Everyday Drills
Whether in a sport, at a job, or in a family, everyone everywhere is part of a team. The Everyday Drills blog is designed to create a moment each morning where we are intentional about becoming better teammates and team leaders. Subscribe for thoughtful ways for you and your team to be challenged each and every day.
Bread and Butter
We all have our comfort foods or favorite songs that we like to play when we are in a particular mood. These are predictable because safety is a construct that requires a measure of predictability. The same is true for our strategies. In games such as chess we all have our favorite tactics. We must try not to be too predictable but when everything is on the line in a competitive situation we must fight the urge to resort to the familiar too often. Great strategists understand this about their own play calling and that of their opponent. If they find themselves on their heels they have to choose what is best and not what is safe. The point is predictable is only safe when we are not competing. Great strategists know the time and place for risk and safety.
False Alarm
Feelings are real but they are not always an accurate portrayal of reality. The chemicals that are released from our emotional triggers cause very real physical responses. The stimulus of those triggers may be a “false alarm” per se when it comes to what is actually happening. This happens when we respond to half of a story without waiting to hear all the details. Those details may change the response we experience when we have the full the story. It’s weird to think that real feelings could be wrongly felt but that’s the problem with being the type of ordinary person who responds to some of the facts. It’s like a very real fire alarm making very real sounds that moves real people outside of a building but there is no fire. Emotions are alarms and sometimes they are false.
Trophies and Unicorns
Teams that are not unified never understand the benefits of unity because they have never been emotionally healthy enough to achieve it. It’s sad to think that so much insecurity can limit so much potential but that is exactly what happens when a team does not trust each other enough to move forward without questioning motives and agendas. When teams live this way, they cannot imagine a day when unity may come because deep down it’s a fairytale like Santa and the Easter Bunny. It always has to be this hard because this is what jaded adults believe, right? There is no fantasy land where people can be trusted, right? Wrong. Teams get on the same page all the time. Those are the teams we read about holding trophies or outperforming the dysfunctional teams that thought they were wiser to question everything everyone does. To those teams, the trophies might as well be a unicorn because they no longer believe in the path to hold one.