How Quickly Do You Make Decisions?
As a speech coach, I think of “thinking on your feet” in the verbal context: thinking quickly and responding appropriately with words. But—watching the NCAA Final Four and the Championships—both men’s and women’s—gave me a whole new appreciation of thinking on your feet—and reacting. We saw young athletes bringing pressure on the decision-making process. This…
Read MoreLeaving It All Out There On the Field (Ice)!
Now that the football season is no longer inspiring my Sundays, I turned to Olympic figure skating! I find the couples’ synchronized twizzles (multi-rotational one foot turns) in ice dancing moved me to instant tears, just as the running back who twizzles away from four or five 300-pound linemen to run the length of the…
Read MoreDon't Let Your "Offense" Get Beaten by the Noise!
Super Bowl 2014: My man, Peyton Manning, goes down in spectacular fashion. After breaking all-time offensive records in the regular season—touchdowns thrown (55) and yards thrown (over 5400), it didn’t matter. He gets rattled and rolled by the best defense in the NFL, and one that may go down in history as one of…
Read MoreComeback Time! Find the Fire
How cool is it that the NFL Playoffs and the College Championship and Bowl games happen for New Year’s? Just when we are fighting our tendency to hash over last year’s regrets — the unfulfilled expectations– the thwarted intentions, here come my favorite sport’s biggest contests to remind us how to start fresh. Someone recently…
Read MoreWhy Not Have a Players-Only Meeting?
What I love about sports is they keep it simple. Any member of a sports team can call for a “players-only meeting.” Detroit Lions running back, Reggie Bush said, after his team’s second consecutive loss, “We definitely need to have a team meeting-really dig deep inside and find out what we’re made of.” They had…
Read MoreThink You Can Do It Alone? "Not so fast, my friend."
Why is it that NFL teams with the most talented players aren’t Super Bowl champions that year? Take the San Diego Chargers. Philip Rivers, the Quarterback, has the best individual stats (including accuracy leader in passes completed), so why aren’t they 9-0? The reason: football is not tennis, nor golf nor even basketball. It’s the…
Read More"Worst to First"–the Power of Resilience
One of the great things about sports is you can see the human condition ebb and flow in a microcosm lasting 60 minutes on the football clock (which we all know is not really 60 minutes) and interminable minutes on the baseball clock. We get to see one-year “turnarounds” where teams go from “worst to…
Read MoreStay Poised in the Noise
Statistics are fun. I mean, don’t you love knowing that Edison patented almost 1300 inventions in his lifetime? Or that summer on Uranus lasts 21 years? Or that more than 10 people a year are killed by a vending machine? Where do they get this stuff? Football stats are fun too. I always love the…
Read MoreNFL—Ultimate Employee Engagement
The season of the NFL, or the demonstration of “ultimate employee engagement has begun! “Employee engagement” is defined as “the emotional and functional commitment an employee has to his or her organization.” Statistics from Gallup show that 71% of all American workers are not fully engaged (see Gen Y multi-screening on company time). We CAN…
Read More"Look up, get up, and don't ever give up"
These are the words Michael Irvin used at the end of his acceptance speech when he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2007. I am a Hall of Fame junkie as you know (see my blog posts from 2012 and 2011) so this last Saturday I was glued to the 3-hour…
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