In previous blogs we reviewed Bill Walsh’s experience as a head football coach and how he came to fall into the trap of a negative scoring system as well as how it affected himself and management of the San Francisco 49ers.

So what did Coach Walsh believe that he could have done differently to avoid the negative scoring system?


THE BILL WALSH SOLUTIONS
Coach Walsh provides some general advice as to how to avoid “Zero points…” syndrome:

1. Look for small positives within any situation, even a loss.

2. Enjoy winning, but do not allow it to define who we are and how we think of ourselves (keep in mind from a poker perspective that we need to be mindful of all emotions, both good and bad).

3. We cannot isolate ourselves from others.

For item 3, Coach Walsh believes that maintaining healthy relationships both on a personal and professional level are keys to success. He advocates heavy delegation in order to involve others in the enjoyment of success and managing the failures (note, this is not spreading blame, but rather everyone banding together in the face of adversity to work on the process and win the next time). From a poker standpoint we are not really in a situation to “delegate” our responsibilities, but what we can do is form peer relationships with others that allow us to share thoughts, concepts, and ideas related to poker: how we play hands, how we view ourselves as players, accepting our accomplishments properly, dealing with downswings, etc.. Using the collective knowledge of our group we can sample different perspectives which will hopefully result in more varied input and ideas to help us with both managing our expectations as well as our overall game.


NEXT TIME
In our next post we will look at another solution not mentioned in Walsh's text. We will also look at this solution can be applied, by continuing on with our first poker example.