Confidence

Stuart Anderson was a confident guy even after 26 consecutive failures. Stuart who you may be asking? He won a Superbowl ring playing for the Washington Redskins in 1982 but prior to that he’d been a top high school basketball player.. In his career he averaged 50% from the 3-point arc, which is pretty darn good.   

So in Stuart’s senior year his team rolled through the Virginia State play offs and into the Championship final. That day Stewart delivered the worst performance of his life. With 2 minutes to go Stewart had had 26 shots and missed every single one of them. Fortunately they had a good team round him and are still in the game with 30 seconds left and only down by 1 point. They get the ball, call a time out and head for the sidelines. The coach starts to draw up a play that has the ball going to the other shooter. Stuart stops him. “Coach if you give me the ball I will make that play, I will hit that shot”. “I don’t know” said the coach but Stuart insisted and the coach reluctantly re-drew the play.    So they went back onto court and started to run the clock down. With time running out the ball was passed to Stuart and he stuck the shot like he had all the time in the world. Afterwards the journalists surrounded the team and one guy asked ‘Stuart, how did you do that, how did you make that shot?’ Stuart looked puzzled ‘what do you mean?’ ‘How did you hit that shot after missing 26?’ ‘Well I’m a 50-50 shooter said Stuart, so do the math. If I’ve missed 26 the odds were stacked in my favor, how could I miss? The journalist thought for a second and said ‘ok, so if you’d have hit all 26 then the math says no way could you hit, so would you have asked the coach to draw a different play? Are you nuts, said Stuart, if I was 26 for 26 I’d be hot I couldn’t have missed. But you can’t have it both ways says the journalist. Yes I can he said Stuart I can think any way I want to. That is confidence and that demonstrates why the really top performers look inwardly for confidence and never to the leader board, or other people, or their bank account, or the sales table. They just know one way or another they will get the job done.  That story was taken from on of my all-time favorite books called The Maverick Mindset written by John Eliot. If you are interested in that, you can link through to it from my resources page at: http://www.adaringadventure.com/life-coach-orlando-coaching.html Scroll down to the Nightingale link.  I highly recommend the audio version if reading a book simply isn’t possible and I promise you that it will get you to think differently by the end.

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