On Friday, Emily, Antonio and I battled through the M5 and A38 closures to make it up to the Entrepreneurs Circle Training Academy in Birmingham for a fabulous, inspirational and motivational day with Olympic Gold medallist Ben Hunt-Davis (Men’s rowing eight in Sydney 2000)

Under the very apt banner of “Will it make the boat go faster?” Ben gave us (and a room full of others) many truly valuable nuggets to help us make “our boat go faster” (the boat being a metaphor for whatever goals you have in life (business and personal)).

Key Takeaways:

A few (of the many) key nuggets and phrases we took away with us were:

“Today is going to be a good day, because I’m going to make it a good day” – that’s going up as a notice on our wall straight away!

“Fortunately…” – this was a very useful word for us in terms of turning whatever difficult situation you have into a ‘positive’, for example, having had a near 5 hour journey to get to the event, we then had a 4+ hour journey going home from the event due to an accident on the M5. ‘Fortunately’ though, it gave the 3 of us a further hour to discuss ideas and action points arising from the day. The car on the way back was absolutely ‘buzzing’; so much so that we barely noticed the accident!

‘Being ruthless about performance review; be clear on what’s MOST important and within a team, make sure we hold each other to account’

‘Crazy goals’ and ‘controlling the controllables’

‘Bouncebackability’

‘Tricks to stop you getting knocked off course’

This, and lots, lots more is covered in Ben’s book “Will it make the boat go faster?” and via his website http://www.willitmaketheboatgofaster.com/

And for a reminder of that magical, nostalgic and nail biting race when our men’s rowing eight won the Olympic gold medal at the Sydney Olympics, you can watch it again here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wo12muzAHKk Gives me goosebumps just thinking about it!!