Sharing Dallaglio Belief & Gerrard Focus
Many salesguys I meet love to talk about sportstars and their approaches. And this week two attitudinal crackers surfaced as various seasons climax.
Dallaglio
A couple of my mates were lucky enough to blag tickets for the Heineken Rugby European Cup final Sunday, and I was out watching (the woeful) FA Cup final the day before with them in a London juicer.
All the rugby chat was Leicester were overwhelming favourites. Yet I view Wasps’ main man, Lawrence Dallaglio, as a colossus ever since seeing him take on the All-Blacks single-handedly at Twickenham when we drew 26-all.
In a pre-match interview last week I heard him say something like this.
“winning is all about belief, if you don’t believe you can win then you won’t, I look around our dressing room and I know that all of my players believe they can win”
Which contrasted bizarrely with their coach’s words, citing in none too enthusiastic tones that they were underdogs and given the opposition’s current stature, they’d enjoy their biggest ever victory if they caused an upset. As for the game? Well, Wasps took the game to their opponents and hammered them 25-9.
The sales moral unsurprisingly is, truly believe you will clinch the deal and you can make it happen.
Gerrard
The European Champions League final Wednesday, pits Liverpool against AC Milan once more. If just half as good as Istanbul two years ago it’ll still be a belter. One of my two current favourite players, Steve Gerrard (the other being Arsenal’s Thierry Henry by the way) has done plenty of media rounds during the build-up.
He’s constantly asked about his reaction to how Milan’s bad-boy, Gattuso, has supposedly said he’ll nail Stevie G and stop him from playing. Gerrard’s answer was a class act.
“I’m worried about my own game and if I get that right, then we’ll see if he can stop me”
He’s focused solely on Liverpool and how they will prepare so that he himself performs to the best of his abilities. He doesn’t take any notice whatsoever of any personal duel hype or whatever words emanate from the Italian camp.
Again, sales lesson bullet, don’t get wound up about the competition.