What makes you a winner?

This blog is inspired by a story, which in very simple words, told me what makes you a Winner. Starting with the story:

The story is about a TT player who hired a new coach to improve his game. The coach was highly experienced and extremely good. However, the player's results did not improve. As the player got impatient with the results not being good over a year, he changed his coach again. After the coach changed, the player started doing extremely well and winning tournaments. When the media asked the player as to what the difference between the two coaches was, the player said that he had a poor backhand. “All my opponents used to exploit my backhand. So, my old coach worked on my weakness and tried to convert it into a strength. As I was working on my backhand, it improved and it was no longer a weak area. However, my natural flair was towards forehand and therefore backhand could not become my strength. Meanwhile, as I was not working on my forehand I started losing my touch on the same. So, I had no weakness and no strength either. My new coach worked on my forehand and it is even more stronger!”

A lot of us may start by thinking how wrong the earlier coach was. What you need to understand is the contribution made by both of them. I believe is that if the earlier coach wouldn’t have worked on the player’s weakness, the player wouldn’t have managed to win only with his strength. Similarly, working only on weakness wasn’t giving an edge to the player too.

In our professional lives, this story is as relevant. If I were to convert the story into a professional set up, it would come as something like this:

Sia was a budding management professional in the sales team of a software company. She was way too good at handling people and all her clients were appreciative of her. However, her weakness was numbers. As soon as the client started quoting some market numbers, she would get lost, start giving vague answers and finally end up losing the deal. She soon realized that she must do something with her number skills immediately. Then she started studying market figures, did an in depth analysis of costs and got a fair understanding of numbers. Now, whenever she met clients, she started by quoting numbers. However, something  was still wrong and the client conversion rate was still the same as earlier. When she discussed her problem with a friend, she found out that the clients were missing the personal touch that they got earlier. That was when she realized that while she has worked on her weakness, it was her strength that had to be capitalized.

A lot of us, as soon as we realize our weakness, get nervous and start working towards it. And the most common mistake that we do is to try and convert our weakness into strength. What we must realize is that weakness is a weakness because we are not good at it. It is human not to be good in certain areas. What we need to do is “improve” ourselves in these areas. At the same time, we must also be grateful for the things that we are good at. These are the things that we like to do and give us a confidence boost. Therefore, it is also important to keep enhancing our strength and not lose touch of the same while we are working on eliminating our weaknesses. You have to combat one and make the other invincible and then you will emerge as the real ‘Winner’.

Winners are unbeatable in their strength areas and they don’t have obvious weaknesses!

Look forward to your comments. 

You can also reach me out at @agrawalsanjeev on twitter.