Last Sunday I said I’d tell you exactly what happened. Even if it wasn’t going particularly well.
So here we are.
The score is still 3/20!
I would love to tell you that my grand declaration last week resulted in people rushing to join The Performance System. It didn’t. In a particularly excellent piece of irony, one of the things I decided to do differently this month was write on LinkedIn every day. I have. And as the week’s worn on, my impressions have got steadily worse, as though the algorithm heard my ambition and personally decided to humble me for it.
Brilliant.
I said I’d write these updates whatever happened though, rather than quietly disappearing and reappearing at the end of September with a beautifully constructed explanation of everything I’d learnt. So this is the slightly less polished version.
I’ve found this week hard.
Last week a tech entrepreneur asked me about my “start up.” I could have actually looked round to see who she was talking about.
I have never once thought of Lessons from the Touchline like that. But she’s right, obviously. That is what I’m doing. Building a business from scratch. Creating the product, working out how to sell it, writing the emails, making the content, watching the numbers, changing things when they don’t work, and trying to convince people that something I’ve spent two years building is worth paying for.
It’s exciting. It’s also terrifying, in that way that only comes from doing something you actually care about.
And I’m not doing it in a lovely quiet vacuum where this is the only thing that needs my attention.
You might not know that my husband (also from rugby) and I also own a 145 year old furniture and interiors business. But here in the UK retail has taken a battering, and running it at the moment is tough. We’re making big decisions there too: streamlining, changing things, adding new things, trying to work out what retail actually needs to look like next rather than hoping it all quietly reverts back to 2019.
Then there’s family. Children. Life. And my ongoing, faintly obsessive commitment to moving my body, by which I mean literally moving it. Running, lifting weights, getting outside, because I know myself well enough to know that everything gets harder the moment I stop.
I am, to use the technical term, knackered.
Now, I could quite happily spend the rest of this post giving you a blow by blow of my week, but this is meant to be a sports informed publication, so at some point I had to give myself a talking to and go back to what I actually know.
And this bit, I do know.
When a team gets a result it doesn’t want, it doesn’t get to decide the season’s over because everyone feels a bit rubbish about it.
You review.
The framework I use is ridiculously simple: Analyse. Action. Achieve.
So I analysed.
The Performance System hasn’t suddenly become something I don’t believe in because I haven’t sold another seventeen places this week. I know what I’ve built. I know the work that’s gone into it. And I’ve seen what happens when people actually go through it.
What I’ve had to question is whether I’ve done enough to help people understand what working with me is actually like.
I don’t think I have.
That’s a very different conclusion to “this isn’t working,” even if it feels almost identical at 11pm on a Thursday.
Once I’d separated those two things, the action became obvious.
And without sounding even more salesy, I’m creating two free masterclasses. One on Self Belief, one on The Structure of High Performance. I want to give you some time with my thinking, rather than expecting a LinkedIn post or an Instagram carousel to do all the heavy lifting for me. I don’t have dates yet, I’m giving myself time to get them right, but they’re coming and soon. Obvs, trying before the end of the month (I better get a move on).
And that’s probably the biggest thing I’ve learnt this week.
When something isn’t going the way you expected, the temptation is to make a judgement. It isn’t working.
Analysis asks a much better question: what, specifically, isn’t working?
Those two sentences take you to very different places.
So the score remains 3/20. I’m still going for twenty. I’m considerably more tired than I was when I announced it, and my LinkedIn algorithm has chosen this exact moment to take me down a peg. But I’ve analysed. I’ve taken action. And now I go again.
Which, annoyingly, is exactly what I’d tell you to do.
See you next Sunday,
Kate
Join The Performance System →Join The Performance System
I’ll be back here every Sunday this month with the next instalment, whichever way the score is going…wish me luck!
Kate what a good honest analysis. And these sort of look yourself straight in the eye self conversations are never easy, but you’re working out. Stick at it. Attitude and perseverance matter the most and you’ve got both.