Sports and business
have much in common. Each is about teamwork, graft, discipline and success. And
each can learn from each other by sharing knowledge of how best to get to the
top.
In sport, motivation
is important.
In business,
motivation is important.
I have often seen
ex-sports personalities give after dinner motivational speeches. Only recently,
I had the privilege of seeing Sir Steve Redgrave give a motivational speech on
his career and how he handled the successes and knock-backs. How he set goals
and objectives, how he worked in a team.
Of course, Sir Steve
Redgrave is not the only sporting hero to pass on his brand of motivational
expertise to businesses.
Many bolster their
pensions by offering their advice to sales teams and management groups.
Of the several I have
seen, the one which sticks out, is by Olympic gold medal swimmer Adrian
Moorhouse.
Adrian Moorhouse knew from an early age what he wanted from life.
From the moment he saw David Wilkie take gold for Britain in the 1976 Olympics of Montreal, he wanted one too.
It was a reward for many years of sacrifice and pain.
As a 16-year-old Moorhouse had just
missed out on selection for Moscow in 1980 and in 1984 he went to Los
Angeles as Commonwealth and European champion and suffered his biggest
disappointment when he came in fourth.
Devastated
“I was absolutely devastated,” he said. “Ever since I was a kid all I wanted to win was an Olympic medal.
“Swimming was my life. I was a bit of a `Billy No-mates’ because all I spent all my time in the pool.
“It took me four or five months to get over the hurt of missing out but the failure made me tougher.”
Moorhouse explained
how he set about winning his medal in the Seoul Olympics of 1988. After failing
at the previous games in Los Angeles, he was determined to win the next time
around.
To do so, Adrian
realised he would need to break the world record, which was then 2 minutes
faster then his personal best.
It seemed an
impossible task: who could improve by 2 minutes. But Adrian worked out that to
speed up by that amount, he needed to reduce his time by 30 seconds each year.
Thirty seconds a year meant 2.5 seconds a month; 2.5 seconds a month was 0.65
seconds a week and 0.65 seconds a week was 0.08 seconds a day.
That means, if he did
two training sessions a day, Adrian only had to improve his speed each time by
one four hundredth of a second to become Olympic Champion.
Adrian Moorhouse winning the Olympic Gold Medal
It’s easy when you
look at it like that (or is it?)
Moorhouse’s point is
that, as his experienced proved, little improvements accumulate into big ones,
in business as in sport.
The power and clarity
of his speech is still with me today.
Can you use Adrian’s
approach and break down your goals / targets into daily ones?
Which sporting hero
have you seen give a motivational speech?
(4 out of 5)
