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Success Strategies From Sports: Transferable Life Skills To Be Successful

FMKN 12 | Transferable Life Skills

 

Life is like a game that you need to win. You have to have a strategy to become successful in it. Today, Mimi reveals her journey as a soccer player and how it affected her life. Kofi Nartey and Mimi Nartey discuss how we can become successful with transferable life skills from professional sports. Mimi and Kofi also share what they learned from sports. So, kick your ball of life into the goal of success with Kofi and Mimi Nartey today.

Listen to the podcast here

 

Success Strategies From Sports: Transferable Life Skills To Be Successful

Transferable Skills We’ve Learned From Professional Sports

Welcome back to the show. I’m excited as always. Anytime we can share knowledge, I’m excited to do so. In this episode, I’m going to be sharing success strategies from sports. Some of you know I played sports, but what you didn’t know or may not have known is that my wife, or a lot of you knew this, too, also played sports at a high level. She is joining me for this episode.

Welcome back.

Thanks for having me again. I am super excited about this topic.

We’re going to dive right in. There are so many tools from sports. A lot of them are some of the things that you hear all the time. We’re going to do a deeper dive into some things that you may have heard before but haven’t heard in this way and things that you never heard in terms of takeaways from sports. It’s important to have a little bit of an understanding of our sports backgrounds. You’re here. Tell us a little bit about your sports background.

I have been involved in soccer for a very long time. I started playing my first soccer team when I was about eight years old. My dad is like your dad, originally from Ghana, West Africa. He was my first soccer coach and my trainer for much of my life. He trained me and my sister. I always joke that my dad is like the African Richard Williams, and I intend that to be as loaded as it sounds.

I played competitive club soccer. I played at the Olympic development level. The United States has a track for preparing talented soccer players for the Olympic development program for representing the nation. I played a lot at the international level as a youth and received a lot of recognition. They were things like Best Player awards, other kinds of accolades, major tournaments in England, Scotland, and Sweden.

When I was fifteen, I had the opportunity to try out for the Ghana Women’s National team. I took advantage of that opportunity. I started playing with them when I was fifteen years old. My high school years involved a lot of traveling back and forth in long stints in Ghana. It was a very non-traditional experience for me. I got a scholarship from Gatorade, played Division I at Columbia University, and made the All-Ivy team in my first year.

What a lot of people don’t know is that in 1999, I was in the Women’s World Cup pool for Ghana. I had an ankle injury, so I was not able to participate in the 1999 Women’s World Cup. In 2002, I had a chance to play in the FIFA African Women’s Cup of Nations, which is effectively like the World Cup of Africa. I helped my team earn a silver medal in that tournament, which was also the World Cup qualifier.

In 2003, I did represent Ghana in the Women’s World Cup. I did not play much longer beyond 2003, but I did play briefly in the W League for the Portland Rain. The W League is the league that proceeded the NWSL that’s actively going on. We’ve got, locally, Angel City FC and all that. I had a pretty storied career from the playing side. On top of all that, I’ve been coaching youth soccer for almost 25 years. I started coaching when I was 16 because I have a sister who’s 11 years younger than me. I had a lot of learnings from a process that long as a player and then also from the long process of engagement with youth athletes as a coach.

There’s a lot there. I feel like we could do a whole episode on your sports experience. Not even just takeaways from sports but from the sports experience. I know it’s not about that for this episode, but I want to ask one question that maybe the audience would like to know. At what point in your journey did you realize that you had the ability or opportunity to go to the highest level of women’s soccer?

I have to credit my dad for holding that vision for me. A lot of times, I talk about my responsibility as a coach or the service that I’m providing as a coach to youth players. It’s not just about teaching them technical and tactical things. The responsibility of the coach is to hold the vision of the highest outcome for those players and help support them through the gap between where they are and where they could be.

Pretty early on, my dad started to develop these ambitions and communicate these ambitions for me about what was possible for me in this sport. I had talent. I had a lot of natural athleticism. I put in a lot of work. It was probably as early as 12, 13, or 14 when I really started to stand out. I had this constant voice telling me that I had a big destiny in this process.

I love it. A little bit about my own sports background. My very first sport was soccer. My dad’s also from Ghana, and he played soccer. He played soccer when he was in primary school. He played field hockey. He was part of the national championship field hockey team from Achimota in Ghana. When he came to the US, he continued with his soccer career at the University of Washington. He was the captain of the soccer team.

I was introduced to soccer very early on and managed to reach a level of club soccer. I played for FRAM here in Southern California club soccer and then transitioned out of club soccer pretty early as well to American football. That was more of my exposure to American football. A lot of my friends were playing football and basketball. There were not as many playing soccer. I wanted to do what my friends were doing. I played one year of Pop Warner, skipped a couple of years, and went to high school.

When I went to high school, I thought I was going to play basketball. I went to a highly gifted magnet program that was at Crenshaw High School. Crenshaw was a basketball powerhouse, so I was like, “I got to try out for the basketball team.” They were a basketball powerhouse and I was not a powerhouse in basketball, but I was 6’1”, almost 6’2” in high school as a 10th grader. The coach there, Robert Garrett, recruited me out of my registration line. I was registering for classes. He came and said, “Do you play football?” I said, “A little bit.” He said, “You’re going to play football.”

I did not know that.

Fast forward, I ended up playing football there. I did pretty well and made All-City as both a receiver, kicker, and punter. I had my soccer still embedded in me, so I was able to do that. I still hold the record for longest punt and longest field goal at my high school. I was a 55-yarder in the playoffs in the Fog. There was major drama. I’ll tell you that story over drinks one day.

I got a scholarship to go to Berkeley. I had a lot of different options in terms of schools that I could have attended, but I wanted to go to also a great school. That was in part because of my dad. He instilled academics first. He had no intentions of pushing me into sports or even into professional sports. He was really focused on the academic side.

Sports played a big part in my life, but I did well in school. I had a great SAT score. I was smart but also had this athletic ability. I had a football scholarship at Cal. I had a very interesting ride there. We had three different head coaches while I was there. We had 4 or 5 different position coaches at wide receivers. I had a lot of transition, a lot of changeover, and a lot of lessons learned from that.

My collegiate career was okay. I realized that I had a shot to make it to the pros. I doubled down on my efforts. I doubled down on my work in between practice and after practice. I gave myself a shot at the league. I had a couple of teams that offered me an opportunity to come in. I opted for the Raiders. They were in Oakland, which was local at the time. I knew there was a receiver space there that I could try to fight for, so I went to the Oakland Raiders. Unfortunately, like many people who go to that level, my career was cut short by injuries against the game or against the Cowboys. I still don’t like the Cowboys, if you’re a Cowboys fan. That was the chance to get to the highest level of football, which was great.

It’s neat that you’ve organized us to do this episode because we have met so many people who don’t know the first chapters of our stories since we’ve been married. It’s exciting to share that and give some more context. A lot of people see you as a leader in the real estate industry and maybe don’t know so much about what your experience was in sports and how that has really framed out who you are as a person.

We started with this idea of doing ten things that we learned from sports, but as soon as we started the list, we were like, “This is going to be more than 10.” Let’s jump right in. Let’s start sharing. It may be 10, 20, or 25. We want to share as much as we can in this jam-packed episode. I’m going to let you go first. We have a policy that we don’t plan these things together. I do my list, she does her list, and then we come into the booth and see where it goes. This is going to be interesting. I know there are going to be some good takeaways.

I’m jumping right in. What’s something I’ve learned from sports that is a success strategy I use in other parts of my life? It comes down to learning how to play, be defensive and protect what’s yours, and learn how to attack and go after what you want. On the defensive side, learning how to play defense, a lot of risk assessment is involved when you are in a defensive mode. That is a really important skill to leverage in life and in business. On the offensive side, when you’re on the attack, there’s something about learning the timing of when to exploit and learning what you have to leverage to exploit your opponent.

That’s so important. We think about some of the biggest deals that are done in business. There’s usually that moment of, “This is the moment to attack. This is the moment to put the offer in. This is the moment to seize this company. This is the moment to defeat the competition,” or whatever it is. It’s such a great takeaway.

Mine is something you hear all the time, but I want to unpack it a little bit further. The first one is teamwork. We hear it all the time, but what does that mean? In most sports, you’re part of a team. You’re competing with other people. You have accountability to other people. That was one of my big takeaways, knowing who your advocates are in that teamwork framework and knowing who your soft, subtle, silent competition is. 

When we’re competing for positions, we have what’s called a depth chart. The depth chart shows who’s the first, second, and third receiver and who’s on the bench. You’re competing to climb up the depth chart. I remember identifying, “Who’s going to be my accountability partner here? Who wants it like I want it, but also, is that competition?” It’s not that we were competing in a negative way against each other.

It was two people in particular. It was Na’il Benjamin, who’s one of my best friends, and Bobby Shaw, another one of my best friends. We were both all three wide receivers at Cal. We would all compete. We come early and stay after. They became great accountability partners for us to push each other even further. On game day, the teamwork thing transitions into, “We’re all in this together at this point. We’re all fighting together. Let’s go get it.”

On the teamwork point, I have two thoughts there. In participating in a team sport, you learn how to value at a deeply internal level the idea of equitable partnerships. In a team, everybody is not exactly the same. The roles aren’t the same. The skill levels aren’t the same. The experience levels aren’t the same.

In the process of working with other people, you do learn how to value equity in the community that you have that’s working towards a common goal. The second point is that you learn with this team model how to build a team and then how to manage people from a capabilities perspective. It really gives you a more inclusive leadership style.

In the process of working with other people, you do learn how to value equity in the community that you have that's working towards a common goal. Share on X

I was playing in a women’s pickup game. There’s an amazing pickup game that happens in the Mar Vista area. It’s been going on for 40 years. It’s a women’s pickup game that’s called 18 to 80. It is supposed to include women from 18 years old all the way to 80 years old. I received one of the highest compliments as an athlete or soccer player I’ve ever received playing in that game. One of the women said to me, “Playing with you is amazing because you make everybody look good.”

That was such an important, humbling compliment for me. From all of the different kinds of accolades that I’ve gotten, that one hit me deeply because it’s the idea of having learned over all of these years of playing sports how to take that capabilities approach, how to see what everybody is offering within my team, and how to amplify their potential in the way that I can serve them the ball or move to support them.

I love that. My logo for the company is a logo that represents unlocking and unleashing potential. It’s one of the things that I pride myself on. How can I talk to somebody about their business and their property, unlock the potential within that person or within that thing, and unleash that potential? You touched on leadership, which was second on my list. You learn different styles of leadership from the other people around you. You learn and find your voice for leadership.

To your point, that partnership or accountability as being a teammate or a team member isn’t always equitable. Sometimes, you play a role as a receiver. Sometimes, I have to block so the running back can score. I have to do something else so the other receiver gets open. I have to clear the field or whatever it is, but that’s my role at that moment. That’s how I can perform leadership in that moment.

You also learn from your coaches. There are so many different coaching styles. My high school coach, Robert Garrett, was a grab-you-by-the-face-mask. He’ll tell you what to do and you have to get it done. He also recognized that I was a little bit more of a cerebral player, so he didn’t have to necessarily grab me every time. He could tell me and I would get it done. You learn to adapt to different coaches. You also learn your own leadership style to help lead other people.

That’s so important. With what you’re saying about learning from different coaches, I had something similar, which was learning that there are different styles of play. It is learning that as a life philosophy. There are different styles of play. You also learn how to learn from different people. Learning how to learn and knowing how to know is such an important skill.

I gave a commencement address a few years ago at St. Bernard High School. I spoke on that very topic of learning how to learn. As an athlete, and you are a person who is a person pursuing a goal and hungry for an outcome for yourself and for your team, you become voracious in trying to extract knowledge from the person or the mentor who has that knowledge for you.

On this idea of learning different styles to play, you start to do the analysis. You’re like, “What are the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches?” You then start to realize what constitutes a particular style or theory of play. These are all transferable life skills. When it comes to business and kinds of business approaches or different kinds of strategies for running your business, you realize there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Whatever the way is, there has to be a certain level of fidelity to that style in order to have success.

I love it. Hard work and discipline are next on my list. Whether you like it or not, if you’re part of a team, you’re forced to work hard and be forced into discipline. Practice is at a certain time. On game day, you have to show up at a certain time. These things are built into your regimen, even things off the field. We see it with the soccer teams that you coach. When they line up their backpacks on the sideline, they need to look neat. This is part of discipline because how you do one thing is going to be how you do almost everything or how you do most things. The level of work it takes to succeed in sports or at a high level is transferrable to almost everything you do.

That’s important, the level of discipline that you get and understanding that excellence is a lifestyle. It’s not something that’s happening on the field. It is being particular about your technique. You have to take the point of view that, “I’m going to be particular about everything that I do.” I couldn’t agree more. Another one that I have that’s really interesting is from sports is I’ve learned how to be comfortable standing in the gaze. That means learning how to accept criticism, learning how to accept praise, and also learning how to be an ambassador.

FMKN 12 | Transferable Life Skills

Transferable Life Skills: The level of discipline that you get and understanding that excellence is a lifestyle.

 

For me, in particular, I have played at a level where I’m representing a state or representing a country, and I’ve had that opportunity from a very young age. It is learning what that means, the responsibility of being an ambassador, and being a brand ambassador. At times, I’ve cooperated with a couple of different sports brands. Importantly, it is learning how to stand in the gaze and accept the attention that comes with performance.

I love that. It jumps to one that I had later on my list, but I’m going to share it because you shared that. That’s performance and performance under pressure. Performance and performance under pressure. Sports is not just playing a game. It’s performing. You have to understand what it means to perform in front of people. To do that under pressure, the game is on the line, you have to step up and fulfill your obligation to get it done.

There’s a little bit of that spectacle. That’s part of it. Even in sales, it’s a little bit of a performance. We think about Michael Jordan and him sticking his tongue out. He always said he played the game as if somebody who was in the stands was there to see him for the first time. He wants to perform and give a certain performance.

Kobe Bryant with that mean mamba mentality underbite is a performance. He wants to show you that he’s angry, focused, fired up, or whatever it is he’s trying to show you. Look at Zlatan Ibrahimovic. Everything about him is performance. It’s all performance, and he lives up to it. It drives him to do exactly what he wants to do. He is a crazy, amazing soccer player. He is retired, but look him up. He came to the MLS and took out a full-page ad in the LA Times that said, “You’re welcome.” He feels like he is a gift to the world. He is a gift to everyone here. Performance is a huge part of it. 

To piggyback a little bit on what you’re saying, also, from sports, you learn to develop coping strategies for anxiety because there is that performance piece and there’s naturally a little bit of performance anxiety that goes into it. You learn how to prepare yourself to minimize anxiety. You learn how to establish a routine, things like the hype song that you’re going to use to get you in the zone and get you fired up. You learn how to identify your support system and how to communicate with your support system to manage that anxiety. These are all really important skills that you also leverage in life and business. These are things that, from sports, set me ahead.

From sports, you learn to develop coping strategies for anxiety because there is that performance piece, and there's naturally a little bit of performance anxiety that goes into it. You learn how to prepare yourself to minimize anxiety. Share on X

I love that. It ties into one of my points, which is the importance of practice. There’s that quote, “Activity is the cure for anxiety.” You could almost replace that with practice. Practice is the cure for anxiety. You have to practice. You have to do it. You’re forced to practice in sports. Those who thrive and excel practice more than they’re even required to because they’re driven to be the best version of themselves.

We talk about practice, but it’s not even about just being good at your position. It’s being good and disciplined across all aspects of being the athlete. That could be in the weight room or classroom because you have to keep your grades up or on the field. We say, “Don’t practice until you get it. You practice until you can’t get it wrong.”

The last part of that is even the plays. You have to understand where you need to be on the field. In football, we have huge 2 to 3-inch stick playbooks with all these different variations of plays. That’s the same thing in business. You have to know your contracts, your scripts, your objection handlers, and your sales pitches. All of that requires practice.

It’s great to break this down because, for people who haven’t had a lot of experience in sports, I don’t think they often appreciate the high level of intellectual functioning that is part of a very high-performing athlete’s experience and repertoire. You look at someone like LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, or Michael Jordan. These people are geniuses at the level of any major physicist and Oppenheimer in terms of the information they are synthesizing and what they can translate. They also have that kinesthetic intelligence that’s coupled with their creativity and ability.

That practice piece is so hugely important. It is learning how to practice and how to understand that that is a huge cure for anxiety. It is understanding that practice also makes permanent at the level. It’s not just getting through the task or going through the motions but understanding that you have to do things in a certain way to develop mastery of the thing that you’re doing.

One other word to add to the practice piece is nuance. When you get to a certain level, especially a high level of sports, it’s no longer learning the foundational elements of the game or being a player. It’s about nuance. It’s about small tweaks. As it relates to business and success even in life, at a certain point in your life, you know the direction you’re heading in. You know the business you want to launch, your business, and your industry very well. You need to figure out the little nuances to continue to get better and to keep breaking through to the next level. 

I’m going to jump in with another one, another important learning. Through sports, I have learned the life wisdom or the life principle. There is a place where you will thrive and it will likely have to change to continue to grow over time. Having had the experience of playing sports at different levels in different teams, different places, different states, and different countries, I have come to learn that there are certain environments that really are right for you as a player.

Based on what your style is, what your experience is, and what your goals are, there are certain environments that are right for you. There are certain environments that are right for you for a season, and then beyond that, you need to look to grow into the next environment that’s going to continue to develop you.

FMKN 12 | Transferable Life Skills

Transferable Life Skills: Some environments are right for you for a season, and then beyond that, you need to look to grow into the next environment that will continue to develop you.

 

I love that. It relates to even part of my own journey in real estate and a lot of agents that I know. You change teams or change brokerages because you’ve outgrown where you are or the opportunities no longer exist where you are, or there’s greater opportunity ahead. This episode is going to be a little bit longer than normal because I want to dig into that a little bit more. You brought up such a good point.

I want to ask you a question and we can brainstorm quickly. How do you differentiate if it’s the environment that needs to change or if it’s you that needs to change? Sometimes, from an accountability standpoint and responsibility standpoint, we have a habit of pointing outward and saying, “It’s this coach’s fault,” or, “It’s this environmental fault,” but it’s you who needs to work harder to be a better player to get the starting position. How do you start to recognize which one it is?

It has to do with really being self-aware. We are off the seat of our pants here, but it’s that self-awareness and understanding of what your goals are. Also, these are changes that are made after attempts to adapt. Those are the three things. One is self-awareness. What am I trying to learn? What aspects of my game am I trying to develop?

For example, our son, Lincoln, is eleven years old. He is a very talented little soccer player. We have him in a really small, what I would describe as a boutique soccer club. There are huge, major soccer programs all across southern California, but the environment that he’s in is so special. He has a West African soccer coach who is really cultivating a certain kind of style of play for him. This is the right environment for this time. He could be in another place and people would be trying to plug him more into a system. We’re focused on a certain aspect of his game.

There’s a real analogy to draw there, depending on where you are in your business. What aspect of yourself in your business are you trying to develop, and is there an environment that’s right for you? It might not be the biggest name, the real estate company, but you know that certain needs that you have can be met in that environment right then. It is understanding yourself, your weaknesses, and your goals for your own development. There is always that trying to adapt and running the experiment to see if you can make it work. That’s also what’s going to reveal whether or not that place is the place where you can flow.

FMKN 12 | Transferable Life Skills

Transferable Life Skills: Understand yourself, your weaknesses, and your goals for your development.

 

I love it. My next one is a little bit of a longer one, but I’ll try to keep it somewhat succinct. It’s the physical demands of sports where you build your mental stamina and resilience. It is the physical demands that are placed on your body. I think about football and what I had to do in high school and college. We do 2 a day in college where you have 2 practices a day.

The first one’s 5:00 in the morning. We’re doing all these crazy drills. We’re running miles and running hills. All these things are so physically demanding that they push you to the edge of mentally breaking down. It’s not just physically breaking down but mentally breaking down. It builds up your mental fortitude and mental stamina to deal with things in life.

Even as it relates to business, it makes it easy for me to deal with anything that is a challenge in business. There’s nothing in business that I’ve faced that’s been as physically demanding as what I faced in sports. It also builds up that resilience. Even with losing games, dropping the ball as a receiver, getting beat as a DB, or giving up a goal as a goalie, you have to bounce back immediately because your team still needs you in real-time. You don’t have time for a pity party. You can watch the film later and learn something from it, but you have to build up that quick bounce back or that resilience. That is 100% transferrable in life.

I always say that one of my personal superpowers is ruthless optimism. It’s really a commentary on that resilient mindset and that attitude and being able to see the difference between the way things appear in a moment and what is the bigger truth. That’s all part of it. You do push yourself to those physical limits. It feels like, “I’m going to die right now. I am over here. I’m exhausted. I’m vomiting. I’m feeling dehydrated.”

In reality, you’re getting stronger. You do have those particular experiences. In the losing, maybe it’s real-time in the game. You are able to see the difference between the losing score and what the outcome still can be before the game is over. It could be an injury. I had some pretty serious injuries. You mentioned what happened with you playing in football. When I was in college, I had a really serious concussion and was told that I would not play sports again. After that, I went on to play in the Women’s World Cup. That whole experience is what has taught me ruthless optimism and how to fight for what I believe can be the outcome despite what it seems like at the moment.

That’s it. Those challenges in facing that adversity and building up that mental stamina and physical stamina create muscle memory. It creates muscle memory for your mind as well when you’re dealing with negotiations and tough things in business and in life. I have this thing, the two taps and a beast. It’s where you are tapping into your inner beast, but your inner beast is created in those moments. That inner beast is created from the life experiences you have and the sports experiences you have that push you to those outer limits. You know, in any given moment, you can tap into that fortitude that you’ve built from life, experiences, challenges, and defeat that you’re still here to fight on. You have to tap into it and go.

That’s fantastic. As you’re talking and I’m thinking about it, across human development, so much of our agenda has been to try to civilize ourselves, so to speak. There is a true power in not trying to suppress your inner beast or your more carnal instincts but harnessing them and being able to manage them and direct them at the appropriate times in the appropriate ways. That’s like unlocking the next level avatar, the one that can have the intellectual side. You also can tap into that fundamentally emotional carnal side to achieve certain outcomes as appropriate.

I’m loving it. It reminds me of the episode we did on it’s not about winning or losing. It’s about always winning. It is this idea of participation awards and getting past that. There is something that builds character, fortitude, and that inner beast that’s transferrable in life, even though when to attack and when to get after it.

We’re running out of time here. I know we have a couple more we want to get through. One of my other ones is playing your game. It starts with knowing your competition. If you know the competition, you can’t be distracted by the competition that’s out there. You have to know what you know and know that you know how to do what you know. You have to stick to your plan and play your game.

That’s fantastic learning from sports. There are different styles of play. You’re going to come up against people that are playing the game in a different way. Being able to have fidelity to what your approach is, understanding your approach, being prepared in your approach, and sticking to that is a huge learning from the experience.

I’ve got to add to that because even in my experience in LA real estate, there are a lot of people playing a different game, and it’s an unethical game. You are tempted to see some of the success that they’re experiencing from lying, cheating, exaggerating, and whatever, but you have to stick to your moral compass. You have to stick to your plan not just in terms of how you’re executing your business plan, but how you hold your vision of your values and your moral compass as well.

Stick to your moral compass. Share on X

You think about the pressure that comes with business and the pressure that we even experience in sports. The best athletes and the highest achievers, when the pressure is at its highest, that’s when they get the most focused. The most focused is knowing your game, your desired outcome, your game plan, and your strengths and staying committed to that.

My dad always used to tell me that under those situations and circumstances of high pressure, we’re going to see what’s really in there. You got to be squeezed to see what’s in there. My takeaway here from sports is that I’ve learned that the destination is the journey. That’s what I’ve learned from all of this.

 

FMKN 12 | Transferable Life Skills

 

Someone asked me on a podcast, “What is that experience like to play in a Women’s World Cup?” You have that moment where you’re on the field. You’re listening to the national anthems and tens of thousands of people are in the stands cheering. You know your family and your friends are out there among them. I said, “It’s such a humbling moment because that is a moment that is a representation of all of the years of what’s been invested.” The destination is the journey, and because of that, I am, even though I’m retired from playing soccer, still becoming a better athlete every day. I am still becoming a better athlete every day because I have learned that integrative approach to my personal development, and it’s ongoing.

It’s moments like this that I know or remember why I married you. I love that. Your last point is the destination is the journey, right?

Yeah.

Mine was remembering that it’s a game, so enjoy the journey. Sports is a game. Life is also a game, so you have to enjoy the journey. Every game has its rules. Know what the rules are, but also, every game has predictable moments and unpredictable moments. The better you prepare yourself, the better you’ll be able to play within your game.

 

FMKN 12 | Transferable Life Skills

 

Be ready for those unpredictable moments. Life is going to give you unpredictable moments. Business opportunities, death, disease, and all these things that we deal with in life are unpredictable moments. If we can hold onto our core values, strengths, and the things we’ve built, that inner beast, we will be able to fight through.

You have to remain flexible. Sometimes, you’ve got to call the audible. You got to do something a little different. The word is little different. Sometimes, things happen in life and we feel like there’s a need for a huge change. When you call an audible in sports or even in soccer, sometimes, you’ve got to turn to your left a little bit to get the pass off or get to pass somebody a little bit. In football, we change the route from a post to a post corner. It’s a slight tweak, but we’re ready to call that audible. You have to enjoy the journey. 

This has been such an interesting conversation and one that I hope everyone can leverage. Our daughter got involved with the EXOS training program. That is one that develops athletes. They develop athletes in preparation for the NFL combine and everything. What’s interesting is they also do a lot of performance training and conditioning for executives, like Google execs and big company execs. There is so much overlap between this sport’s or athlete’s and business mindsets. Success is a success.

That’s what’s led to even some of the speaking opportunities that both you and I have had. It’s not just speaking to athletes. I spoke to the Kansas City Chiefs in 2023 about excellence and transferable skills. I do a lot of talks to NFL players in particular, but some of the corporations, big companies, insurance companies, and different companies in different industries have brought me in to teach some of these lessons from sports. I am excited. This was a good one.

Nice job.

Hopefully, you guys enjoyed this and took something from it. Hopefully, something’s applicable to what you’re doing or what you’re planning on doing. I’m going to do another one coming up, a little teaser alert here, on things that I’ve learned from acting because there are a lot of tools that I learned from my acting career. Share this. Reach out to us on social media. Let us know that you’ve read this particular episode. Reach out to us. DM us. What’s your social media handle?

@MimiNartey.

That is my wife’s. I’m @Kofi_Sellebrity. You can always find us at the Full Mogul show. Go to FullMogul.com to read this episode and other episodes again. Please stay committed to your full mogul journey.

 

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