My son is a senior in high school and runs cross country. There is obviously a lot that goes into running the perfect race. The temperature, the condition of the course, your physical condition and your mental state all play into your time. Too hot, makes it tough to breath. Soggy conditions, makes it harder to keep those feet moving. Pulled muscles, hurt ankles and the like make it a challenge to keep up a fast pace for the entire race. A wrong decision on when to stay in the pack or when to pass can doom your race.
He recently had a race where all of those things didn’t line up. Tough racing conditions, one week removed from a sprained ankle and taking the ACT test the morning of the race didn’t put him in the best position to succeed; and he didn’t. He didn’t finish in the time that he wanted and frankly had a pretty valid list of excuses that he could have use; but he didn’t. When I talked to him after the race, he just said “I didn’t have it today and I have to work harder this week to get it back together.”
He really does seem to get it and I think that there is a business lesson in this for us. We don’t always face ideal conditions at work. If we are sitting at desks, we probably don’t have to worry too much about the weather and course conditions; but we trade those for competing priorities, a loud neighbor or an overflowing in-basket. Unless you are running late for a meeting, muscle pain isn’t a concern; but we could replace that with the pain of having a key team member on vacation during the critical time of a project implementation. As far as the mental state goes, there are a lot of similarities. He is thinking about how fast to start to stay with the pack, but not over extend himself. We are doing the same thing; thinking about our competition and when take the lead or when to move forward cautiously.
Just like he didn’t make excuses, nor should we. There are going to be days when we don’t have it, but my challenge to you is to not fall back on a long list of excuses to justify the underperformance. Instead, let’s admit that we didn’t have it that day and plan to work harder to correct the situation. If we let the excuses be the reason for our mistake we will never get better. Instead, if we take responsibility for the situation we can them take the steps to fix the problem moving forward and continue down the path of personal development. If you used the “dog ate my homework” excuse for missing a deadline, you may get your boss to believe it, but if you admit that you mismanaged your time and start using your calendar and task tools to better track due dates, you will be in a much better situation to avoid that happening to you again in the future.
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