Real Success - Faces on the Cards - Joel - 3

In our last couple of blogs, we have talked about our discussion with Joel Adamson.  From a young age, he was really good at both pitching and hitting and he made his way to the Major Leagues.  After only three short years, he had shoulder surgery that would end his career in MLB.

As he was looking at what to do after baseball, Joel’s approach was, “What’s next?”  He knew that, just as people helped him (his father (as his first coach), other coaches, other people who cared about him), he wanted to help others and stay involved in baseball.  You don’t have to talk with Joel very long to find out how passionate and focused he is about everything he does.  As an example, he told us, “Our family enjoys what we do and are competitive.  If you come to a family reunion and play anything (like darts or horseshoes), you better bring your A game.”

So, when Joel began to tell us about coaching and teaching young people, we guessed that we would see his passion and focus fairly quickly.  And, we were looking forward to seeing how he brought that to the young people he was giving back to.

We didn’t have to wait long.  He told us about a teaching method for hitting that was our next lesson in success.  His method includes a navy bean, a broom handle and feedback.  He gives the broom handle to the young person he is coaching and, then, tosses a navy bean to them.  Of course, at first, most don’t get anywhere close to hitting it.  But, as he helps them adjust their swing (“you were a little low that time, swing a little higher”) or encourages them (“you are doing great – keep your eye on the bean, focus on it”), they will get to the point where they make contact.  Then, he tosses the beans to them one at a time in groups of fifteen beans.

Joel says, “…they will get to a point where they will foul one off.”  Then, with a lot of praise (“see, you are getting it…you made contact…you can do this…”), they start to really hit it.  It isn’t long from that point that they hit two in a row, three in a row, eight in a row and are hitting ten or twelve out of the fifteen.  At that point, there is a lot of praise and a lot of excitement.  And, Joel says, then when they get a real bat and they are swinging at a real ball, it looks like a watermelon coming to them.

Here are some lessons for all of us in Joel’s teaching method.  In the things we are trying to accomplish, how good is our focus?  If we break down what we are trying to do into things that we can practice and get really good at each one of them – then when we get to the actual task, we can make it easy to accomplish and succeed.

Here are some examples, if you are in sales, what is the part you struggle with?  Break it down, immerse yourself in practicing that piece of the process – when you are in front of the person, succeeding in that part can look like a watermelon coming to you.  If you want to start your own business, focus on the tasks you will need to do and really work on how you will get them done well.  Then, when you launch, major parts of what you will need to do will be in place.  If you are out of shape, how can you break down the things you need to do into things that you can turn into habits and do well in?

Something else to think about:  If you lead people (at work, in your family, at church, etc.), how can you help them succeed?  How can you help them see the pieces of what they need to do clearly and do well?  How can you help them succeed in those pieces?

Lastly, we need to make sure that we don’t underestimate positive enthusiasm and feedback.  Words and energy matter.  I once read that it takes ten positive comments to counter the effects of one negative one.  I don’t know if that is accurate or not, but it seems like it could be.  Helping people succeed and celebrating with them along the path can be great for the people we care about and it is rewarding to us.  But, for most of us, that doesn’t necessarily come naturally (especially when we are dealing with our own lives).  So, we need to do what we can to make habits of helping and celebrating.

May all of your navy beans turn into watermelons.  And, may you help others to see watermelons, too.

Real Successes - Faces on the Cards - Joel - Part 2

In our last post, we talked about something we learned about success from former Major League Baseball player Joel Adamson.  In the first couple of minutes of our conversation with him, he surprised us with how he (and we) shouldn’t set our sights too low, we can (and should) keep looking towards your next goal.

Joel had a baseball career that was shortened by a shoulder injury.  He only got to play three years in professional baseball.  In those three years, he had some great stories, too.  Like the time he struck out Barry Bonds.  Or, the time that he got the hit to end a no-hitter by figuring out the famous opposing pitcher’s throwing sequence against him.

But, we wondered how having an injury that made his career that short affected his life after baseball.  Was he able to bounce back?  Was there other success to find?  Or, was that the end of his success and goal setting?

Clearly, from our conversation, that was a difficult situation for him.  He didn’t want to spend a lot of time talking about it.  His main comment was, “Yeah, that was hard.”

But, here is this key to success.  He paused with that comment for a minute, but went on to talk about the things he has been doing since then and how rewarding they are.  For example, he coaches in a youth league that includes his son.  The powerful thing is that he doesn’t talk about that as something he has settled for.  How much he still loves baseball and the focus he has in helping those kids are clearly evident in his enthusiasm and in the details that he talks about in how he is working with them.

Hi is still in baseball (as well as being involved in other things, including other things his kids are doing) and he is still focused.  Although what he is focusing on has changed, his ability to focus hasn’t.

Here is the takeaway that we had from Joel on this aspect of his life:  Yes, difficult things happen, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be grateful and apply the tools that we used to reach that success for the next phase of our lives.  And…helping others with those tools can be pretty rewarding.

In our next blog, we will talk about one particular tool that Joel uses in coaching kids.  Not only is it great, but it can also teach us all about reaching our goals.  You will not hear advice on success that includes navy beans and a broom handle from anyone else.

Real Success - Faces on the Cards - Joel - Part 1

As I mentioned in my last blog, I came across my old baseball cards and was intrigued by how many of these people I didn’t know.  They had achieved so much, but I didn’t recognize many of them.  In thinking in terms of Mountaintop Life, I wondered how they had achieved their success in baseball, if they were able to maintain balance in their lives and what they were doing now.  That last question was particularly interesting – did they continue to find success or did the ending of that phase of success make life harder after their retirement.  I wondered what they were doing now.

I found one card that I noticed right away.  Joel Adamson.  Here is the picture that caught my eye:

He looked so young to me.  Yet, he is wearing a Big League uniform.  He made it to the majors.  I wondered what his career was like.  How long did he play?  What did he do afterwards?  What is important to him now.

I did a little research and found out that he was very successful in high school – both as a pitcher and as a hitter – that is a combination you don’t often find.  Then, I learned something hard that I wondered what impact it had on Joel’s future – his career in the Majors was cut to only three short years because of a shoulder injury.

Fortunately, I was able to connect with Joel and talk with him.  As I have found with many former MLB players – Joel is a great guy.

One of the first parts of our conversation is a lot of what you need to know about Joel.  I asked him what it was like to reach the pinnacle of his sport.  He replied, “Getting to the Majors isn’t the pinnacle.  Being named an All Star is the pinnacle.  That is what you want.  To be named one of the best in the majors – that is what you strive for.”

In the first minutes of our conversation, I learned something:  Keep striving…keep working to improve…keep setting your sights higher – even if you have achieved what others think is successful.  It is so easy to get into a groove (or a rut or habits) and not even set goals.  And/or it is so easy to get so busy that we are just doing so many things that we don’t take the time to think about what we hope to do or what difference we hope to make.  Sometimes we find a little bit of success and it is surprising how easy it is to just coast on that.

But, are any of those things the best or most we can do with this life?  You have unlimited potential.  Well…I guess a better way of saying that is we have to be careful that we don’t limit our potential.

Do you have goals?  Have you set them high enough?  As another former MLB player and now Coach, Clint Hurdle, often says, “Make a difference today.”  Do you have goals and plans to make a difference today?

I also wondered if a shortened MLB career discouraged and tainted Joel’s outlook on life.  That will be the topic for our next blog.  And, we will be featuring our interviews with other “faces on the cards” in upcoming blogs.

Learning About Real Success

The reason that we started Mountaintop Life was to help individuals and organizations to do three things:  1).  Set good goals; 2). Achieve those goals; 3). Find and maintain balance along that path.

As we have been working on that, we had a big life change.  We recently moved.  What a process.  Packing, unpacking, organizing, cleaning, signing papers, etc., etc., etc.  It was a good move, but I am always amazed at the amount of work that it takes and how tiring it is for all of us.

As I was unpacking a box, I found something I haven’t thought about or looked at for a while:  My old sports cards.  As I picked up baseball cards and looked at the players, something really surprised me:  I didn’t know most of them.  These were professional baseball players who had made it to the top league in their sport.  Yet, I probably only knew about a third of them at most.  I thought I would recognize most of them.  But…I didn’t.

As I looked at their faces, I thought about how successful they were to get to that level.  Then, I wondered what they were doing now.  What are their lives like after their time in Major League Baseball was over?  Did they continue to be successful (however that would be defined)?  Were they happy?  What were their priorities now?  I wondered if that was something that a person could find out (without being an annoyance to them).

I thought I would try to see if there was some way I could learn more about them.  I utilized some resources and contacts that I had and started to do some research on some of them.  There wasn’t a lot of information about them outside of their statistics from when they played.  So, I attempted to make some contacts.

In upcoming posts, I will share some of what I have found.  I think you will find it really interesting – I sure did.  And, I think this will help us all learn about how to define success, how to work towards achieving those successes and how we sometimes have to make adjustments to what we think success is.  If you go back up to the first paragraph – doesn’t that sound an awful lot like Mountaintop Life?

Suffice it to say, I have met some great people.  Some stories are sad, but most of them are truly inspirational and can give us a lot to think about and learn from.  So, be looking for upcoming posts to learn more about their (mostly untold) stories and how those apply to Mountaintop Life…and us.

Mountaintop Life: Starting the Climb

We have some exciting news at Mountaintop Life (drum-roll): Our first book Mountaintop Life: Starting the Climb is in publication! It is set to be printed between October 10-17th.

We will have availability, book signings and those types of things in the next couple of weeks - so please stay tuned for that information. You can find it in our next blog, on our website (www.mymountaintoplife.com) on Facebook at Mountaintop Life (community) and on Twitter.

Mountaintop Life is a system...a life system. It is a group of tools meant to be resources for you to help:

• Define what is most important to you,
• Set goals for each of those most important people, dreams, career steps, etc.,
• Yet (and this is a CRITICAL component), help you maintain balance between all of the things that compete for your time (so that you don't lose track of those things that are most important to you),
• Maintain your focus and energy to keep moving towards your goals and maintain balance.

The tools that we have developed all work independently, but have the most impact when used together. The tools are:

• Our new book (and subsequent books),
• Online resources (website, videos, Facebook, Twitter, etc.),
• Our PlanningLife app (in Android and iOS) - they will launch in October,
• Seminars (regional and corporate),
• Online communities.

They combine individual tools (the book, app and online tools) with community resources (seminars and online connectivity). What you use independently provides what you need to work through the system to develop your goals and tasks and be efficient in accomplishing them. The community tools help you learn more and see other ideas - but they especially help to maintain focus and energy. Keeping that momentum is often the hardest part in achieving goals and maintaining balance.

We look forward to sharing these with you and to being a part of helping you reach the peaks of your Mountaintop Life. Climb well.

The Next Step

Getting to this post took a few turns in the road.  Up to this point, I have written three blogs, which I was hoping to have as fairly sequential:

• What Matters Most? - in which we discussed that what really matter most are typically people, hope and dreams and, yet, how easy it is to let those get pushed out of our focus and time
• Can What is Most Important Come First? - beginning the discussion of how we might be able to give what matters most the proper time and resources
• First Key: A Plan - discussing that it is very hard to have the above happen without a plan in place to make it happen. "Without a system and/or a plan and/or a strategic way of focusing, almost every day will get so busy with things that come up (things that seem so urgent) that the most important things will get pushed out or get relegated to inconsistent events."

     I had planned to follow up the third blog (First Key: A Plan) to start introducing the steps that we have used in Mountaintop Life to help bring what matters most into the right focus and have the right allocation of our time and resources. That is so important for so many reasons.

     For example, if there are people around us who really matter more than anything else, yet we get so busy with other priorities that we don't spend the time with them that we should (or we spend time that is problematic rather than positive), then those relationships will, of course, suffer. Or, if we have a dream that we know we can and should accomplish, yet it keeps getting pushed further and further out, until it just dies out - we have lost, the people around us have lost and all of those who could have been touched by that dream have lost. Or, we let our bodies go and suffer those consequences.  Or...

     It is so easy for these things to happen.

     As mentioned in an earlier blog, at Mountaintop Life, we have developed and lived a system that has helped us work on these issues and have some pretty neat and powerful results.  We hope can help you do that too.

     We had planned to start talking about those specific steps before now.  But, we had to wait to discuss those details for a couple of reasons.  First, we needed to get our trademark and copywrite the steps and our materials.  And, we have also written a book that is a great reference for all of these pieces, but we weren't sure about the publishing timeline.

     So, we have two pieces of good news: 1. The trademark and copywrite are applied for and/or in place; 2. And, the book is set to be published in late July/early August 2016.  So, we are ready to start talking through the steps.  The next blog will start talking about specific steps in the Mountaintop Life plan and we will also talk about how we can stay on track and motivated within the Mountaintop Life system.

First Key: A Plan

In previous posts, I have talked about What Matters Most and Can What Is Most Important Come First?  In those blogs, we started by looking at what can and should be most important to us – those are usually people, hopes and dreams.

Then, we discussed whether we can, actually, put those people and things first in our lives.  It is so easy for those most important people and things to get pushed to the side as we work on the other things that seem so urgent at the time.  There seem to be so many urgent things that, even though they aren’t as important, they take our focus.

In my own life, in doing research and in working with others, here is what I have found:  Without a system and/or a plan and/or a strategic way of focusing, almost every day will get so busy with things that come up (things that seem so urgent) that the most important things will get pushed out or get relegated to inconsistent events.

At Mountaintop Life, we have developed a system to help sort through all of this and to also help plan and systematize how we can take control of our schedules to put first things first (as Stephen Covey said it).

Our next post will start laying out that system to see if it could benefit you.  Then, I will go through the tools that Mountaintop Life provides to help make it happen.

Here’s a glimpse of what I can tell you.  At one point in my life, it helped me go from a 60-70 hour work week to 32 hours per week.  That enabled me to really spend some time on the other parts of my life that I had been neglecting because I was working so much.  A system and a plan can have that great of an impact.  Then, with a system, it can become really incredible what you can do with that time.

CAN WHAT IS MOST IMPORTANT COME FIRST?

In my last blog, I talked about how hard it can be to keep focus on what matters most in our lives.  We can get so busy that the people, values and beliefs that are most important to us just slip to the side as we react from one thing to the next.  Steven Covey refers to that mode as substituting the important for the urgent.  The urgent may be loudest so we do that, even though it isn’t what could and should be the most important to us.

It doesn’t have to be that way.  We really can decide what we are going to do and how we are going to spend our time.  We can define what matters most to us and we can live in a way that puts those things in the center of our thoughts, time and resources.

Here’s the hard part:  In a lot of ways, it can go against the flow of several things that are currently in our lives (and even in our culture).

If you think about it – why have we gotten so busy?  That can be a little different for each person, but in my experience and for the people I have spent a lot of time with, it has usually come down to some similar things:

• Other people’s requirements – I had a friend say that he wasn’t living his priorities, he was living his boss’.  There are a lot of people who will take as much as we will give them.  Ironically, I have found that the people who will do that taking are often far more assertive than those who will give.  Most of us don’t want to disappoint others.  And, particularly in a work situation, we don’t want to lose our jobs.  So, we say “Yes”.  That is ok if it fits in what matters most.  But, if it doesn’t, something that mattered less just took some of the time of something that mattered more.
• Wanting it all – it is also easy to want to do so many things that activity takes the place of quality.  This is particularly easy to do with those who have kids.  We want our kids to experience everything and have every opportunity so we run them and ourselves ragged trying to fit it all in.  When that creeps in, I try to remind myself of a couple of things:  1).  Doing a lot can easily mean that we are not that good at anything – we can help weed out what is mediocre and/or not that important; 2).  I am the grown up – I am teaching our daughter what life can be like – I don’t want to show her that she has to fill every minute of every day with a blur of mediocre experiences.
• Necessity – I have been (and am periodically in) the situation where something just has to get done.  Or, I remember a time when there wasn’t enough money to go around and I just had to go work more.  It took time away from other things that I wanted to be more important, but it had to be done.  In those circumstances, I really tried to keep a clarity of where I (we) was headed and what I needed to do to get there.  Here’s the thing – I had to work harder, because I had to do what was necessary while also doing the things needed to move me (us) beyond that circumstance.

That isn’t a complete list, but it covers a lot of situations.

Here’s the key question:  How can you get from where you are to where you are spending your time and other resources on what is most important to you first?

In Mountaintop Life, we have some tools to help you do that that I will talk about in upcoming blogs, but the best starting point I have experienced is to: 1).  Think about what is most important to you, then; 2). Get strategic.  How can you change your circumstances?  How can you get to where you are giving the most important things to you all of the time that they need?  What do you have to do today, tomorrow, this week, etc. to get yourself there?

In the next blog, I will talk about some of the steps you can take to get yourself there that we have seen be successful.  Until then, what is most important to you?  And, what steps can you start taking to live accordingly?