Everyone wants to succeed.

Regardless of what you may perceive as lackluster performance in someone, when it comes down to it, everyone has a deep desire to be successful. Once I identified and accepted this as a true principle in my life, it dramatically changed virtually all of my professional and personal interactions.

Here are a couple guidelines I use regularly to extract high levels of production from my athletes and, even, my employees:

What makes a person tick? Figure this out - it is a foundational key!
How can I help this person see the end goal (the success) for the process we’re currently going through? This can be applied to individual workouts, practices, and professional work projects.
Describe expectations. How can you expect someone to be successful if they don’t clearly understand the expectations of the event, team, work environment, etc.?
Finally, don’t let people down! For example, if you’re a coach and you’ve managed to get total buy-in from your players, don’t let them down by not putting together the best game plan of which you’re capable. Their success depends a great deal on what you’re doing, planning, producing, reading, writing… it depends a LOT on you.

This isn’t my sneaky way of getting people to work really hard. It’s my straightforward way of helping to guide people towards what it is that they really want to achieve. And it doesn’t matter if it’s running a faster 100-m dash or earning a higher paycheck or even building and maintaining a happy marriage, accepting that "everyone wants to be successful" will help you in working towards virtually any goal!

- Sarah