Persistence – the Key to Success!

This week I was delighted to deliver my Mental Resilience Keynote Masterclass to the sales staff of Champions UK Plc who are one of the UK’s leading digital and brand communications agencies. They are a fast-growing family run business working with some of the UK’s biggest brands.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with CEO John Hayes and MD Matthew Hayes for over 3 years where I have presented an award at the annual Nottingham Sports Awards. These events are amazing and so professionally run by Champions – it is a joy to share the platform with many sporting superstars.

Champions – a great family run company

Champions are also a fast-growing speaking agency representing many world class celebrities and I have signed up with them to book me out for future events. John Hayes introduced me to the team and explained that Champions sponsored Loughborough All Stars many years ago around the time when I played for them, which was an amazing coincidence.

Persistence is one of my key attributes and is the main reason I reached the elite level of professional sport playing Basketball for England and also professionally for Sunderland. I am now using the same persistence to build my speaking, training and coaching business. It is small things executed consistently which gets you there.

I came across this article in Forbes magazine which describes persistence really well:

Persistence – the Key to Success

“If we look throughout the world in every industry, in every culture, there’s one consistent trend among successful individuals, and that trend is the ability to persevere. It’s the ability to stand up and take a step forward when everyone else sits down. Our greatest leaders — Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Colonel Sanders, Mark Victor Hansen, Steve Jobs — are the ones who have persisted beyond the norm.

But this is not always natural; it’s a learned trait. This means that persistence is most often a choice. It’s a matter of believing in oneself and finding a way to reach the end result when the first three strategies failed.

Take Abraham Lincoln, for example. He failed in business at the age of 21. He was defeated in a legislative race at age 22, failed again at business at age 24, overcame the death of his lover at age 26, had a nervous breakdown at age 27, lost a congressional race at 34 and 36, lost a senatorial race at 45, failed to become vice president at 47, lost a senatorial race at 49, and then finally was elected president of the United States of America at age 52.
Imagine what our country might look like today if he hadn’t persisted through those previous failures.

There’s the famous story about Thomas Edison trying 9,999 times to perfect the light bulb — and he couldn’t do it. Someone said, “Are you going to have 10,000 failures?” And he responded, “I didn’t fail; I just discovered another way not to invent the electric light bulb.” He chose how he perceived his previous experiences — and decided not to perceive them as failures.

So, what are the steps to increasing your level of persistence?

1. Clarify your why. By identifying the deep purpose behind your goal, your “why” will push you through the challenging times. I recommend writing out in detail what it means to you to have this goal complete.

2. Map out the possibilities. Identify all of the different means and methods you could use to reach your goal. I’m sure we can all agree that there’s more than one way to reach a desired result. No matter what that result is, there are multiple avenues to reach the destination. By mapping out all of the ways you can reach you goal, you can easily adjust if one strategy isn’t working.

3. Take action. Nothing can ever be created without measurable action. Get started and adjust as you need to along the way. Time and time again, individuals are stopped along their journey. Just because they failed once doesn’t mean their failures define them or that their project will never work. It simply means, as Thomas Edison believed, they found one more way it didn’t work. But that means they are one step closer to achieving the result.”

That article certainly gives us food for thought and maybe this week you can think about your levels of persistence and how increasing that part of your life could result in huge improvements.

Thoughts for the week:

1. How would you describe your level of persistence?
2. Do you give up easily or do you keep getting back up?
3. People often give up just before their breakthrough.
4. It’s like a combination lock where the first 4 numbers are correct, and you just need the final number to open the safe. You’ve already done the hard work you just need one more push.

Well that’s it for this week have a wonderful weekend and stay positive.

Warm regards

John