Press Room

April 1, 2011 - I Want You on My Team

Why are sports so popular?

What makes so many of us spend so much time not only playing sports but also reading about them, talking about them, watching them, and just idly thinking about games of seemingly no importance.

Are sports just an escape from real life? Or are they real life?

As an adviser to many businesses and as a lifelong sports fan, I see sports as a metaphor for real life—and especially for business.

Sports metaphors color our workaday speech. When we succeed in business, we’re “moving the ball down the field.” When someone changes the rules on us, they’ve “moved the goal posts.” When we want to go after a big procurement and are willing to expend extra resources in the pursuit, we “put on a full-court press.”

Much of what I do is coach individuals, and among the lessons I offer are some ideas about coaching large groups—about managing people, through leadership, transparency, and mutual accountability.

Football might be the sport in which coaching has most to do with whether a team wins or loses. A brutal, messy, complicated game, football requires every bit as much choreography as Swan Lake. To win at football requires buy-in to a coach’s philosophy.

“Running a football team,” Vince Lombardi said, “is no different than running any other kind of organization.” I’ll come back to Lombardi in a bit.

Most Football Players and Businesses Die Too Soon

Football and business can be cutthroat. Even though the median salary for an NFL player is $790,000 a year, 78 percent of all former NFL players who have been out of the game for two years or more are either bankrupt or facing enormous financial stress because of unemployment or divorce. And we’re learning that brain injuries commonly haunt players for the rest of their lives and lead to premature death.

And business? Consider some grim statistics from the Small Business Administration: Only 1 enterprise in 3 survives three years after startup. Of those survivors, only 3 in 10 survive the next seven years. So only 1 startup in 10 lasts a decade. Even fewer survive their founder.

If you’re reading this newsletter, it’s not because I see you as 1 of the 10. It’s because I think you’re even more special than that.

What Is the Next Step You Should Take?

You already run a business. How’s the rest of your life running? How’s your relationship with your spouse? With your kids? What are your plans for the next 15 years?

Your business can’t be everything for you. If it is everything, we’re going to change that. And by making sure it isn’t everything for you, chances are, your business will run better.

You need something to grow into. You need to design a parallel career with a mission beyond success. But first you need balance.

I want you to succeed now… and 15 years from now… and 15 years after you’ve retired from your business. I want not only for you to succeed after you’ve walked away from your business but also for your business to succeed after you’ve walked away from it.

But we have some work to do. It involves reengaging with the things that have mattered most to you in the past—even if you can’t identify them right away right now.

Three Elements Must Go Together, and Help You Find Balance

My great passion is being a life coach. I love what I do for a living because I’ve found a way to marry three elements that each of us has but that are unique to each one of us: my talent, my skill set, and my interest. As your life coach, I will do the same for you.

Your talent is your gift—your genetic makeup, your God-given ability to do that which you’ve always been able to do better than those around you.

Your skill set is your ability through knowledge and experience to craft something.

Your interest is your passion. Your passion is what you do—with love and intensity—when you’re not doing what you think you have to do.

I will take you step-by-step on a path to self-discovery:

1. Discover your true identity. This is essential. You can’t improve on something you don’t understand. There are things you do well and things you don’t. We will find the three elements unique to you and put them together. But key to managing time effectively is identifying the things you don’t do well—or that you hate doing—and finding people you can count on to do them for you. An essential duty of coaching is to give people things to do at which they can succeed.
2. Develop a new performance standard.  Don’t get me wrong: A big part of the return on your investment in me is greater earning potential. But your new performance standard is not the bottom line. I will take you through Success Detox and help you find a happier and more productive life.
3. Find the confidence to embrace intimacy with God and others you love. My life coaching system is a belief-based system. Do you know what true happiness is? It’s the knowledge that you are doing God’s work—the work God wants you to do.
4. Discover the strength of interdependence. It’s all about relationships. Our essential human relationships—with family, friends, and community—are what give our lives the deepest meaning. You need to find a trusted adviser—someone between you and God—to hold you accountable.
5. See the hero in becoming a servant. Learn to balance pride and humility. Become a catalyst in relevant things. You will see the fruit of your labor growing on other’s trees.

 

My life coaching system is designed to work with properly motivated individuals who wish to make important changes in the way they live their lives. My program is designed to serve as an investment you make in yourself… maybe for the first time? 

The promise I make is that by the end of this proven coaching experience, you will have a customized and personalized mission statement and roadmap with which to guide the rest of your life.

Finally…

When I think of successful coaches in the sports world, the one I keep coming back to is Vince Lombardi. Not because he won so frequently—he did, by the way: he took over a last-place franchise and led it to five NFL championships in the next nine years—but because of the way he inspired the men he led.

Remember that statistic about all the NFL players—78 percent—who within two years of leaving the league are bankrupt, divorced, unemployed, or all three?

There is success—in business and in sports—which Lombardi had in spades. And then there is significance, which Lombardi—and many of the players he coached—achieved. Many of those players, when their playing days were over, went on to second, extraordinary careers outside of football. To a man, these former Green Bay Packers felt they owed a debt of gratitude to Lombardi.

Hey, when it comes to world championships, I’m no Lombardi. But I do have one thing in common with him.

Lombardi handpicked his players. And I’m picking you.

Pete