt with an entire principle! You can also visit its facebook page too.
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