My doctor always starts with two or three measurements of how my health is; blood pressure, listen to the chest and maybe give a small cough. And then we carry on with the consultation. My accountant always starts with wanting to know two or three numbers, a personal trainer will start with measuring resting heart rate, BMI and weight to see how physically fit you are. So I felt that I should have three quick checks each time I meet a client to see how their mental fitness is right now?
Mental is the new Fitness
Over the years I have learned that there are three quick ways to measure how fit you are mentally at the moment. There are three main areas of interest and they are – Self-Motivation and Confidence, Self-Discipline and Habits and, Self-Resilience and Recovery.
The first one (motivation and confidence) is the most important one and yet can be the trickiest to assess, the second one (discipline and habit) is the quickest one to assess and is the hardest to fake and the third one (resilience) is the most mis-understood and yet most requested one. So, for the purposes of this article I would like to focus on the third one being resilience and recovery.
Resilience is the new Goal
Is your ability to recover quickly from setback and disappointment, at least, this is the common interpretation. And while this is true, if resilience is like any other fitness then you and I must practice it regularly so it’s there when we need it. So, what is resilience? I guess if you need to practice it you need to be clear about what it actually is. Also, when I advise organisations on being more resilient their leaders want to know how do they spot it at work? How can they see it so they can acknowledge and reward it?
Basic is the new Advanced
There comes a magic moment in business, sport and life where committing to brilliant basics produces advanced results. This is what resilience is. If you’ve had a setback then you have taken a huge hit to your confidence and motivation, your good habits are gone bad and your discipline is all over the place. You know you need to do something, you’re under pressure to show some results and yet you are very unsure about where you invest the effort.
In these moments world-class performers return to their basics and commit to being brilliant at the basics of whatever endeavor they are involved with. If you do your basics brilliantly after a period of time it’ll look like you are doing something advanced! People will want to know your secret! ‘Brilliant basics’ is not a dumbing down, it’s not a lesser strategy, in actual fact winners win because their basics are better than anyone else. You win a rugby world cup with the best basics, Ireland beat England in the Cricket World Cup with better basics.
The Irony of a Setback
Is that very often the setback is caused by us neglecting the basics and getting distracted by other things. So the delicious irony here is that the loss of basics in the first place create the setback that we use the basics to recover from!
Pre-silience is the new Resilience
So we should be working the basics all the time, why wait for a setback to happen? Why are you not using your most successful success strategy all the time? You will see resilience by walking around and seeing who is doing the basics of your business better than anyone else? The basics of good health, good business and good accounting have never changed, the issue is who is the best at them?
Success is Basic not Advanced
The success of your business in 2016 and beyond will be based on how good your basics are. There is no rocket science, there is no magic fairy dust. Everyone all knows the same stuff. The differences show in the basics; the basics of good leadership, of good management, of good staff engagement, of good teamwork and of good customer relations. You do not need an advanced course in any of these; the genius is consistently brilliant basics.
Basic Questions for Advanced Results
Rather than give you the Top 5 Tips or The Seven Steps I thought I’d leave you with some questions to ponder instead. And please note, that although most of us may share a few universal basics, there can be vastly different answers to the following – what are the basics of good health for you? Are you doing them? What are the basics of peace of mind for you? Are you doing them? What are the basic habits that help you consistently hit peak performance? Are you doing them? What are the basics of your business that are being neglected right now? How do we improve these basics? Start now before there is another setback.
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