No wonder! Taking that first step is a huge moment for any baby. It separates the past from the future, and opens the way for a different life.

You’re just like a baby in the sense that first steps don’t end when you grow up. Life is full of first steps, and you can take them any time you want. You can go from out-of-shape to buff, from addicted to sober, from sick to healthy or from jobless to employed. In each case, that first step is the one that can transform everything. Nothing happens without it.

Just as with a baby, that first step isn’t easy. You may fall a few times. You may be a bit rocky on your feet. But those things are soon forgotten when you’re on your way to a new life.

If you’re not getting what you want from life, you can change it all with that one step. You can start doing something you haven’t been doing, or you can stop doing something harmful.

Tennis legend Martina Navratilova took a big step in her life. Years ago, after winning a major or two, she faced a choice: She could rest on her laurels or become one of the all-time greats. She chose greatness, and began by overhauling her diet. She became great, maybe the greatest of all time. It began with the one step of fixing her diet.

What step can you take today that will transform your life?

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Take a first step toward a new life today with “The Improvement Factor: How Winners Turn Practice into Success.”

She also said, with not as much pride, that her daughter can only do one thing at a time.

Only?

By being able to do “only” one thing at a time, her daughter owns the key to success. Doing “only” one thing at a time is a gift, not a limitation.

“I can’t do two things at once,” said Helena Bonham Carter. “I can’t even do one thing at once.”

Great things come to people who can define a task and then stay with it through completion. Narrow focus helps you beat the odds, win the big prize. It’s a basic part of your mental game. Multitasking is the enemy of quality.

“Multitasking is a way of screwing up several things at once,” a wise person once said.

Besides, the ability to focus on more than one thing at a time is a myth. You can switch quickly from one thought to another, but your brain cannot hold two simultaneously.

“To do two things at once is to do neither,” said ancient writer Publilius.

I’m not sure what the woman who can 12 things at a time does for a living, but I would bet on the quality of the work turned in by the daughter who can do “only” one thing.

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Would you like to improve at what you do? “The Improvement Factor: How Winners Turn Practice into Success” can show you how! Are you a coach? “Ten Things Great Coaches Know” can make you a better one.

“We’re going to re-set your baseline today,” a SEAL tells a group of athletes as they embark on a grueling session to test and expand their limits.

Olympians and SEALS are just like the rest of us. They have limits to their ability to endure discomfort, pain and frustration. The difference comes in the way they handle those limits. Their life is a struggle to re-set boundaries.

That’s what brought them to SEALS training, with its freezing water, rolls in the dirt, and heavy loads to lift, as detailed in this article from USA Today.

“We push in our training,” says Zack Railey, a 2008 Olympic silver medalist in sailing, “but this was just a totally different type of physical and mental exhaustion.”

Olympic gold medalist Garrett Weber-Gale went through the training with Michael Phelps and other swimmers in 2009. “I guess what I took away from that was the human body can always achieve more than we believe,” she said. “And that’s controlled purely by our minds.”

You may never play in the Olympics, but you can compete against the most important foe of all — yourself. You can become a SEAL or an Olympian in the way you struggle with the things that are holding you back.

As peak performance expert Dave Cross has written, all the things you want lie outside your comfort zone.

“You must break out of your current comfort zone and become comfortable with the unfamiliar and the unknown,” said Denis Waitley.
Don’t wait for a Navy SEAL to re-set your limits. Start doing it yourself today!

*** *** *** ***

Would you like to improve at what you do? “The Improvement Factor: How Winners Turn Practice into Success” can show you how! Are you a coach? “Ten Things Great Coaches Know” can make you a better one.

The good news is that you have a great ability to focus. If you don’t believe me, think abut the last time you watched a great TV show. You were really locked in.

The bad new is that you don’t always use this focus for the right thing. You know how it goes: When you’re at work or school, you think of home. When you’re home, you’re preoccupied by work.

Here’s a great article on how you can use your incredible ability in the right way.

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Would you like to improve at what you do? “The Improvement Factor: How Winners Turn Practice into Success” can show you how! Are you a coach? “Ten Things Great Coaches Know” can make you a better one.

The book finally got done because I’ve learned the same lesson that I preach in my Winner’s Workshops. You can’t try to do several projects at once. If you do, all of them will suffer. Instead you must finish one, then go on to the other. That way, you have a few finished projects, not a bunch of unfinished ones.

Winners always finish. In fact, they win because they finish. This wisdom goes back centuries.

“Do not plan for ventures before finishing what’s at hand,” said Euripides.

Not finishing really hurts. It leaves a nagging feeling of something undone. It drags you down. Finishing, on the other hand, gives you confidence.

In sports, you often see examples of teams that faltered at the end, managing to lose a game they should have won. That comes in part from practice, where you can choose whether to nail things down or falter at the end.

That’s right. Finishing is a choice you can make today. It all comes down to the entire story of success. It’s not a matter of whether you can. It’s a matter of whether you will.

Injuries, bad calls and momentum swings will test the will of all teams, and the one that responds best will win.

It will take mental toughness to survive, which raises a key question. In planning their practices, why don’t more coaches work on building that kind of toughness?

If it’s a sure thing that every team will face adversity in games, then every team should face adversity in practice.

A creative coach can find many ways to test will as well as skill.
– Find drills that put the athletes into pressure situations.
– Make the athletes succeed at a certain skill several times in a row.
– Throw in an officiating “mistake” now and then.
– Pipe in loud noise to simulate a rowdy crowd.

There is a fancy phrase related to this kind of training. It’s called state dependent remembering, which means that when someone learns something, their mood and the surroundings become part of the same memory.

So if the skills are learned in a calm environment, the athlete will have a hard time performing them in a crazy gym.

What ways do you use to train for adversity?
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Does your group need a speaker? TotalGamePlan offers Winner’s Workshops for schools, sports teams and businesses. The emphasis is on motivation, skill-building and teamwork. To bring a Winner’s Workshop to your group, just email coachtully@totalgameplan.com or call (973) 800-5836. To order a copy of “Ten Things Great Coaches Know,” click here.

Qnexa is designed to help those struggling with obesity. Tests have shown that it helps, but they’ve also shown side effects that include heart problems and birth defects.

I’m no doctor, lawyer or pharmacist. I don’t know whether the risks outweigh the benefits or vice-versa. I’m not an expert and don’t claim to be.

But I’m a coach, and I know there’s another way to address obesity: act differently than you feel. Just because you feel like eating something doesn’t mean you have to do so.

I’m not passing judgment on overweight people. I’m one of them. And I’m sure not dismissing the strength of addiction. All I’m saying is that people who are best in the world at what they do have found a way to act differently than they feel.

They practice when they don’t feel like it. They work out when they don’t feel like it. They perform when they don’t feel like it. This puts them ahead to those who act according to their feelings.

Take baseball teams as an example. They’re in spring training preparing for a 162-game season that stretches over six months. Do you think that those players will feel like playing every day? No way. Think back to the last concert you saw. If performers are any good, they seem like they’re totally into it. That’s how they’re acting. They may feel differently.

You do this every day. You get up when you don’t feel like it. You go to work when you don’t feel like it. Sometimes you even pass up a snack that you feel like eating.

That means there’s another way besides Qnexa to address obesity. When you feel like eating, you can act differently. It’s not easy, but it’s possible.

Remember the difference between winners and others. Some people say, “It may be possible, but it’s too difficult.” Winners say, “It may be difficult, but it’s possible.”
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Does your group need a speaker? TotalGamePlan offers Winner’s Workshops for schools, sports teams and businesses. The emphasis is on motivation, skill-building and teamwork. To bring a Winner’s Workshop to your group, just email coachtully@totalgameplan.com or call (973) 800-5836. To order a copy of “Ten Things Great Coaches Know,” click here.

One expert says there was a one in six chance that Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, would die in the attempt. Glenn made it, but not before enduring a tense re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere.

“There were flaming chunks of the retro-pack burning off and coming back by the window,” Glenn said. “I didn’t know for sure whether it was the retro-pack or the heat shield, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it either way, except just keep trying to work and keep the spacecraft on its actual best attitude coming back in.”

In other words, Glenn did what we all should do: control what we can control and ignore the rest. This advice holds true whether you’re in space, in sports, school or business.

It’s a waste of time, energy and focus to worry about things beyond your control.

Great performers use their time, energy and focus just as Glenn did. He kept his mind on the task and did what he could to make the situation better.

You can do the same.

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TotalGamePlan offers Winner’s Workshops for schools, sports teams and businesses. The emphasis is on motivation, skill-building and teamwork. To bring a Winner’s Workshop to your group, just email coachtully@totalgameplan.com or call (973) 800-5836. To order a copy of “Ten Things Great Coaches Know,” click here.

Over the years, the press corps has used the preview week to pose some questions that have gone down in history.

Try this one, offered three decades ago to Oakland quarterback Jim Plunkett, who came from two special needs parents, one of whom had died.

“Jimmy, I want to make sure I have this right,” the reporter said. “Was it dead mother, blind father, or blind mother, dead father?”

Then there was the reporter who asked Dallas running back Emmitt Smith, “What are you going to wear in the game Sunday?”

Hmm, my uniform?

Anyway, reporters aren’t the only ones who ask stupid questions. As peak performance guru Dave Cross points out, we ask them of ourselves all the time. And these questions keep us from becoming great.

Here are some stupid questions, as laid out in the mental training masterpiece “Volleyball Cybernetics.”

Why does it always happen to me?

Why can’t I get better?

What’s the use?

Why is life so unfair?

— — — —

Here’s the problem with asking yourself stupid questions. Your mind is a powerful computer, and once you ask the question, it will work hard to provide an answer. But, as they say, “garbage in, garbage out.” If you ask a powerful computer a stupid question, it will give you a stupid answer.

For instance, if the question is, “Why does this always happen to me?” then the answer might come back, “Because you’re a loser.”

And that’s a really stupid answer. So instead, ask yourself smart, productive questions like:

What have I learned?

How must I change to get the results I want?

What must I do today to take action?

Whom have I helped today?

By asking the right questions, you can start getting the right answers, whether it’s Super Bowl Sunday or any other day.

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TotalGamePlan offers Winner’s Workshops for schools, sports teams and businesses. The emphasis is on motivation, skill-building and teamwork. To bring a Winner’s Workshop to your group, just email coachtully@totalgameplan.com or call (973) 800-5836. To order a copy of “Ten Things Great Coaches Know,” click here.

One day, when Wayne Gretzky was already the greatest hockey player in the world, he was practicing with his team, the Edmonton Oilers. Walter watched from the stands.

Afterwards, the two drove home together.

“You just wasted two hours of your life,” Walter Gretzky told his son. “If you’re going to practice, then do it right.”

No word on what happened the rest of the ride home. Maybe there was a sullen silence.

But Walter Gretzky’s comments are a reminder that even the world’s best need a wake-up call now and then. It can come from a coach, a family member, or an unexpected loss. That’s what happened to the Soviet hockey team when the U.S. Olympians defeated them in 1980.

Performers must be, in the words of golfer Bobby Jones, “everlastingly on the lookout against the self.”

Slumps often begin when things are going well. When results are good, performers never notice little flaws creeping into their game. The flaws only get discovered when results begin to fall.

Walter Gretzky knew his son well enough to know whether or not he was working hard. Trouble is, as Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has said, you can fool yourself about how hard you are working.

Don’t fool yourself about your practice ethic.

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TotalGamePlan offers Winner’s Workshops for schools, sports teams and businesses. The emphasis is on motivation, skill-building and teamwork. To bring a Winner’s Workshop to your group, just email coachtully@totalgameplan.com or call (973) 800-5836. To order a copy of “Ten Things Great Coaches Know,” click here.