I was talking to a father this weekend about his daughter’s soccer team. “She’s always played a striker position,” he said, “but the coach moved her back into the midfield for the tournament.”
For those of you unfamiliar with the positions in soccer, here’s all you need to know to follow this story. In the simplest of terms, a soccer team’s three levels of structure are: defense, the midfield, and the strikers. Even more simply, so you can understand how this story ends: the midfielders play the ball to the strikers and the strikers score goals. For all you football aficionados out there, please forgive the blasphemy with which I’ve oversimplified the “beautiful game.”
Anyway, the athlete in this story is the most prolific goal-scorer on the team, probably the best player as well. So: why move your best goal scorer off the front line and into the midfield? Well, the answer to this question brings me to Rasmus Ankersen, the author of “The Gold Mine Effect: Crack the Secret of High Performance.”
There are several profound and provocative lessons to be learned from Ankersen’s research; however, for the purposes of today’s post I want to offer just one. Take a look at the following equation and try to solve for “X”.
POTENTIAL – X = PERFORMANCE
What is “X”?
If you solve “X” you will know why the coach moved our young protagonist off the front line and into the midfield.
X = Obstacles. In other words, remove the obstacles and performance and potential are maximized. Simple enough, right? Wrong. Identifying the true obstacles to peak performance is an extremely arduous and elusive process, often ending with the wrong obstacles being identified; thus, sending us down a path of folly, frustration, and perhaps collateral damage. For instance, the most popular obstacle identified in the path of academic performance is “poor work ethic.” Parents and teachers often say, “You need to work harder.” Research, however, would suggest that eight out of ten times “poor work ethic” is not the obstacle to high performance; it’s something else. It’s just easier to say, “Work harder.”
About 90% of everyone, when asked question #2, will say “to get better.” Well, to that I would say 80% of us are unknowingly lying. And not being honest here means: Failure to identify obstacles. After all, the obstacles to high-performance are diametrically different depending on whether you need/want to “feel good” or “get better.” While question #3 is not asking how much your peers, or your parents care; but how much you care. It’s asking, “Whose dream are you pursuing?” Sort of, echoing Daniel Pink’s contention in his book “Drive” that says “…autonomy and self-purpose are the keys to powerful motivation.”
Ankersen believes that if you can get to deep and honest responses to these three questions you will be able to successfully identify the obstacles to top performance.
So, why did the coach move our athlete to the midfield? Because, the obstacle standing in the way of her performance (thus the success of the team) was the fact that she was not receiving enough good passes from the midfield to score goals. After all, a gifted goal scorer still needs to receive a pass in order to score. It’s useless being a goal scorer if you never get the ball.
I encourage you to reflect on your own performance and to chat with your children about theirs using Ankersen’s questions as a guide. I did it yesterday with over 100 teachers in our multi-purpose hall. It was powerful.