"Weathered The Storm" - Now What?

It’s an exciting time right now for those of us in #SportsBiz. More and more venues are starting to welcome back fans to their buildings or preparing to do so soon. Those that have "weathered the storm" over the past year plus, are excited to see better weather ahead for our industry.   

One of the challenges I’ve made to myself for this year was to put out more content in an effort to give back to an industry that has given me so much over the last 10 years. For this month’s #SportsBizNuggets, I’m focusing on how to hit the ground running as a seller and/or leader in our business over the several months and beyond. 

I mentioned that the we’ve “weathered the storm” over the last year. However, if you don’t understand these core key truths you still may be in for a rocky start for your 2021 goals and ambitions. 

• “Self-reflection”. We need to take in inventory of ourselves and have an honest conversation about who we are, and the person we’ve become over the last year. This is hard to do, and an enormous challenge for most of us – but at the end of the day you can’t hide from you. Most people want to focus on the finish line, and that’s the goals and targets that we are setting for ourselves and our organizations for this year. However, it’s not about where you’re going – it’s about recognizing who you are now. More importantly, what you need to do to become the person you need to be to reach the finish line.
• “Get back up fast”. We’ve all been knocked down over the last year and no one in our business is coming out of this without taking a few punches. However having a victim mentality and laying down on the mat, complaining about how the world has been unfair to you is not going to help or serve you. Everyone gets knocked down, and everyone gets back up – the difference between the average and the elite is how quickly you get back up. You’re going to get back up, so you might as well just do it now and do it quickly.
• “You get your standards, not your goals”. We live in a world of instant gratification, but in reality most of the time the results that come with achieving our goals are delayed. At any point if you are unsatisfied with the results you are getting, you can most likely trace back the actions of your rituals and habits you had 60-90 days prior. The rituals and habits that we create for ourselves are meant to hold us to a standard on the days that we aren’t feeling motivated and inspired. What do you do when it’s not your best day? What do you do when you’re tired? What do you do when you’re under pressure?  If your obsessed with creating challenging rituals and habits that hold you to a standard that pushes you to be elite, the pursuit of your goals will be the reward – not achieving them.
• “Be a thermostat, not a thermometer”. A thermometer tells you the temperature in the room, and it changes with its external environment. A thermostat regulates the temperature. If it gets too warm in the room, the thermostat adjusts and cools the room down. If a room gets too cold, the thermostat kicks on and warms it up. Regardless of the external environment a thermostat stays consistent at a specific temperature that you set. Our external environment can hinder our results if we let it control our emotions. This might be a bad conversation, an angry email from a client, and interaction with our boss/co-worker that didn’t go well, or something on the news that puts us into a whirlwind of emotions. If we act like a thermostat, we can learn to control our internal mindset, attitude, and emotions, where regardless of our external environment we can operate at a high level.

I started off this conversation by saying that a lot of us in this business have “weathered the storm”, so I’ll stick with that analogy in closing. Picture a storm that is raging in the ocean, and waves are crashing against the shoreline. However, if you were to see the bottom of the ocean floor during a storm the water is completely calm. The advice I laid out today is meant to help you create the building blocks you need to stay calm through any storm. Be like the ocean floor, because as the storm is moving on there still might be some rocky waters in future as we all move forward.  

If you believe this content was helpful, please like, share, comment, or tell a friend. I would love to hear from you and look forward to continuing this series moving forward.

Get after it!

Elliott