Being prepared and practiced enables one to be in the moment when performing. And that brings out your personal best.
What do you think about when you’re making a presentation? How you look? Whether you’re saying things right? Whether you’re making a fool of yourself?
Any such thoughts interfere with the quality of the doing of it.
“I thought it was pretty good, but athletes don’t think about history when making history. They think about what they’re doing, and that’s how it gets done.”
NADIA COMANECI, the Romanian gymnast, on the routine that won her a perfect score at the 1976 Olympics.
How do you get over being self-conscious or distracted when you’re showing the business or product?
Practice. Rehearse. Over and over and over. (I don’t mean a memorized bunch of words that are glib – but your story in conversational style, and why you are doing this when you could be doing something else – way less hard.)
When it’s like part of you, then you WILL think only about what you’re doing when you’re doing it. Because you will be in the moment.
Aren’t those in-the-moment-experiences our personal best?
That’s part of what we’ll be discussing in the new Haystack Telecourse. Coming Feb 20. I also made a little QuickTime slide show of the Haystack program here.
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Since today is Super Bowl Sunday, I thought you might like this quote from Peyton Manning, the quarterback for the Indianapolis Colts and the MVP of last year’s Super Bowl:
“Pressure is something you feel only when you don’t know what you are doing.
That’s how I feel. I get prepared. I prepare as hard as I possibly can. Sure you feel nervous, you feel anxious, but I don’t feel pressure because I feel that I have done everything I could to be prepared for that game.
There have been plenty of games where I have said that I wish that I could have this throw back or I wish that I would have seen that linebacker, but it just didn’t happen. But I have never left the field saying I could have done more to get ready for that game.
That gives me peace of mind.”
Paul Eilers
http://www.PurpleGreenPops.com