“Have utmost concern for what’s right rather than who is right.” John Wooden How did the human race become top of the food chain? How did we find ourselves in this position, where we have completely transformed the world, leaving our mark in every continent. We not only beat out stronger, faster and more aggressive animals, we also beat out other human species to be the lone human species on earth. How did that happen? It happen for many different reasons, however two stick out in my mind as most important. Firstly we were able to break down complex problems, and build tools to allow us to overcome these problems. Imagine the board meetings held to discuss the products needed to take down a wooly mammoth!!!!! Secondly, we developed the understanding of co-operation. We quickly learned that if we work together, and use the tools we built to create a solution, we could be ultimately successful. We therefore became better hunters, we created settlements with a shared purpose and defined roles that benefited the whole colony. Hunters hunted, farmers farmed and so on. This cooperation was born out of survival, however it’s necessity is still prevalent in the relative safety of our modern world. In this very safe bubble of Western society, where the most people look after number one, it appears that we have lost the want and the need to work together. Social media provides an illusion of togetherness and closeness to people, however depression and social anxiety is growing. The World Health Organisation is currently saying that the most common form of illness in the next 20 years is going to be depression. We have it all, seemingly, however we are missing something fundamental. I see it constantly when coaching basketball and in the work environment. The willingness to work together with somebody for mutual benefit seems all but lost. We need human connections to enable us to thrive personally, however we seem to have lost this understanding. We need each other as much now as we did when we were hunting mammoths. So, what can we do to develop a cooperative mindset, so we can truly work to not only our own advantage, but the advantage of others? We live in a world of quick hits and life hacks. Click this button for 2,000 instagram followers, do this for instant radiant looking skin, get a six pack in a week!!!! These are the messages being seen by millions of us daily over all the social media platforms. The message is slowly sinking in that we don’t have to try, we don’t need anyone else’s help, what we need to do is send £9.99 in order to receive this special, once in a lifetime fix that will make you awesome. This is in true opposition to what is needed to create cooperation. Cooperation takes time, patience, communication and time (I know I have said time twice). The problem is we don’t take the time to actually work out how or (even more importantly why) we should work together. Let us look at a couple of scenarios where we are introduced to new potential partners. In different aspects of our lives we act very differently to meeting new people, and my main question is should we? The first scenario is the job interview. In the modern day job interview the competency based interview reigns supreme. In this interview you spend hours developing your CV or application form to convince your potential employer that you have all the correct skills, honed through all the right workplace experience to be able to deliver the work required. Then you spend an indiscriminate amount of time meeting your potential employers face to face and reiterating your amazing skills and the amazing work you have completed with these skills. You tell them you are a team player that can work on your own initiative and you can use all Microsoft Office software. You get offered the job, start work, and six months down the line everyone realises that you don’t fit into the team, you are unhappy with your work and you spend more energy fighting the establishment and your boss than you do being creative, productive and happy. Why is this? For me, the whole employment process focused on what you can do and how do you do it, rather than looking at why you want the work, why you would work passionately and diligently everyday and why you would be a good colleague. You may have the skills, but you have personality traits, or points of view, or behaviours that will not make you friends in the team you will be working with. Contrast this with a first date. On a first date you spend the whole time trying to find out about the other person. Their family history, where they grew up, what they like and don’t like and what they are passionate about. You spend the time getting to know them, at least at a superficial level. You are trying to make an educated guess at whether or not you would like to spend more time with this person. You do this through story telling, showing pictures of your family and sharing your dreams. Sometimes you decide after the first date, no thank you, we would not work, sometimes it takes a few dates to decide this and sometimes we look back smiling 10 years later, mortgaged to the hilt, with three children nipping your heals for cinema money, more chocolate and another new toy. The point here is when we are on our first date we are laying the foundations of cooperation, we are asking the pertinent questions that allow us to decide whether this person is worth spending more time with. We are looking at aligning our values. So what can we take away from all this? I believe the following are all very important aspects to building and maintain a cooperative relationship, whether it is at home, at work, in our friendships or when we play sport:
In the modern world cooperation is something that everybody talks about, but very few actually do. It is a skill that is becoming a lost art, however it is one that should be cherished, developed and grown. It is vital for our survival. So go out there, cooperate, create and grow. Peace and happiness.
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‘Be true to yourself. Be true to those you lead.’ John Wooden In my previous post in this John Wooden Pyramid of Success series, I wrote about loyalty from a personal perspective. The premise being that in order to be loyal to others you need to start with being loyal to who you are first. Being loyal to yourself with respect to how you train your brain, how you prepare your body and how you tend to your spiritual life are all very important components to being able to show loyalty to others in your life. If this is the first blog post you have read by me you can find part one of this blog post here. So why does loyalty to others matter at home, in sports, in our personal relationships and in work? Well, as the title suggests loyalty can act like a currency and be the platform for positive business decisions, growth of a friendship, winning or losing in a sports setting and a happy relationship with your loved one and family. Like finances you need to trade in loyalty carefully because it can take a long time to build up a solid loyalty reserve, but once you spend it, it is gone and is very hard to get back. You need to be careful with how you use it, you need to show it your respect and you need to use it wisely, or else you will find yourself out in the cold looking in. However, I am not talking about loyalty in the way that Trump views it. It has been alledged that Trump has repeatedly asked for loyalty from people like Comey, the former FBI Director. The press has been awash with Comey’s public testimoney that Trump repeatedly asked for his loyalty in their now famous private dinner. As Comey tried to explain to the President he would be honest with him, not personally loyal. What Trump was asking for here was loyalty to him personally, loyalty to his needs. Not loyalty to the American people. This type of loyalty is wrong, it is incorrect, it is perverted and it does not build an open and honest working relationship that would not allow Comey, in his role as the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to carry out his role impartially. If Trump were any sort of leader he would have understood that Comey stating he would be honest with him was Comey showing loyalty not only to the American people, but also to the office that Trump not inhabits. Loyalty is not getting your own way from others to the detriment of others. It is not something you should, or can command from someone. It is something earned. When looking at loyalty in a more personal environment the most obvious form of loyalty (or at least the type of loyalty that is in the public domain most often) is not cheating on your partner. However loyalty runs much deeper than this in a personal relationship. Loyalty is pulling your weight, it is doing what you say you are going to do, it is putting family first, it is helping each member of your household to be happy and successful, it is about being consistent in all that you do. Loyalty in the home is very much about the small details. When I have conversations with other people at the school gates a lot of the conversations are based on when things don’t go right in the home. ‘He did not get up with the baby last night….she did not wash my work clothes so I am going to work in this….she did not buy the right coffee and now I haven’t had my caffeine hit…..he was out late last night with his pals again…..’. The list is endless, however each of these scenarios all have the same underlying issue, a specific routine or function has not been carried out to someone’s satisfaction. Ok, so this can happen from time to time, especially with babies and young children in the household. However, where has the loyalty been broken? For me it is the loyalty of the relationship itself. When we commit to one another we are committing to building a shared life that is better that the one either party could or would have on their own. At least that where we start. When we get a few years down the line and kids come along, and job promotions happen and we get a nice big house and people carriers we can lose sight of what we started in the first place. This ideal image of familial bliss has been eradicated and replaced with this messy, tiring, noisy tantrum filled, money draining reality that we were not prepared for. In this instance it is all too easy to take our focus off the dream of family bliss and focus on each and every small annoyance that happens in family life. The small things become the big things and all of a sudden we are being and thinking negatively about our families, our partners and the life we are trying to build. We have broken the loyalty of the family unit, the trust that we have built up with our wives and children because we are so focused on somewhere in the future when our children behave impeccably, our wives always wash our favorite pants first and our house is always tidy. By focusing on happiness being somewhere out there, in the future, we lose sight of the fact that happiness is a process. Happiness is in the detail. Happiness is right here and right now, not somewhere in the future. Once we understand that we can be loyal to our partners, our kids and our family unit and in that loyalty is where we find joy. So what about when we have a fight with a friend or partner? How can we be loyal to someone when we are in the thick of it arguing with them? Chade-Meng Tan, a former google employee and now a world leader in emotional intelligence shared in his 2012 book ‘Search inside Yourself’ how he deals with arguments in work and in the home. ‘Whenever I have a fight with my wife or a co-worker, I go to another room to calm down and after a few minutes of calming down, I do this exercise in stealth. I visualize the other person in the next room. I remind myself that this person is just like me, wants to be free from suffering just like me, wants to be happy just like me, and so on. And then I wish that person wellness, happiness, freedom from suffering, and so on. After just a few minutes of doing this, I feel much better about myself, about the other person, and about the whole situation. A large part of my anger dissipates immediately.’ He shows loyalty and respect to those in his life by removing himself briefly and going through a practiced routine that allows him to understand that the other person has the same wants and needs to be loved and happy and free from suffering. In the sports arena we have just seen the Golden State Warriors win their second championship in 3 years. This is a special group of basketball players, coaches and managers who have created a winning competitive environment that is built on care, compassion, joy and trust. I have written a previous article on this team, which you can find here. What is clear from player interviews after the final is the value all involved with the club place on loyalty. It was repeated by everyone interviewed that each player shows loyalty to each other and to the process of winning by how they turn up to train each day. They don’t skip any parts of the process and they spend time on the details. They sacrifice personal, individual glory for the wider team glory and they each do this in their own unique way. This team wins because of the collective strength they have, which is formed and solidified through a strong sense of loyalty to one another. In my time as a player and a coach I have been fortunate enough to have been on amazing teams, and have experienced the feeling of invincibility of being with a group of guys that I trusted 100%. It pulled us through in tough games, it helped us forgive when people made mistakes, it helped us play for each other and not against each other. The loyalty of those teams was often built up off the court, through social interactions, showing a care for each other and spending time getting to know one another. I have also been on teams that were filled with selfish, me first players. These teams always fell short and I could not wait to get out. Practice was not fun, there was no sense of enjoyment and motivation was low. As a coach I spend a large proportion of my time speaking to the players about sacrificing for the team, giving up their ego and instead feed into the team ego. A collective force that will help propel the players to a better place. However, working with young testosterone fuelled men can often mean that the team ego can very often be destroyed by something as simple as a bad pass or a miss timed shot. It is obvious that the loyalty capital has not been built up and will need some time to develop. So in your lives, as you move from home life to personal life to your hobbies be careful of how you are treating those around you. Work hard and diligently to build up a reserve of loyalty from friends and family that add value to your life. The currency of Loyalty will buy you happiness, self worth and joy, however it is in the act of loyalty that you will discover this. I was listening to the Tony Robbins Podcast today, the episode was called, 'Becoming an Extraordinary Leader' and was released on February 2nd 2017. This episode was an interview with General Stanley A. McChrystal and Chris Fussell, who both served with the American Army and had massively influential and important careers there. They now mentor businesses on leadership based on over 3 decades of experience leading men and women in some of the most hostile environments on the planet. General McChrystal gave some great information on the fundamentals of great modern leadership and how to keep your business on track in the modern world, when change is happening faster than ever before. The interview was packed with awesome nuggets of knowledge, however one such nugget really stuck with me and has kept me thinking all day about it. So I thought I would share it. General McChrystal described two very different styles of leadership with such simplicity it made them so clear and easy to understand. Firstly he explained that he has seen a lot of people lead like Chess Masters. He goes on to explain that Chess masters are in complete control of all their 16 chess pieces on the board. He moves one at a time, all the while plotting the next moves ahead. Reacting to his opponent, he is the one making all the decisions. The chess pieces do not make a decision, ever. They are all under his control and he is in complete command. Secondly he explained that modern leadership, when done well is like being a Gardener. A gardener does not actually grow any plants. The plants grow themselves. What the Gardener does is create the environment for the plants to grow. He turns to soil, gets rid of weeds, waters, prunes, feeds and generally looks after the garden. If he does his job right the garden will thrive and the plants will grow. I think this has stuck with me because it is so easy to be the Chess Master, our ego wants us to be in control and to be the one to be making all the moves. However this style of leadership is outdated and no longer produces results in the modern workplace, and it definitely does not work at home. It is stifling, and does not promote individual and team growth. No one in the team has the chance to use their decision making muscle therefore they stop using it. I now strive to be more like a Gardener in all aspects of my life. I want to create an environment for learning and growth. An environment like this is liberating, fun and full of energy. Not stifling and stuffy. It is important for me to create and maintain a healthy, growth mindset environment that allows my girls to want to learn, both in their education and life. My seven year old today was making pancakes, which my wife had taught her to do. She was doing the whole thing, making the batter, putting the batter in the pan, understanding when to flip the pancake and knowing when it was properly cooked. I was so proud to see her do this. I stayed well back, allowing her to stay in control, but stayed close enough to make sure she was using the gas and pancake safely, without burning herself. Getting her to approach her maths homework in the same way is challenging, but we are working together on that!!!!! In my basketball coaching I am working with young men aged 15-18. A potentially difficult age, as they seem to have all the answers. It is very important to create a supportive learning environment here, where mistakes are OK and an understanding that learning comes from making mistakes. Trying to blend the personality types, skill sets and hormones of this group is not easy and I often see myself as a guiding hand, rather than an iron fist. Next time a coach will see myself working away to clear out the weeds (or to put a better way, poor fundamentals), turning over the soil (working on skill development) and watering the plants (helping each player with coaching points and advice). I will make sure that the environment is relaxed, fun, engaging and challenging and I will work my hardest to allow the flowers (players) to grow. I will be a servant to their needs, in order to further their growth, not an all powerful decision maker cutting them down and stunting their growth. So, go out there and work on your gardens, your areas of influence, wherever that may be. Peace and Happiness. |
AuthorMy name is Andy Smyth, I have spent the last decade working in the field of Sports Development, where I have had the pleasure of working to grow leaders within local community sports clubs in Scotland. Archives
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