Are you being persistent enough?

Are you being persistent enough?

I write this article having watched Liverpool Football Club beat Barcelona 4-0 last night. Don’t worry it is not all about football but what is inside the footballers and the team.

A bit of context, Liverpool had been beaten 3-0 in Barcelona in the first leg of the semi-final six days ago. A part of this was Lionel Messi scoring a free kick from 30 yards out – a goal of the season contender. This meant they had not scored the away goal needed to give some level of security if Barcelona scored in the home leg. They had to win by four clear goals. During the game, one of the Liverpool midfielders Naby Keita went off injured and was ruled out of the second leg.

After the game, it was announced that Bobby Firmino – their third highest scorer this season – had aggravated an injury and would miss the second leg. On Saturday evening they played a tight match against Newcastle and with seven minutes to go and with the score at 2-2 Mo Salah – the top scorer this season – got concussion after a collision with the Newcastle goal keeper. Liverpool went on to score a late winner to keep the Premier League title race alive but Salah also missed the second leg.

On Monday evening Manchester City won their game against Leicester with Vincent Kompany scoring a late goal with a 30 yard screamer. Kompany has not scored a goal from outside the penalty area for twelve years!

So, on the night of the second leg, with all these series of events building up against Liverpool did they decide not to bother? Did they give up?

No, they showed persistence, determination and played their hearts out to get an unprecedented result beating Barcelona 4-0 and booking themselves a place in the final.

Prior to the match the manager Jurgen Klopp had told his players that what they were facing was nearly impossible but that because of the character of the team he felt they could win by four goals and go through to the final.

So, now imagine when you have had a bad run in your business or in your job. A time when things you can control don’t go as well for you as you would want and all around you – the uncontrollable seem to be stacked against you. Are there times when the next thing you face has, in your mind, low odds of success or where success feels nearly impossible? Can you think of such a situation?

How did you react? Did you lose motivation, focus, determination, appetite for a challenge? If so, you need to think as Liverpool Football Club did and just do more, keep working and turn the tide your way.

So, how can you do this? I believe the start is to be self aware enough to realise when you start to feel the tide of events is turning against you, the going gets tougher. Then you have to develop a habit that sees this as a trigger or a cue for you to raise your performance level by 10%. This may be working that bit harder, doing that bit more. It may be taking time out to think, what can I do differently or better? Create a situation where you can think through how you will be able to control the things you can control to enable this to work in your favour and turn the tide.

It all comes down to mindset, persistence and determination.

AS you will see from the photograph above, Mo Salah, one of the injured players wore a t-shirt giving a message to his team. They didn’t.

Make sure you don’t!

If you would like to discuss how this can apply to your situation and how to build that winning mindset, please contact me on rogerpemberton@actioncoach.com and I would be happy to see how I can help you win.