What's Your Excuse?
It was 1962, and UCLA coach John Wooden, age 52, was a very good basketball coach. He'd never won an NCAA title, but then a lot of coaches never had.
That year, a funny thing happened. His team made the final 4 and tied the score with 10 seconds to go. In the last 10 seconds, a player from Cincinnati who hadn't scored a single point the entire game, scored the winning basket and UCLA lost by 2. The next night, Cincinnati won their second straight NCAA title. His team had come "within a whisker of winning it all." And that shocked him. He had always used his team's poor facility as a reason why they could never excel in the big time. But their performance that year blew that excuse away. He realized then that their dated gym was NOT a reason not to excel. "A subconcious barrier had been removed. A light went on," he wrote in his extraordinary book "Wooden on Leadership." "No longer could I tell myself 'no'; no longer could I be comfortable with the status quo. I now knew what I should have understood long before, namely, UCLA could go all the way to the stop despite the Men's Gym. It was up to me to figure out how to do it." Suddenly, he realized that his poor practice facilities did not preclude a national championship, and that realization shook him out of his complacency and "unconcious excuse making." He then realized that the things he couldn't control interfered with the things that he COULD control, such as "ceaselessly and creatively searching for ways to improve and reach the next level of competition." The rest, as they say, is history. From the not-so-tender age of 53, Wooden went on to win 10 of the next 12 NCAA titles, a feat unrivaled in basketball history. He coached four 30-0 teams in that stretch and at one point, over three seasons, his teams won 88 straight games. What's your psychological barrier to reaching your potential? Poor management? Maybe it's the lack of appreciation for the contribution of credit? Maybe you didn't get to finish the degree you wanted? Perhaps it's the lack of a training budget or the unwillingness of management to pay enough. Whatever it is, the lesson of John Wooden - who passed away last week at age 99 - is something all of us can learn from. There's no credit department in the world that doesn't suffer from significant factors outside its control. And there's no credit department in the world that can't benefit from an attitude of "ceaselessly and creatively searching for ways to reach the next level."
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