Who are we really competing against?
Our opponents change game to game; the mascots, personnel, locations, atmosphere, days and times all change night in and night out. Plus, depending on the sport, games are only a handful of days out of the year. That said, one foe remains constant. One mountain or obstacle that we must conquer every day we show up to compete. That opponent is ourselves: individually and collectively: "Who we are vs who we are striving to be”. Whether we realize it or not our biggest opponent is ourselves from yesterday, every single day. The countless choices and decisions that we make every day, every hour, even every minute - each of these moments is another chance to compete, another “game” we must play, another “opponent” we must face. Another chance, to “win”.
The truth is that we have more control over these areas of our consciousness than we think. It is so much easier to pass that blame on an external formula that we can point to in order to say, “We were dealt a bad hand, we weren’t given enough time, resources, choices, or opportunities to win.” Maybe we weren’t given a fair shake by the officials, but even if we are restricted in a number of these areas, we still have choices we must make on how we handle our response to that situation.
Our experience is our experience. No one else’s. Our story is our story. No one else’s. We hold the pen, we are the authors. The hardest part of writing a story, however, is knowing the intricacies of the plot and how it resolves itself in the end. This is the very reason it is imperative we understand and define who we want to be, against what/who we want to compete, and our values and standards. How do we know if we are on the right track if we do not have absolute clarity about our desired destination? (RACA Blog Series).
Defining those standards is a process and changes from year to year and team to team. Let’s fast forward past our initial Standard Setting Series (if you want more details on this, please feel free to reach out) and say we have those set in stone - a massive step that must be completed first. There’s a shared ownership on our team, a common, understandable language, accountability, and ideals in place. Once we have that standard defined, we can focus on simply making the best possible choices ahead of us. The more we can make these decisions ahead of time (or they are made for us, based on the results of our Standard Setting Series), the easier they will be for us to know which road to follow as issues arise.
Now, put that in terms of what we can control: our standards (now clearly defined), the choices we know we will face, and the responses we have to things unseen. This becomes us, this becomes who we want to be; now it is up to us - we just have to execute. Remember from Part 1 of this series, the goal is to create as much predictability of desired outcomes as we can by prioritizing speed and reducing variability and complexity. In other words we create more consistency and rely less on those outlying performances and experiences. That simple consistency allows us to make better and quicker choices which raises our level of character (part 3 of this series). When we remove the unpredictability of external formulas, the typical results or outcomes most people would use to assess their success do not get to have the same hold over us anymore. It’s Us vs The Standard. Not us vs some opponent or scoreboard.
