Are You Ready For A Comeback? Start Here!

You know how the story goes. It starts with our hero facing a major obstacle or setback. Followed by a time of despair, where the hero looks like they may have given up. Then there is a period where our hero begins to turn things around and has a major comeback culminating in the achieving of their goals and dreams. 

This is a narrative that fuels our human experience, the belief, the hope, the new ideas fueled by grit and determination. We love it when an individual or team overcomes insurmountable odds! It gets us pumped, inspired and motivated! We love a comeback story because we all have our own comeback story within us!

I find this time of year always an interesting and sobering time. We are nearly at the half way mark of the year and in some cases we are behind the personal goals or the targets we had set for ourselves back in January. Or professionally we are struggling with our organisational strategic projects, or our sales and margin targets. The impending half way mark is always a time where we stop and take stock, are we still on track?

Time can sometimes can be our greatest enemy, yet in other times it can be our greatest ally. It can remind us of our progress of how far we have come and how much we have achieved. Or it can create awareness of what we still need to achieve and raise the intensity and focus on our goals, targets and dreams!

Does this resonate true for you? It does for me? Are you in need of a comeback for this year? Do you need to get your goals, targets and dreams back on track? Are you wondering where to start? Or what I can do differently to get back on track?

If so, check out these three key components of a successful comeback story.

You Gotta Believe!

With any comeback it always has to start with your mindset and a belief that you can do it. One of the most famous recent sporting comebacks has been Liverpool's defeat of Barcelona in the Champions League semi-finals during May. Liverpool down 3-0 after the first leg in Spain came back in the second game to score four unanswered goals and to win on aggregate 4 -3 claiming one of the greatest comebacks in Champions Leagues history. Jordan Henderson Liverpool's captain put the famous win down to the teams unwavering belief in themselves and their ability to win. “The belief we have in the changing room is amazing,” he said. “We knew we could do something special at Anfield. Andy Robertson agreed with his captain “I’ve said so many times this season but what a team,” he said. “We believe. People wrote us off. But we believed if we got off to a good start we could do it.

Belief in yourself starts with self-confidence! Confidence by those who study the subject is "the degree to which you think and "feel" your actions will achieve positive results. It helps to think positively about yourself and believe that you are capable of achieving what you need to achieve and completing your comeback! We can help build our confidence by reflecting on the skills, knowledge and past experience we bring to this comeback. Our past performance is a reliable predictor of our future performance.

“To establish true self-confidence, we must concentrate on our successes and forget about the failures and the negatives in our lives.”

Denis Waitley

Find Your Team!

I recently wrote a post about Robert Downey Jr.'s very famous career comeback. In reflecting on my post I realised there was a key part of Downey's story that I failed to mention, and that was the major impact that Mel Gibson had on his career revival.

Mel Gibson believed in him when no one else would, he was willing to underwrite insurance coverage for Downey (when no insurance company would) and cast him as the main character in his movie 'The Singing Detective'. The belief that Gibson showed in Robert Downey Jr. and the support and encouragement he demonstrated helped fuel his career comeback, and as they say in the classics the rest is history.

It is crucial when you are planning your comeback that you surround yourself with people who will be in your corner. People who will encourage you and help pick you up when the going gets tough. People who will inspire and motivate you to get it done when it needs to get done.

“If you surround yourself with positive people who build you up, the sky is the limit.”

Joel Brown

Ask Questions!

We’ve all heard Albert Einstein’s famous line: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” We all know this quote yet it amazes me how rarely we actually apply its key principle. When we want to change results we can make the mistake of thinking that it is just about working harder, increasing our effort and intensity. Yet doing the same thing at a higher intensity will eventually just leads to frustration and burn out!

Our performance (actions and behaviours) influence our results. To change the way we perform we often need to change the way we think, and this starts with new insight and new awareness. We have to be willing to start thinking differently, change our mindset and experiment with new ideas. Most importantly believe that we will be able to get it done.

New awareness always starts with asking ourselves powerful questions. Could we do it differently? What's not working? What is working? What do we need to stop doing? What do we need to continue doing? What do we need to start doing?

The right answer is always in the right question.

"The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge."

Thomas Berger

Final Thought!

Could I encourage you all with this final thought for this week. This years results are not yet written in the history books! There is still time to write your comeback story. Can you start this week?

"It's not how many times you get knocked down that count, it's how many times you get back up."

GEORGE A. CUSTER

What! There should me more to it! Well there is, stay tuned for another three components to be revealed in next weeks post 'The Comeback: Fueling the Fight!'

Regards, Peter Edwards