The Coach Who Almost Had A Heart Attack

A lot people ask about what I call compartmentalization…

And people who work with me often talk about the surprise that I can instantly stop one thing and go do another thing and do it over and over again. The illustration that one of my colleagues used to use is now antiquated. He used to talk about clearing the calculator. You had to clear the thing before you could do the next problem

Now his illustration of clearing the calculator is wildly outdated. A better illustration is a computer closing a file, opening another file, closing a file, opening another file. That's literally what you train yourself to do mentally. And, if you have multiple responsibilities, multiple tasks, multiple projects, or multiple clients, it's a pretty important thing to train yourself to do. And, it's not accidental. I've worked at it.

I was at a fair once and we had a coaching conference call. And I went into a little office in the barn and onto the phone to do the conference call in under five minutes. And I was fine. I was totally focused. You just close that thing and you open up the next and go to work.

It's an important thing to learn how to do, if you have problems with it, it’s really a matter of concentration, and the example for me that has always sort of motivated me to work on this is the coach of athletes. Because they've gotta do these two things.

They've gotta be able to compartmentalize and they've gotta be able to shift from one thing to the other. They've gotta hit their reset button between plays. So think about when it goes bad on the football field, I've always said the worst job would be coaching pro basketball, because I think that's the fastest game and there's no built in break between the plays. Good friend of mine, Coach Foster, almost had a heart attack on top of another heart attack. And it doesn't surprise me in the least. But think about football and if a play goes bad. Your quarterback goes out there and does a stupid play and throws an interception. If that coach behaves like most people do and stays upset and mired in all of the emotion, no reactions to the stupid thing that just happened and all of the horrible things that can now happen as a result of what that happened.

Six plays go by and he's still in a funk. Well, he can't be he's gotta reset instantly or he loses the game. And he’s gotta do it minute by minute…

So we ought to be able to do it, maybe not at that level, but at some level really.

Compartmentalization is a really important skill, talent or ability to develop. It is crucial when it comes to daily productivity and being able to hit the reset button. See how you can compartmentalize your time using “Brass Balls” a free course inside of my NO B.S. Newsletter. If you want to listen to it for free, let me give it to you along with multiple other courses worth $19,997.