Do you like to cook? What if you cooked your whole life and finally made it onto Top Chef Masters. But instead of getting to cook with all your fellow chefs, you have to stand off to the side while your mates whip up their crispy bacon-roasted quail with cornbread-chorizo stuffing-type dishes and finally, a few seconds before the show’s over, you’re asked to come in and make a dessert that decides the entire competition. While 90,000 foodies scream at you.
Do you fancy politics? Imagine you’re a Presidential advisor who’s forced to watch a three-hour debate from the wings (which sounds bad enough) and at the end comes in to make a statement for your candidate that determines whether your side emerges victorious. Oh, there are 87,000 political fanatics there, from both sides of the aisle. Screaming, of course.
Things like that happened all over the country yesterday, on the football field, where those curious creatures called placekickers were trusted to resolve what 3-4 hours of relentless hand-to-hand combat couldn’t. In game after game, the outcome of the contest was placed on the feet of the kicker, who, as usual, was left alone on the sidelines, except for tv cameras in his face, until his moment of truth.
Why don’t people hang out with him as he’s contemplating the final kick? Why do they make him feel like a condemned prisoner instead of a trusted teammate? I don’t get it.
The best kind of coaching helps an athlete--professional, corporate, or otherwise—be completely comfortable in any situation by talking to her, giving him distractions, forcing her to be able to complete the task while pressure swirls. Create a community, put that person in the middle, and let the chips fall as a team.
If I were on any of those teams yesterday, I would’ve chatted up the kicker for the entire time he was waiting for his shot, distracting him from the situation and allowing him to forget about everything except for the one thing he knows how to do exceptionally well.
That’s what a community can do.
No comments:
Post a Comment