FROM HERE

I had a great Egyptian friend who I played much tennis with over the years. We would spend many hours practicing and as you know, tennis is a repetitive action sport. Much of your practice time is repeating the same stroke over and over again. He had a unique characteristic. Every time we would begin to hit balls back and forth, when there was a miss and we had to start over, he would say “from here!” It was his way of allowing your concentration to focus not on the mistake but on the process and begin again. An error was not an end but a new chance to start over. We use to kid him about it, but in today’s world I was reflecting on it as a concept and found lots of relevance.

How often do you encounter a challenge today and reassess it as a new beginning? Do you spend too much time looking backward? It’s the age-old question: “If you knew you could not fail, what could you accomplish?” The “from here’ strategy is a brilliant one. How powerful could your organization become if every misstep was quickly reviewed and the charge would be “from here” Would you be more responsive? Would you take more chances? Can you see a better future with more emphasis on starting again versus starting over? What kind of progress could you create?

So often we feel we are in a slump, we feel down by a loss, we feel we cannot make progress and the deck is not in our favor. What to do? We can sulk, mope, complain, reassess, whine, cry, or… we can do it over. You see, much of what you encounter is not new or special or different. We experience in the business world many things that have been encountered under different circumstances.

Think about it: Recession? We’ve had some. Housing crisis? Yep, that too. Mortgage rates high? Been there. Employment contracting? Uh-huh. Inflation? Felt it. New home construction down? Got it. Unemployment rising? Seen it.

So what to do? I had a coach for a tennis team talking to me during a slump in my tennis career. Our teams were playing each other and I was slumping and moaning about my slump. I was considering moving to another school and struck up a conversation with him that stayed with me then and today. He asked about my past, how long I had been playing, how much I wanted to play, and asked me to guess how many times I had hit a ball. We came up with some astronomical number. He said, “take your mind out of it”. I didn’t get it. He said your body has repeated the same form over and over, probably more than a million times. Your muscles know what to do -let them do it and don’t complicate it with thinking about it too much. I went off and processed that thought. Son of gun if he wasn’t right.

You see, when you trust your hard work, have faith in the process, and just work on letting the execution happen, you can get through a slump without too much thought. And when you start to see a little success, you build on it and it grows. Your confidence grows, your execution improves and you build momentum. Pretty soon, you are driving on and it’s more like: “what slump?”.

I would argue, the challenges we see today are causing us too much reflection on the past or the hiccup. We know what needs to be done, we know how to do it, we know where to do it and we know we need to do it.

From here.