I was watching football on TV the other night with my son, we both like footy and enjoy a bit of banter about what is happening. This night I wasn’t enjoying the game as I usually do, I found it frustrating.
The main point of my frustration is that one of the teams had massive potential, but they were not living up to the potential.
What was so frustrating is that they had no problems rolling up the field, making ground easily, making things look easy when they were under little pressure.
But once they get in a scoring position, things got frantic.
The team lost the structure that got them to the position on the field, everyone wanted the ball, they tried to score off every play and invariably things went wrong and they bombed it. Time and time again they bombed scoring opportunities.
The worse thing is that often when you are part of the team in that situation, you cannot understand why things are not working, you think the only way to get out of this is to try harder, move faster, become more frantic, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
We will all have times in life and in business, when things will invariably get frantic. What we need is to be able to identify when frantic is setting in and to respond in a calm and measured way.
Having robust systems and processes to follow, to slow down, to follow the game plan is often the difference between taking control and escalating out of control.
What systems and processes do you have in place to stay in the opposite of frantic?