Friday, April 11, 2008

The Power of Team In You Personal Life

How is the power of team relected in your personal life?

In sports, it's generally pretty easy to identify the power of a cohesive team. And the notion that we win as a team or lose as individuals is pretty easy to comprehend. How many times have we seen examples of a team's chemistry being ruined by one selfish star player? And how many times have we seen storybook finishes where the team was able to rise far above the individual skill level of its players?

Even in individual athletics, the power of team is readily apparent. There is the coach, the athlete, the training partner, the nutritionist, the therapist, etc. A whole team of people working together to enable the athlete to reach peak performance.

Similarly, it's not at all uncommon to see an emphasis on team work in business. Companies create mission statements, establish goals, and put mechanisms and people in place to promote working together as a team to achieve its goals and fulfill its mission at many levels. Again, it's not very difficult to recognize and understand.

But what about in our personal lives, day-to-day? Where is the team power you (or I) is tapping into? Assuming we've determined to go out and live a life of inspired abundance, what team have we assembled to assist us in achieving that vision?

How many people do you know who have explicitly assembled a team of people around them to assist them in achieving their life goals? Conversely, how many individuals do you know who wander through their life without goals and without any semblance of a team in their day-to-day life?

It seems to me that most of us are out there working on our own. Perhaps we have a supportive spouse or partner, but often even that appears to be missing. It's no wonder so many of us live our lives with a sense of quiet desperation.

I know I'm guilty of trying to do it all myself often. I've got a whole bunch of programming that tells me it's somehow a failure to ask for help, or that I'm somehow less worthy if I can't figure things out for myself. And so I'll flounder around on my own, often for what feels like an eternity.

Yet it doesn't have to be that way and, in fact, nor should it be that way.

You could very easily assemble a formal or informal team around you. You could easily appoint one of more coaches to assist you in specific areas of your life. You could easily recruit team members to play with you in particular pursuits within your life.

I'll expand on this more in my next post, but suffice to say, if we were to approach our personal lives with the same level of focus on being a successful member of a powerful team as is done in the sports world and the business world, we'd all be much more successful and powerful people.

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