What Did You Accomplish Today?

I wanted to piggy-back a little bit on what I wrote about last week when I discussed autonomy and what we tend to do with any discovered time. Realistic goals and accomplishments drive the majority of successful businesses and individuals. Some people set goals daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly. Sometimes ones original goals may change depending on their environment or surrounding circumstances. Whatever the case, a person still needs to be able to commit their best effort to accomplishing new or existing goals.

In addition to my career and family, I also coach hockey. This year I was an assistant coach in order to be able to spend more time with my family. I was the head coach two years ago after taking last year off entirely for the birth of my daughter. This past weekend, our team (the Carmel Icehounds White team for those wondering at home) played in what ended up being its last tournament of the year. Our original goal was to win or get to the Championship game in order to be invited to participate in a national tournament in several weeks. As I have stated, goals can change quickly. The team played one of its best games of the year on Friday night, but ended up losing 4-3. We essentially needed to win our next two games on Saturday to get into the championship on Sunday morning. We lost our Saturday morning game 2-0 and tied our afternoon game 0-0. Obviously, I and the other coaches were disappointed that we did not make it into the title game. However, we were able to get into the consolation game. We were able to quickly re-align our goals with the situation. We now wanted to win the consolation game to end the season on a high note and give the two Seniors on the team the ability to say that they won their last high school game with Carmel White. Long story short, we won the game 2-1. It was impressive to see the team pull together and really give tremendous effort when they could have very easily "mailed it in."

Whether it is your business or your personal life, having to change and re-evaluate goals is a necessary exercise to drive success and emotion. It is true that the other coaches and I did not achieve our original goal of winning a tournament championship this past weekend. But we did win our final game and reward our Seniors with a victory. Make sure that you are giving yourself the opportunity to adjust as needed in order to work towards accomplishing something each day. Smaller victories are better than no victories at all.