Trusting your Teammates

by Tom Dore

You want to be a Leader? If that’s you and what you are saying to yourself then let’s really talk about what you want and what you’re willing to do. I really want you to make a decision right now. This is it. No matter if you want to lose weight or become a leader or start working out. No matter what it is that you want to do, the way to start is to do it NOW!

For now let’s just say that you want to be a leader:

If you want to be a leader in your

• home
• office
• school or
• even in your own car

Then you have to make a few decisions. Starting today you need to BE that leader that you can see yourself being. Right now. No more waiting around.. no more .. I’ll start next week. You need to start Right NOW!

If you want to be a leader then you need to start with some discipline in your own home and in your own car, starting today. NOW.  Let’s get through this first week with just one goal for the entire week. It’s not a tough one, in fact it should be the easiest one that we do.

If we start out with the easiest one and you manage to make it through the week, then the second one will be just as easy. I promise.  For the first one all I need you to do is to be completely honest with yourself and everyone else about everything.

If you’re completely honest with yourself and everyone else you’ll set yourself up to win which is your ultimate goal. Making a change like this is difficult and the ONLY way you can make a permanent change in your life is to follow these steps consistently. Make sure that when you wake up every day you tell yourself that you’ll follow your own regimen without fail, whatever it is.

See we’re all smart enough to do what we need to do to make this change what we really need to do is make the change but NOT give in to temptation. If you want to be that leader you’re seeing yourself as, then you need to BE that leader.

So that’s it. For 1 week completely honest with yourself and everyone else. You don’t have to tell everyone else the complete truth but you can’t lie anymore. As a society we have allowed ourselves to tell what we call “little white lies”. Stop that now.

Ok now I’ll share a really good Bulls story on teamwork from the Bulls first championship season.

Like most of the good Bulls stories this one revolves around Michael Jordan and one of his favorite teammates John Paxson. The Bulls were playing the Los Angeles Lakers in the NBA finals, and in sports the thought is always that the team that has experience playing in the championship always has the advantage. In this case the Lakers were that team coming off of a loss in the finals to the Detroit Pistons in the 1989 finals.

The series started off in Chicago and the Lakers looked like they would be the dominant team as they won the first game in a cliffhanger. The LA crowd was in rare form walking into the old Chicago Stadium for game # 2. The experts all seemed to think that the Lakers might win all four games in a row and the series would almost be over before it began.

It seems that those experts forgot to tell Michael Jordan that plan, or maybe they DID tell him the plan. Either way it did not turn out quite like those experts had planned. The Bulls won the second game by 21 points. Now that series was going to move to Los Angeles and again the “experts” thought that it would be all Los Angeles.

Here is where our teamwork story begins. The star player for the Lakers was Ervin “Magic” Johnson and Magic and the Lakers were doing a great job of shutting down the Bulls in game 3. Coach Jackson called a time out and talked to Jordan, who was not used to passing the ball in pressure situations. In this case, just as in your office everyone has to be a team player and that’s just what Coach Jackson took this time-out to do.

During the timeout Coach Jackson got very vocal with Jordan and what he asked him went back to the roots of basketball for every one of us who have ever played the game. You see, the Lakers had done a great job of scouting the Bulls and they knew that the Bulls rarely relied on another guard named John Paxson to shoot that ball. The person who was guarding Paxson would go over

The timeout begins and Coach Jackson looks right at Jordan and asks “MJ who is open?” Jordan does not answer. Again, not looking at anyone else Coach Jackson asks “MJ WHO IS OPEN… and again MUCH louder MJ WHO IS OPEN? “ Finally about half way through the timeout after no other words have been spoken Jordan finally says “PAX”.  Coach Jackson then told him in as LOUD a voice “THEN  PASS THE F-ING BALL!

Pax shot a sizzling .650 from the floor in the Bulls’ first NBA Finals appearance and capped the experience with a memorable 20-point performance on a spotless 8-of-8 from the floor in the title-clinching game five, including 10 points in the final 3:54 of the contest.

The Bulls were the Champions and in his post game press conference Coach Jackson said “Pax was the key”

In your office just like the Bulls you have got to trust your teammates and believe that they will get the job done to either get that client packet out, or to make that winning shot.

Ok.. time to go to work. If you really want to make that change in your life, you have seven days to make one small change in your life. No more lies to anyone. ESPECIALLY YOURSELF. Don’t allow yourself to get away with anything. Can you do that for a week? If you can I promise you’re well on your way.

Good luck. From someone who has done what I’ll help you do, you can do it. I’ll talk to you in a week.

Tom

For more on my speaking engagements and how to be a leader please visit my Website   https://tomdore.com

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