5 Steps designed to help you reignite your team’s fire to be their best.
It is often said, “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink.”
In order to survive, you have to hydrate your body. While drinking fluids is a requirement to survive, proper hydration is how you thrive. How do we get a team or an individual to survive and thrive? We can lead them to that decision point, but we can’t make them do it.
While we can’t make them drink, we can intentionally lead them to a decision point, where they can opt in to reigniting a fire inside themselves or their team. Maybe you were winning, and now you aren’t. Maybe you feel like you hit a plateau with your improvement. Maybe you just need to jump start out of a rut at the midpoint of the season.
Whatever the case, we need to get back on track with improvement, self belief, and confidence. I use The Self Scout to help my team get out of a rut, or to increase motivation levels and refocus our work.
The Self Scout focuses on aspects of success that are controllable. When we focus on improving controllable things instead of on winning/losing we are more motivated and will often improve faster. Focusing on controllable aspects of development doesn’t guarantee winning, but it gets us much closer to the chance to not just survive, but thrive. If we get our teams focused on controllable things, it guarantees we will feel better about our time spent and our performances.
Here are the 5 steps to the Self Scout process:
1. Visit Your Opponent’s Locker Room: Pretend for a moment you are in the opposing team’s locker room where they are talking about our team and the game coming up on Friday: “What do you think they are saying about us?”
Stoke the thought process if you need to…
- How hard do we play?
- Do we give up? Do we always grind to the end?
- Are we emotionally unstable? Can they get in our head?
- Do we play out of control? Are we unflappable?
- Do we play as a team or play selfishly?
- What is our team attitude like?
- Is there a strategy that easily stop us? (make them shoot from outside, take away one player, crash the glass, push the ball, etc)
2. Reflect: Do you like that this is what they are saying about us?
- Does it bother you that is what they think about us? Explain.
- What do we like about it, what do we not like about what they would say?
3. Brainstorm: What do we want our opponents to say about us?
- List a few things we want to be known for
4. Commit: What will we do right now, today, to change every opposing team’s view of us?
- Work together to create a list of what daily or drill by drill behaviors we need to adopt to change us, which will change the perception of us
5. Accountable: Write down what they said they wanted to do to change how they are viewed, and then remind them of this drill after drill.
- “You said you wanted to be _______…is that effort/intentionality going to change people’s opinions of us?”
- “Let’s remember, you all said you wanted to be __________, lets make sure at the end of this drill we can say that we are earning that reputation.”
- “We said we wanted to be ______. Think to how that drill just went, give us a grade on how we did at developing _____ during this drill.”
Please notice that all of the things listed are controllable things. Things that can be executed whenever a team wants to execute them, if they choose to do it. No team can stop you from doing these things. Only you can stop you from doing these things. That is motivating because your “fate” is in your hands. Being a better version of us is for us to decide.
Just like we can’t make the horse drink, we can’t make our team win. But by using The Self Scout we can get them to the opportunity to decide who and what they want to become.
Whether you want to turn your team around or just want to spike motivation, lead them to water by doing The Self Scout. Help them grab hold of what they actually can control so they have a better chance at doing what they can’t control. Lead on! Lead well!
