Week 4 - Reading - Telling the WE Story

This week I read about the power of WE. In the Art of Possibility, by Benjamin Zander, he presents the following thoughts on how to achieve the WE.

1. Tell the WE story - the story of the unseen threads that connect us all, the story of possibility.
2. Listen and look for the emerging entity.
3. Ask: "What do WE want to have happen here?" "What's best for US?" - all of each of us, and all of all of us. "What's OUR next step?"

I found this chapter to be very personal to me as a former athlete and now as a coach. Many of speeches provided by former head coaches or evan myself have involved this promise of WE. Yet as I have learned, the real WE in these case evolve from the I. Zander asks us to take a different approach. An approach which is free of fixed wants and desires and is replaced with not a compromise but rather a vision of mutual fulfillment. This shift happens when the conversation moves away from the I and is replaced with the WE. Even in writing this it sounds simple and almost commonsense based. However, I can recall several occasions in which my speeches on WE have really been embedded in the I. As coaches, we ask so much of our players. We ask them to put their health, trust and at times, lives in our hands. This upcoming year I will begin the task of coaching the freshmen football team. I have been asked to take over as head coach and bring some new life to the team. See in the past, the coaching staff before lived for the I. What was best for them, not the players. Students have since transfered or stopped playing the sport and now the head of the program is asking me to bring back the WE that Palma football stands for. Hopefully I will be able to take much of what Zander has presented in this book and apply it, not only to my personal life, but also to my new life as a head coach.


Reference:

Zander, R. & Zander, B. (2000). The art of possibility: Transforming professional and personal life. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press