Raise Your Game - Alan Stein Jr. And Jon SternField

Raise Your Hand : High Performance Secret From Best Of The Best

Self-awareness helps us to utilize our strengths and manage our weaknesses

In today’s business world, an essential requirement for success is self-awareness. Practice self-awareness daily to make it a habit that can empower you to succeed. To succeed, you have to know yourself. The essence of self-awareness is swallowing hard truths and recognizing the real version of you in the mirror.

Self-awareness involves knowing who you are and what you do. It avoids the pitfall of ignorance. Arrogance stops us from seeing our mistakes or flaws. Hiding our weaknesses or shortcomings only leads to self-destruction. Listening is a way of improving self-awareness.

Your inner circle comprises your friends, family, and colleagues because they know you best. Therefore, evaluate your strengths and weaknesses through your inner circle.

After self-awareness, the next step is to control the controllable; this involves the knowledge that there is a limit to what you can control. You cannot control what people say or do, but you can control how you react or respond.

Learning to control the controllable is maximizing your performance; instead of complaining, focus on your attitude and effort consistently.

Self-awareness helps us to utilize our strengths and manage our weaknesses: that is, it isn’t just about knowing; instead, it is adjusting and correcting your mistakes. Accept healthy criticisms, accept your fears, and be willing to work on them.

Passion is an internal drive that can be brought out through external factors like competition

If you have a love for something, it makes the work easier. Grit means putting your passion for working to the task. To get the job done correctly, you require more than just talent. You have to amplify yourself.

In difficult times and situations, it is the passion that pushes us through. Passion also directs us. We decide to either follow or not. Then we have to stay on it, meaning give yourself entirely to what you do.

Mark Cuban did not have anything; he started from selling garbage bags to powdered milk to the franchise for a TV repair shop: he had the perspective that work was an opportunity. Therefore, he had a passion for succeeding.

You have to always be prepared because you don’t know when and how opportunities will come. And passion is the only thing that keeps us ready when these opportunities come.

Passion is an internal drive that can be brought out through external factors like competition. Competition in Latin means to strive. And in trying, we become better.

In a workplace, healthy competition is good, whether you win or lose, your effort and attitude are what counts. Whenever you lose, disappointments can be turned into motivation. To sustain passion, it requires courage. To be courageous, you need to stop seeing problems as things to avoid rather as an opportunity to do something better. With time, you tend to become better.

Self-awareness doesn’t only make you confident or courageous, it also makes you optimistic and positive. We grow through discomfort and adversity. Passion allows you to drive through your discomfort. Be open to failure, invite failure. Temporary discomfort leads to permanent improvements.

You cannot accidentally fall on success; you have to create success by building habits to reach it

Passion is the why, while discipline is how. When opportunity meets preparation, it is mostly called luck. To be disciplined is to carry very high standards for yourself. It involves ethics and belief to work efficiently. To achieve this, you have to create good and efficient habits.

To be productive and efficient, treat priorities as priorities. To succeed, you have to be prepared. One can prepare by reading, studying, observing, evaluating, reaching out, and taking risks.

Unseen hours refer to all the time and effort the public doesn’t see that lay the foundation to the success they see.

To be disciplined, you have to decide precisely what you want, determine the price you have to pay and choose if you are willing to pay it or not.

Avoid multitasking because it slows you down. Your habit should be to put first things first. Spend your time wisely and focus on what matters.

Growth, improvement, and development is a continuous process

To be successful, you have to be coachable. Those who accept feedback and are willing to improve on it are referred to as the coachable. They refuse to stop learning, therefore, desire to improve.

What separates successful people from others is how they use their failures. Failure should be an opportunity to learn. Learn from your failures through those who reject you, and want nothing to do with you because you’d learn better from them. Your worst customer is your best friend.

Coachability requires trust, openness, and the ability to execute your plan. It understands the gap between where you are and where you want to be.

No one wants to fail, because failure is embarrassing, but P J Carlesimo understood that failure is just the word we give to those previous reps that got us to where we are now. Some academics have started putting notable omissions to their resume.

Being coachable requires being open to learning from anywhere and anyone. Everyone has value. Great ideas are all around us; train yourself to recognize them. Growth, improvement, and development is a continuous process. And your happiness, performance, and success can be predicted by the ability to manage these transitions.

Whenever disappointments or failure come, we should take just what we need and move on

Confidence comes from experience and knowledge. It doesn’t mean being afraid; it means being prepared and driven enough to get yourself past that fear. Confidence comes from both winning and losing — it also comes from passion and discipline.

Comparison enlarges doubts, it denies us of happiness and increases our insecurities. We need to get others to believe in us.

Confidence involves knowing and understanding your ability and influence and starving to be better.

Your purpose should align with your vision 

Vision means understanding the future of your game and your team’s purpose and fueling everything you do.

A coach is a leader who cares and has an idea for a group of people and has developed them to work together to achieve a common goal.

Vision enables coaches to have a clear picture of where they are going and what the team can achieve. Also, vision involves seeing where only potential lie — seeing things before they happen. It requires dedication and having a mindset to improvise.

Lack of vision has made many great companies fall. An example is Blackberry. Management is different from vision. Vision means understanding your purpose; your purpose is where you are, and your vision is where you are going to. Therefore, your purpose should align with your vision.

Leaders ought to spend time thinking about the purpose of their organization or company. Also, they need to be with people who support or will help to achieve that dream. Vision grows in the right environment. Mark Zuckerberg had a vision, and his roommates helped him execute it.

There is no such thing as a million-dollar idea. Vision is executing ideas with the help of others. This can be done by communicating your vision to inspire others and convince them to bring it to reality.

Culture is the collective values, beliefs, behaviors, and environment of a team

Culture is created by a leader to make the team motivated, committed, and secured. It is everyone’s responsibility to maintain it. It can be best defined as what happens when the boss is not around. After creating your vision, culture is what you create to brood your vision and achieve it.

Leaders then introduce the buy-in technique. Buy-in means that members of an organization choose to embrace, share, and maintain the culture a coach is trying to create. Make and get everyone involved. Keep all employees connected and motivated. Identify negative cultures and remove them.

Culture requires a sense of openness to change your habits. If you desire a culture of truth, you have to build a culture of trust. Create an environment where everyone is safe to speak out by encouraging open communication. Create a culture where everyone sees himself as part of the company and not just for the paycheck; this will enable everyone to give his or her best at all times

Leadership is about serving others and putting their needs before yours

What makes leadership effective is knowing that as a leader, you work for people, they don’t work for you. People are not loyal to jobs but other people. Effective leadership creates strong loyalty, loyalty brings commitment, and commitment strengthens culture.

A coach can become a servant by understanding what is best for the people, seeing work from their point of view and giving them all they need.

Appreciate those who work for you. Serving others is about providing for those working with you so that you can all move together. It requires compassion and empathy. Focus more on what you want for your employees than what you want from your employees. Most people care more about the relationship than their salary, therefore, focus on that.

Serving requires guidance, instructions, and correction. Avoid criticism that kills their confidence. Invest in people, understand that there are different types of people, and treat them as such.

Character creates loyalty in business

Character is who you are. It is the way you behave when no one is watching. Leaders show respect to people by giving them time. Character means your actions towards your employees shouldn’t be based on what you will get from them. Leaders are to live as examples, through their words, actions, beliefs, values, and behaviors.

Character creates loyalty in business. When you act with integrity, people see you as someone they can trust. In 1988, Michael Jordan was about to be marked the most marketed player on earth, his agent, Falk, offered to cut down his firm’s marketing fee, but MJ turned down his offer, and this changed Falk’s relationship with Jordan entirely because he had trust in him.

Leadership is not just about dishing out orders and over-laboring people; it is about leading by example, by demonstrating what you want players to do.

As a coach, take the blame for losses and give the players credit for the victories. Character means that you understand that sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose.

To guide, coach, and lead, you must be consistent. It is not about being a saint but your ability to identify your mistakes and not repeat them.

Empowering people builds their confidence because it shows that you believe in them

A coach should give his team members a sense of independence. He should empower them. This empowerment will bring about happiness, thereby increasing productivity.

Empowering people involves being a player-coach. It means you get out of your way, you trust the people you have trained, and still take charge. Allowing those you have trained to lead makes everyone feel on top of their pyramid. Give a man a fish he will eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.

Team is a group or organization who work together to achieve a common goal. A successful team is composed of a set of people who are self-aware, passionate, disciplined, coachable, and confident. Such people are led by people with vision and character and have a strong culture that can serve and empower them.

As a leader, you should make others believe in you, and you also believe in them

For a team to be effective, they must have belief. You either believe in yourself, your teammates, your coach, your mission, culture, goals, standards, or you don’t. Doubt and uncertainty in just a person can affect a whole team because it will spread and drain the group’s spirit.

Energy vampires are those that drain positive spirit out of others. This causes negativity and kills belief.

Belief turns our goals into reality. Simon Sinek says, “unless you give motivated people something to believe in, something bigger than their job to work towards, they will motivate themselves to get a new job, and you’ll be stuck with whoever is left.”

Belief involves others; this is different from confidence. As a leader, you should make others believe in you, and you should also believe in them. The people who surround us determine our success through beliefs.

Belief has to exist from the coach down to every player. Belief brings accountability.

To achieve success, leaders and team members must be unselfish

Most people believe that in order for me to win, you must lose. All men are born selfish; it is in our DNA. Unselfishness considers others. It entails putting the needs of others first. It doesn’t mean being competitive; instead, it means working towards the team’s mission.

Unselfishness helps everyone to strive to become the best for the team, not the best in the team. Success is defined collectively instead of individually. There is a misconception in the business world that unselfish people get trampled on, therefore, you must look out for yourself, but this is wrong.

As leaders and team players, we must recognize that unselfishness and generosity are integral to success.

Leaders should clarify the roles of their team members

For teams to succeed, people have to be where they can function. Role clarity helps a team understand what each person is responsible for. A leader must examine every player on his team, communicate their roles and values, and motivate the weak ones.

For a team to be successful, members must talk to each other. Communication breaks down the proverbial wall. Instead of telling someone you know how they feel, tell them you appreciate how they are feeling or respect what they are going through, this will be regarded as genuine sympathy. Everyone can talk, but effective communication is the key; it can be learned and improved upon, with practice and repetition.

Communication helps us check on those around us, making them feel loved. Good teams talk, great teams communicate. As a leader, allow your team members to air their views because it is essential to know what people think about you.

Cohesion means unity, togetherness which emphasizes activeness

An organization with people who believe in their mission are willing to share the blame, praise, or credit unselfishly will operate cohesively. People who play their roles and communicate effectively will work together. Successful team attains cohesion when every team player clearly understands his or her roles at different levels with dedication, focus, and patience.

Successful people have cohesive inner circle members. Members of the inner circle should: tell you the truth, hold you accountable, be supportive, challenge you, and want to see you happy.

As a coach who wants to build cohesion, you must have developed effective communication, belief in yourself and others, and the ability to do better. Cohesion means unity, togetherness which emphasizes activeness. To build cohesion, you have to hire people who compliment your goal and are willing to help achieve it. Things that kill cohesion are entitlement, arrogance, selfishness, and complacency.

Organizations need glue guys. Glue guys are those willing to do little things that need to be done for everything to work.

Conclusion

Success does not just come; it starts with commitment. Everything valuable comes with effort; in other words, you have to make the sacrifice by first believing in yourself, in your coach, and your team.

Try this:
Look within your organization. What are some truths that you can share with your employees that will engender trust in them? Share these truths with them and encourage them to be more open to you. Observe how removing the fear of reprimand from the minds of the people who work for you will change their attitude to work and increase their productivity.