We all have goals that require some discipline, but once one thing goes wrong it can be easy to let everything else fall apart.
You're on a diet and you have a bad day. You miss a gym session and break a solid streak. You have a lapse of judgement at work. You lose your cool at home. Once the bottle gets uncorked, it's easy to let things spiral out of control. But the best thing you can do is call a timeout immediately and reset.
How to lose a championship
Things won't always go in your favour. How you react when the board starts to tilt defines whether you'll survive the tumultuous period.
Very often we do the opposite - things get hard and we grit our teeth, we double-down, we try to white-knuckle it. But a lot of the time that just makes things worse, or at least makes them harder than they need to be.
Draymond Green was an underrated factor in one of the greatest basketball dynasties of all time - the 2015-2019 Golden State Warriors. He was the defensive force on a historically great offensive team but was forced to watch from the bench as Lebron James pulled off a historic upset in 2016, coming back from 3-1 down to win the championship finals.
When talking about the series in retrospect, Draymond pointed out the moments where momentum began to swing away from them, and how pivotal it is to be sensitive to those changes in the moment.
There are crucial moments in our daily lives which can swing the tempo and momentum against us. You take a five-minute break that becomes 50. Playful banter suddenly descends into an argument. You make a small mistake at work and, having lost composure, make several more afterwards.
Get your head in the game
A timeout is a mental reset. You cool off and clear your head. Then you draw up a play for what adjustments you want to make when you come out of the timeout. You decide how you'll address the weaknesses that have been exposed, and capitalise on the strengths that are und.
Sometimes the pressure of the ticking clock makes us feel like we have to hurry, have to rush. Like we have to throw up hail marys and make bad shots out of desperation.
Don’t just charge bullishly ahead. Learn when to disrupt the flow of the game instead. Don’t let your opponents rush you into taking poor-quality shots.
You can't wait patiently forever but you can carefully create and maximise the few opportunities which can make all the difference.
Don’t let the game control you. Get in rhythm. Move at your tempo. Don’t just watch the clock, manage it.
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