The Challenge
A Case Study and Guide
This chapter will help you embed and apply the 7 Skills to impress™. It will set you up to perform and inspire in challenging times. You will be able to use The 7 Skills in any test you face.
To guide you in your use of The 7 Skills, I’ll take you through a personal challenge I faced in my elite sports work.
It’s a useful example because it was a test that hit many of my personal shortcomings. I’ll take you through it step by step and show you how I used The 7 Skills to overcome my limitations and perform at my best.
England Rugby
One of my favourite elite sports jobs was working with England Rugby coaches. We focused on inspiring speech patterns and mentally prepping players to be at their best when they crossed the white line.
One of the coaches from The Sevens team had a spare time project with a semi-pro 15s side. He asked me to help with them too.
One day, he called me from a Sevens tournament in New Zealand. His semi-pro team was on a losing streak, and morale was low. He was on the other side of the world and couldn’t do anything for them. So he asked if I could go along and give them an inspirational speech.
Let me say straight up, I didn’t want to do this. Being sent to deliver an inspiring speech is a bit of a tall order. You can find yourself standing in front of a bunch of sceptical faces. A “go on then, inspire me” sort of defiance oozing from them.
I loved this guy, the coach, though. And I still do. He was the one who opened the door to England Rugby for me. I was honoured by his unswerving faith in my abilities. But I wasn’t seeing this request as the privilege it truly was.
At this stage in my life, my PTSD wasn’t yet diagnosed. But I knew that for every challenge in my life, I first had to beat the demons in my head telling me that I was no good, that I was an outsider and not wanted. And tasks like this tapped deep into that well of self-doubt.
I wanted to say “no,”; but instead, I heard myself saying, “sure, no problem”.
Of course, this is what I had developed the 7 Skills for. To smash through my glass ceiling and perform when I felt pressure. And since the training evening the coach wanted me to talk at was only a few days away, I got to work immediately.
This is how I used the ‘ 7 Skills to impress™’ to prepare myself to perform at my highest levels. And how they helped me shape the inspirational words that stirred the squad to turn their season around.
The first thing, clearly, was to set my Outcomes for the talk. Skill 1: Working Out My Outcomes is up next. Click here.