Coach Jerry Claiborne.
With the Super Bowl fast approaching, many football fans and sports media programs are busily debating which team will win and why. Everyone has stats, records and maybe a gut feeling or two to back up why they think one team will have the advantage over the other. Those of us whose teams are not in the big game are also wondering what it takes to build such a good football program that you end up at the big game.
Well, I’ve never coached or played in the Super Bowl. But I did have the good fortune to play for and coach with two of the most successful coaches in college football history: Bill Dooley and Jerry Claiborne. Both of these coaches were remarkably similar in their approaches to building winning football programs.
They rarely spoke about winning. They spent most of their time focused on perfecting the fundamentals with each player at each position. After every game they evaluated all of the players on how well they applied these fundamentals on each play. The core of both of their philosophies was the believe that if they focused on perfecting the little things (fundamentals like good blocking and tackling or protecting the football), the big things (winning) would follow.
I met recently with one of the top commercial real estate brokers in the state and discussed this very subject with him. He mentioned that he recently made a major change in how he tracks his productivity on his accounts. He said that since he first got into sales over 35 years ago, he always made a list of all his prospects and the money he would realize from each of these potential transactions. Then the economy slowed down, and the uncertainty that caused meant that most of his potential transactions took much longer to complete, if they got completed at all.
So he decided that instead of focusing on the money he would make on each deal he would change that category to focus instead on how much value he could add to each transaction. I asked him how this was working for him and he replied that the results were amazing. By focusing less on the big stuff and more on the fundamentals, he found himself less stressed and with a greater sense of accomplishment based on the value he could see that he was creating every day.
There’s a famous saying: “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” I disagree with this statement. It’s true that you shouldn’t let yourself get too stressed out by either small or large things, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t important. I think the saying should read more like, “I don’t sweat the big stuff because I focus on the small stuff.”
Have a great weekend,
Ro