How many times in your life, do you feel you have been pushed to breaking point?
And how many times have you gotten through those breaking points?
But how many times have you given up?
The way I look at things is that there is ALWAYS a way through. You must always find a way and nothing is impossible.
When I was striving to become a Rugby League Coach, it was tough. When I was starting out, I was working a full-time job as a key account manager at a construction company – Tarmac. Alongside this, I was working my way up the coaching ranks at Wigan Warriors. I started off as a scout, searching for the best young talent in the North West, then worked my way through the academy set up. I earned very little money and was working very long hours to ensure that I was successful.
I started my day at 6am travelling around Manchester visiting sites, at lunch I would analyse and clip videos from training, ready for me to show to the players at night to help them improve. I’d then carry on my afternoon closing business and go straight to training after that. I’d run the training session, stay around afterwards to plan games and help individual players. Then I’d go home to my family at 9 or 10pm.
Having a full-time job as well as coaching at night and at weekends was incredibly hard work – I was working 70 hour weeks and was getting very little renumeration for the coaching. But I knew I needed to do it to be successful so that I could progress.
At junior and academy level, you don’t get many resources – that’s just the way it is. But I wanted to win so badly that I had to find a way around those limitations! That’s where my girls came in. I recruited my wife and daughters to analyse games. I would watch the game, shouting out the information to capture, whilst they wrote it down. Stopping and starting the recording, so that I could re-watch different plays, defensive efforts (or lack of); to make clips of the game to show players. This could go on for hours, through all of the stopping and restarting. That’s a lot of time out of a weekend for teenage girls! But they did it because they wanted to help their Dad and they knew why I needed to do it (and they had little choice in the matter!).
It paid off because we won 7 Grand Finals and 6 League Leaders in 7 years in the academy.
Others might have given in and made excuses. “I don’t have an analyst, so I can’t get those stats”, “I don’t have time to do it”, “it doesn’t matter”.
The question really is – how much do you want it? If you want to achieve something that much, you will find a way and you will have to get creative with the way that you solve problems.
How many times have you used obstacles as excuses?
I would challenge you to think differently about obstacles. Try and enjoy the challenge of navigating around them.