TOM TIME

Why do so many of us beat ourselves at the game of life?

I’ve wondered about that for a long time, and it seems that the older (and hopefully wiser) I become in my role as performance coach, mentor, and advisor to youth and adults alike, I become more troubled by watching people fall short of their potential for self-inflicted reasons.

We all go through peaks and valleys in our lives, and it is true that many times the culprit for the valleys is an external force that we cannot control.

But what about the internal forces we can control?

I recently had a motorsports client who was told by a friend who works in the sport that he was wasting his time chasing his son’s racing dream because they are not financially independent and there is no sponsorship money out there for race teams right now.

So should my client just give up?  Those kinds of negative comments from influential members of our inner circle may be well-intentioned, but they can shatter even the strongest walls of hope.

I worked with a young racer a few years back who had all the resources necessary to position himself for a shot at achieving his dream of big-time motorsports.

But one day he decided to try using cocaine he got from a relative’s stash.

That decision would end up costing him, literally, everything.

When his habit was discovered, his dream turned to powder in a heartbeat.  He teetered perilously between darkness and light for over two years, taking one step forward then two back.

Finally, addicted to (brace yourselves) turpentine, he took his own life.

Stories like these take place every day.

Life seems to get more and more challenging as we get older.  Sometimes it seems as though it takes all we have just to get through the day.

Here are five things we can do every day to help us overcome life’s toughest challenges.

1. Keep away from negative influences – This is critical.  In a world full of violence, hatred, greed, and a growing belief that anything is OK as long as we think it is, it takes a great deal of discipline to not allow ourselves and our attitudes to be swayed by things we see and hear on TV, in the newspaper, or on the internet.

It gets even worse if the people we must interact with every day are negative in nature, but we have to keep our guard up  and not allow their poison to seep into our belief systems.

2.  Get up every morning and thank God for another chance to make the right impression.  You can choose to live your life any way you want, but you can only live it once.  Each new day is full of opportunities for success and happiness.

Think positive and surround yourself with positive people and influences as much as possible.

3.  Stop making enemies and start making friends – Friendships can last a lifetime if we work at them, and can lead to opportunities in life and business.  Making friends always makes us a better person.  Making an enemy just makes you mad and creates tension and stress in your life.

Haven’t we all got enough of that already?

4.  Put others first in everything you do.  Why?  Because a life led by lifting others up and helping others to succeed leads others to see the best in you and you will be rewarded with a peace and satisfaction that you cannot get living a life where “things” matter more than “people”.

Legacies are built on what you d0, not what you have.

5.  Focus on the future, not on the past – Our failures teach us about how to succeed.  This is called “failing forward”. We know we cannot change anything that happened yesterday, but we can learn from it and use it to become better in the future.

I see so many people who have trouble letting go of their past, and honestly my heart aches for them because I know they will never achieve their true potential in life until they can make peace with their past.

All of us have done things we are not proud of, whether due to circumstance or by design.  Make amends where you can, forgive who you need to, and then forgive yourself.

Today is the first day of the best days of your life.

Believe in yourself.  Don’t beat yourself.

About Coach Tom   

Tom Baker is a performance coach and communications specialist who owns and operates a communications and development company called Team Full Throttle.
Team Full Throttle (TFT) has been successfully providing expert performance coaching, media, and communications services for individuals and businesses for over 20 years. Currently, TFT’s client list serves the U.S. and Canada.

Individual and small business coaching, youth coaching, performance coaching, freelance writing, blogging, media and PR coaching, website development and maintenance, individual and company bios, and voice talent work are all a part of TFT’s menu of services.

Based in Charlotte, N.C., Team Full Throttle’s motorsports division has been improving racers’ on-track and off-track performance with coaching and public relations services for racers at every level. The organization had over 60 feature wins and multiple championships to its credit in 2010.

In the course of doing my job as a performance coach and mentor for young racers and athletes (and serving as a volunteer in my church’s youth ministry), I encounter many situations where I see highly intelligent and talented

Coach Tom

young people who are unwittingly paying the price for our increasing lack of attention to teaching and enforcing proper grammar in our homes and schools.

This frustrates me to no end, because I see the effect our sloppiness has on these young men and women when they apply for jobs, have to deliver speeches,  or try to carry on formal conversations with adults.  Many employers are now starting to lean on schools to get “back to basics” with grammar, vocabulary, and verbal communication skills.

I’d strongly suggest that we re-introduce our young people to their grammar immediately.  She can be such a helpful lady!

I know of a first grade teacher who for many years allowed her students to spell by sound in the first half of the school year, and then started to correct them when they got it wrong in the second half.  I believe this was her way of combining the modern “whole language” approach to teaching her students to read and then adding the more traditional “phonics” teaching method in after Christmas break.

Let me illustrate in a literal sense what this “spell by sound” method would look like.

Those who teech this way fale to sea that letting the stoodents spell a word by its sound hawnts the stoodents later wen thay have to rite storees or blogs or cuver letters latur in life.

I am sure her intentions were noble.  But I have to wonder if this is really the best approach for our students?

Our failure to pay attention to how students learn to speak, spell and write has become an epidemic, and it’s deducting IQ points at the speed of sound.

Why do teachers, parents, and other influential adults in a child’s life not take the time to correct what I call “speech ticks”? Examples of speech ticks would be inserting “like”, “um”, or “you know” into sentences where they clearly don’t belong.

“Like, it was so cold outside that like, my nose just like started forming icicles as soon as I walked out the door and then you know like, I just said dude this is nuts and I like went back in the house and like chilled out for the day.”

Why do we allow our children to program this type of poor grammar and speech construction into their brains and repeat it over and over for years?  When did it become OK to just dismiss this as “It’s just the way kids talk these days”?

I have even heard some of the most well-known young actors and musicians speak that way in interviews, and I wonder why their handlers fail to find this important enough to warrant correction.

I have been pointing out incorrect grammar in my young clients’ verbal communication for years, and working with them to overcome their “ticks” and elevate their skills.  I want them to be able to speak intelligently with adults in media and business settings so they will be judged for the bright young minds that they are.

Our society’s trend toward communicating with a keyboard instead of through written or verbal means has no doubt led to the deterioration of our young people’s skills in those areas.  They simply don’t get the practice.

I totally understand the pressure that our teachers find themselves under in this technology filled world we live in to teach so much more than “readin, writin, and rithmetic”, but can we really afford to ignore this simple yet serious issue that ends up hindering our young men and women in colleges and in the workplace?

I believe it’s up to every influential adult in a child’s life to be positively persistent about helping that child to learn to communicate properly in all ways.

If we don’t do our jobs as their parents, teachers, mentors, and coaches, who will?+

About Coach Tom   

Tom Baker is a performance coach and communications specialist who owns and operates a communications and development company called Team Full Throttle.
Team Full Throttle (TFT) has been successfully providing expert performance coaching, media, and communications services for individuals and businesses for over 20 years. Currently, TFT’s client list serves the U.S. and Canada.

Individual and small business coaching, youth coaching, performance coaching, freelance writing, blogging, media and PR coaching, website development and maintenance, individual and company bios, and voice talent work are all a part of TFT’s menu of services.

Based in Charlotte, N.C., Team Full Throttle’s motorsports division has been improving racers’ on-track and off-track performance with coaching and public relations services for racers at every level. The organization had over 60 feature wins and multiple championships to its credit in 2010.

We all experience fear at different times in our life.  But few of us know what “fear” really is, or where it comes from.

Fear, as defined in the dictionary, is “a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, pain, etc., whether the threat is real or imagined;

the feeling or condition of being afraid.”  We know that fear causes stress which can lead to any number of health related issues if we don’t do something to minimize it.

But what really causes you to be afraid of something?  If you think about it, you’ll probably realize it is often just a lack of knowledge.  You may be afraid to call prospective marketing partners for your race team, for example, because you don’t feel you know the right thing to say, which causes a lack of confidence and leads to a fear of failing at the task.

Knowledge is power.  The more you know about something, the more confident you will be in your ability to do it or speak of it.  That confidence will translate into better results.

If you really think about it, how many times have you been afraid of something in your life and then later realized you had nothing to be afraid of?  When we are very young we fear monsters under our bed or ghosts in our closet, but then when we look (face the fear) we realize that we are the only one in the room.

We gained the knowledge that those mysterious creatures were not there because we did the research by actually looking for them, and then we gained power over our fear of being alone in the dark, eliminated that fear, and slept better as a result.

All of us no matter what our age should remember this acronym to help us through situations when we experience fear…

Fantasized

Experiences

Appearing

Real
The way to overcome fear is to gain knowledge over that which we are afraid of and then face it head on and eliminate it.  Knowledge = Confidence = Success.

Obviously this thought process requires us to actually spend time and do our homework to gain the knowledge we need to overcome our fear, but isn’t that a better alternative to letting your fears overcome you and produce the very result you were afraid of in the first place?

Believe in yourself and your dreams, and don’t let your fear stop you from doing whatever it takes to achieve them!

About Coach Tom   

Tom Baker is a performance coach and communications specialist who owns and operates a communications and development company called Team Full Throttle.
Team Full Throttle (TFT) has been successfully providing expert performance coaching, media, and communications services for individuals and businesses for over 20 years. Currently, TFT’s client list serves the U.S. and Canada.

Individual and small business coaching, youth coaching, performance coaching, freelance writing, blogging, media and PR coaching, website development and maintenance, individual and company bios, and voice talent work are all a part of TFT’s menu of services.

Based in Charlotte, N.C., Team Full Throttle’s motorsports division has been improving racers’ on-track and off-track performance with coaching and public relations services for racers at every level. The organization had over 60 feature wins and multiple championships to its credit in 2010.

I was watching a video of legendary musician Buddy Rich the other day, and it got me thinking.  Buddy, for those of you who don’t know, is considered by many in the business to be the greatest drummer who ever lived.  An experienced drummer for 40 years myself, I sometimes show a clip of Buddy performing a drum solo during my coaching sessions as an example of how years of hard work can pay off.

Buddy died in 1987.  But his music and videos are still priceless among drummers of all ages.  If you watch him play, his speed, precision, and out of this world technical dexterity will leave you wondering how a human being could be capable of such a performance.  I also sometimes show a clip of Neil Peart from the Canadian rock trio Rush during the training for the same reasons.

These are drummers who are not just considered great, but are considered to be masters of their craft.  They didn’t just settle for being the best in their particular genre of music, they worked tirelessly to become the best at their instrument (Neil still does).  You can look at other walks of life and see other examples of masters…

Tiger Woods in golf, Michael Phelps in swimming, Michael Jordan in basketball, Bill Gates in computer software, and Tony Stewart in Motorsports are examples of individuals who have excelled to levels of competence beyond most or all of their peers. They can take something that is incredibly hard for most of us and make it look easy.

While it could possibly be argued that there are better NASCAR racers than Stewart, I would suggest that Tony’s ability to get into any type of car and go win with it right away would place him far above a majority of his NASCAR competitors in terms of pure driving ability.  Tony may also be an example at times of how even some masters of their craft could become better if they learned to master their mind.

So how did these people get to be masters of their craft?  Start comparing notes and you’ll find pretty quickly that they all worked extraordinarily hard for a long period of time to practice their craft…carefully studying and learning every phase of it, in order to get to where they are.  Woods still practices daily even in the middle of tournaments he’s already winning!

Some of you may have mastered your craft at some entry level.  But in the big picture of reaching the top level of your profession, you and I are all apprentices.  An apprentice in the US Navy is an enlisted officer receiving specialized training.  That perfectly defines why we all could use coaching and why I personally have benefited from it tremendously, and hope my coaching clients have benefited from my guidance and support.  It should be your vision to become a master of your craft and to never stop learning and improving.

Do you have the drive and determination to invest the years of time it takes to go from being an apprentice to being a master your craft? Do you have the talent?

If so, with a lifetime of hard work and persistence and the right people around you to hold you accountable and to guide and encourage you, someday in the future your name might just be used as an example in this type of conversation!

About Coach Tom   

Tom Baker is a performance coach and communications specialist who owns and operates a communications and development company called Team Full Throttle.
Team Full Throttle (TFT) has been successfully providing expert performance coaching, media, and communications services for individuals and businesses for over 20 years. Currently, TFT’s client list serves the U.S. and Canada.

Individual and small business coaching, youth coaching, performance coaching, freelance writing, blogging, media and PR coaching, website development and maintenance, individual and company bios, and voice talent work are all a part of TFT’s menu of services.

Based in Charlotte, N.C., Team Full Throttle’s motorsports division has been improving racers’ on-track and off-track performance with coaching and public relations services for racers at every level. The organization had over 60 feature wins and multiple championships to its credit in 2010.

I’ve had several occasions lately where I’ve been involved in discussions with people who were telling me that they

Coach Tom

were very disappointed with where they’re at in their lives or their careers.  It always seems that they have a reason for not reaching their goals, and often that reason involves everyone or everything else but themselves.

It is understandable to want to deflect blame, just as it’s understandable to want to accept praise when things go well.  That’s human nature.  But that’s also a recipe for failure.  If you are not where you want to be in life, how about trying a new approach to reaching your goals?

Here’s one for you to think about…I call it the acronym of L.I.F.E.

Look

Inside

For

Excellence

What this means is that if you’re not getting what you want out of your life, the first thing you probably need to do is look inside yourself and determine whether you’re really doing everything you can to put yourself in the best position to achieve your goals.

If we’re just waiting for someone else to create our life for us, we will most likely fall short of our expectations.  Goal setting should be immediately followed by a plan for goal getting. We need to be relentless in the pursuit of excellence, and if that means we have to spend more time learning to master our craft or put more effort into convincing others to help us, then we have to be willing to do those things.

If you need to involve other people, the way to do that is to communicate your goal (vision) in a way that lets them see exactly how you would like them to help you achieve it.  But remember, it’s still your goal.  You own it.  It’s up to you to make it happen.

Sometimes it takes years of hard work and persistence to get to the top of the mountain.

Sometimes it takes us admitting our weaknesses and setting aside our pride in order to ask others to help us improve.

Sometimes it takes one or more failures in order to give us the knowledge we need to finally succeed.

Did you know that Walt Disney bounced back from no less than twelve bankruptcies before Mickey Mouse hit the movie screen in 1928 and changed his life (and ours) forever?  Now there’s an example of motivation from the inside.  Walt never gave up on his dream of full length cartoon animation films, or his belief they’d appeal to the masses.

In his youth, Walt had to endure the scorn of his fourth grade teacher who once asked his class to draw a pot of flowers she’d put on her desk, and he put faces on his flowers.  “Flowers do not have faces”, she spat out to him.

Good thing he didn’t listen!

About Coach Tom   

Tom Baker is a performance coach and communications specialist who owns and operates a communications and development company called Team Full Throttle.
Team Full Throttle (TFT) has been successfully providing expert performance coaching, media, and communications services for individuals and businesses for over 20 years. Currently, TFT’s client list serves the U.S. and Canada.

Individual and small business coaching, youth coaching, performance coaching, freelance writing, blogging, media and PR coaching, website development and maintenance, individual and company bios, and voice talent work are all a part of TFT’s menu of services.

Based in Charlotte, N.C., Team Full Throttle’s motorsports division has been improving racers’ on-track and off-track performance with coaching and public relations services for racers at every level. The organization had over 60 feature wins and multiple championships to its credit in 2010.