I learned a fairly important life lesson today and I consider myself extremely privileged to have been able to recognize the moment for what it was. I asked one of my Mentors this morning on a training teleseminar call about how competitiveness affects one’s ability to be able to attract the things they truly want into their reality. Being a very competitive tennis player for most of my life, I have always felt that this has been my reason for not achieving the very high goals I have always set for myself. That and maybe God was angry at me for something or I was paying a price for mistakes in a previous life. You know the drill? You start thinking up ridiculous reasons as to why things aren’t working in your life and generally start pointing the finger at things and people outside of ourselves.
Playing sport in general I feel is a huge imitator of life. It teaches us so much and this is what I have been teaching my 8 year old son. Sport teaches us about patience – generally we have to wait our turn before we have a go. It teaches us teamwork – we have to be able to work together to achieve the same goal. It teaches us about effective communication – I mean yelling at your fellow team player never helps does it? And it inadvertently teaches us confidence by demonstrating that when we really put in the training and try our best, we can sometimes get the result we are striving for. But how does this translate to our everyday lives and is it practical?
So here’s the lesson I learned (and thanks Sandy – you know who you are). Competitiveness in everyday life tends to be destructive. Whether it’s from a personal or a business perspective. Businesses that primarily focus on what their competitors are doing will eventually lose focus on what they are doing. Consumers aren’t stupid – they can see when a company is just copying another company with merely cheaper prices. I mean how many of us here in Australia shop at both Coles and Woolworths? Not too many I don’t think. We tend to stick with one or the other. But these companies are focussed so much on what each other is doing that I do wonder how long one or the other will last. So many smaller businesses go out of business due to a simple lack of focus because they become so fixated on who they are competing with, that they lose their own identity. Their own creativity. Their own flair. It can be the same in sport too. Do you really think Roger Federer spends all of his spare time watching what Rafael Nadal is doing? Of course not. He is focussed primarily on his own game and improving what he can about his own game. Same goes for all Olympians. They prepare themselves and go into qualifying believing they have done what they can and it comes down to the day as to whether or not their preparation has proved successful in competing against the other competitors.
I realized in myself that I had become competitive with everything, and it wasn’t right. I had always wanted to research what everyone else was doing, how they were doing it and why. What I have learned is just how completely irrelevant that is! You can never pretend to know what battles other people are fighting and what their journey is and why. That is between them and God. What I can do is focus on improving me and preparing myself in the best way possible. In tennis is certainly is important to recognize your opponents weaknesses and learn to recognize them early – yes. But if that is all you focus on, then your own game weakens and suffers. You don’t play at your best. You end up playing a game of not losing instead of winning. Totally backwards. If I lose against someone and I know I played the best game I could by bringing out the great shots I have prepared in my training, then I don’t feel so bad knowing that my opponent was the better player on the day. I take away what didn’t work for me and how I can improve on that.
I have learned not to focus on what my opponent did to win the game. That is irrelevant to my game. The exact same goes for business and life. If we take the focus off improving ourselves and just worry about what everyone is doing, we become the victim. We end up blaming everyone else and believe me I did this in tennis. I used to say things like “well if she didn’t keep doing those stupid shots down the line, then I would have had a chance.” It’s so childish. If I had’ve just focussed on playing my best game and what shots I do best to overwhelm my opponent, then the outcome may have been different.
You absolutely get what you focus on and if your focus is somewhere else aside from what you are doing, your results will reflect this. So today look at the areas of your life where you feel you are blaming outside factors for your lack of results. Then really analyse what it is that you can do to change and/or improve the situation. If we gave everything our absolute best, I promise you, we would quite literally astound ourselves. Give it a go and share with me your results.
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