Synopsis

Dr. Misner shares a story from his high school football days. When the team members complained about having to do wind sprints and conditioning exercises at practice instead of playing ball, their coach took them to see the LA Rams practice. Imagine their surprise when they saw that the pros were doing the same conditioning exercises their coach had inflicted on them.

If you do not learn to execute the fundamentals flawlessly, if you do not engage in the conditioning necessary, you will never be a champion on or off the field.

BNI meetings are a place to practice the fundamentals of networking until you can execute them flawlessly. If you’re going to be successful in BNI, you need to put effort into those fundamentals.

Brought to you by Networking Now.

Complete Transcript of Episode 444 –

Priscilla:

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Official BNI Podcast, brought to you by NetworkingNow.com, which is the leading site on the net for networking downloadables. I am Priscilla Rice, and I am coming to you from Live Oak Recording Studio in Berkeley, California. I am joined on the phone today by the Founder and the Chief Visionary Officer of BNI, Dr. Ivan Misner. Hello, Ivan. How are you and where are you?

Ivan:

Hey. This week I am in Austin, TX and we are preparing for our first Executive Management meeting of BNI top management coming to Austin. So I am in my new hometown this week, but we are doing a big meeting for BNI.

Priscilla:

That’s great. Tell me a little bit about these networking wind sprints. What is that about?

Ivan:

What do wind sprints and networking have to do with each other, right? Wind sprints are when people get down in three point stance- I first saw it in American style football. You know, the coach would blow a whistle and you would run like a bat out of heck for 10 yards and back or 50 yards and back. Whatever. You know, they are running quickly in short spurts.

It’s part of the fundamentals of football, and I will tie it into BNI and into networking in just a minute. I want to tell a story. I learned a really important lesson about the fundamentals of success when I was playing football as a high school kid a long, long time ago.

We had a pretty good team my junior year of high school. I was, you know, 16 years old when I started the year. Most of the other team members were juniors. The following year, the team had mostly seniors, and there were some pretty high expectations for the season, you know, because it was going to be mostly seniors and they would be a little more mature. A situation like that can maybe- you probably haven’t ever seen this in teenagers, Priscilla, but it maybe made us a little bit over-confident.

When the season started, we thought we were really experienced. In football, they have this brutal rite of passage that s called Hell Week. It is called Hell Week for a really good reason. The conditioning that the team is put through is pure hell. The team does very little other than drills and exercises. They have to do isometric exercises, wind sprints, short distance sprints as fast as you can run, hitting the bags, tacking dummies, running plays, hitting the ground. Did I mention wind sprints?

Priscilla:

You did.

Ivan:

Wind sprints, running up and down stadium steps, hitting the sled. They have these big, giant sleds, and they are made of iron, Priscilla. They aren’t made of aluminum. They are made of iron. Then they take the two fattest coaches known to mankind. They stand on it and you have to hit it and knock them back. And did I mention wind sprints? So many wind sprints! Lots and lots of wind sprints.

We were doing these drills for days. We never even saw the football. I saw the football when the coach threw it at my backside for not running fast enough.