Moments
Gentlemen, welcome the Winter Session at Northern Elite. As is tradition in the winter and spring, we will continue with our Leadership Principle initiatives. Today’s discussion is about moments.
Each day we wake up and do our morning routine. We get ready for the day, moment by moment, that is to come and we prepare ourselves for the challenges that lie ahead. How we prepare for each day often times dictates how we handle the situations that come our way. Leadership, however, is not about handling those BIG moments. The ones we tend to gravitate towards thinking about. Everyone imagines themselves making the game winning shot, hitting the winning homerun or making the final save with 10 seconds left. However, those MOMENTS are preceded by a number of meaningful opportunities that often times make a bigger difference than the last moment does itself. Think about you personal life or your academic life.
When going in to take a test, it’s important you prepare adequately during the time before the test occurs. Im not talking about the day before or even the week of, but months in advance the preparation should start. When I was in my undergraduate program, I would use 14 of the 16 week semester to study really hard, own the processes that were necessary to fully grasp the concepts being taught and then I would take the final week off before finals from studying. A little brush up here and there was sometimes needed, but nothing to the extent of cramming and trying to memorize like most of my colleagues. The result? The result was acceptance to the National Honor Society, Academic All American Honors, Dean’s List and Honor Roll nearly every semester that I attended college. Were those awards important? They got me into graduate school, they qualified me for scholarships and they got me into doctoral school. Ask yourself this: Am I taking as much advantage of the moments leading up to the test as I am the moment of taking the test itself? What about our personal lives or dating lives?
Have you ever asked a girl out on a date then just shown up without a plan? Do you think she feels important when you show up without a clue what you’re going to do when you were the one who set up the date? What would happen if you planned something? Or took the time to think about something fun to do? Would she feel more special then? Do you think the date would be more fun if she was having fun and felt special? Those moments preceding your date, the planning and effort that goes into it, are meaningful to her and should be meaningful to you as this is a time to get to know yourself as well.
The moments in life that are overlooked are often times more important than any other moments. If we are careless with our ever passing moments, our results will follow suit and be careless too. Leading, as you know, is not about leading when it’s convenient or easiest, it’s about leading all of the time. Those little moments, the ones where we go 10x100 on the 1:20 and you finish in at 1:04 instead of 1:10. It’s the moments of trying to have a perfect passing warm up without a dropped ball. It’s the moments of pushing yourself every second of every practice so that you can perform better every single moment than the one before.
Welcome to Northern Elite.
Can you think of a moment when you could have done better to prepare? What was it?
How can we be more mindful of the moments we are to encounter on a daily basis?
What do you hope to accomplish this session at Northern Elite?
How do you plan on accomplishing those goals?
What moments do you need to work on in practice? In life?
