Last month I had the opportunity to hear Marc Woods in a business offsite in London. Marc Woods is a truly inspirational story. He was diagnosed with cancer as a teenager. He had his leg amputated but still went on to win 12 Paralympic medals participating in 5 Paralympics. Marc spoke powerfully about “how to achieve your full potential”, a topic close to my heart. We are all capable of much more than we believe we are, both physically and mentally. I am sharing below with you some nuggets of wisdom I picked up from Marc’s talk that should help us on the journey to achieving our Personal Best.
- Key difference between those who achieve their full potential versus the many who don’t is living life actively versus living it passively. A few are naturally motivated to live actively but most need a kick up their backside to start being active. When you are active lot more starts happening to you. Luck is a dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get.
- It is helpful to have multiple sources of motivation. If you have only a single source of motivation that might not sustain you as it might not always stay a compelling reason for you to keep pushing yourself. Therefore, have multiple reasons that make you get up from bed every morning to put in the hard yards required to achieve success.
- It is OK to be competitive and to hate losing, but it is important to not be scared of losing. As an athlete you get beat more than you win. You have to pick yourself up, learn from your mistakes, and then keep going. If you become afraid of losing you will be stressed and can not give your best.
- Regular and systematic practice is very necessary. Improvement in performance is often an aggregation of marginal gains and not sudden breakthroughs. Therefore, you need to be patient and persistent, and keep making the daily sacrifices on the path to achieving excellence. Moreover, you need to break down your overall goal into multiple, smaller goals that you can achieve in a targeted manner.
- When you communicate as a leader, the responsibility for outcomes is on you not the other person. If the behaviors of your team members do not change, then your communication is the problem. To really connect with people and to make change happen, you need to understand their goals and equally to get them to be honest about their fears.
- Important to have a sense of humor when faced with adversity. That helps you de-stress and manage the situation calmly. The best way to deal with stress is to remove the stressor – whatever is causing the stress, and/or to remove yourself from the stress. However, it is not always possible to remove the stressor or yourself. In these cases, you have to manage stress, and humor is a great way of doing so.
- Disability is relative to the task. Important to not be prejudiced. Just because a disability inhibits a person from doing certain things well, it doesn’t mean that person can’t do other things exceptionally. If you approach the world with a bunch of prejudices, your team is likely to be a lot smaller than it could or should be.
Marc ended with this inspiring takeaway: “a desire to live your life to the full, the inspiration to be the best you can be, the determination to strive to constantly improve and, above all, the courage to live your life without regret.”
Marc Woods has written a book “Personal Best” where you can read his story and his life lessons on “achieving your full potential” in detail.
Thank you!!
