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Get Selfish to Be Selfless: Building a Resilient Team


team strategy

To be a top coach or leader, you must know how to get the most out of your people; having every single one of your people perform at their best consistently is a beautiful sight to see.

The best teams in the world are ones that are resilient; teams that can handle adversity with ease and adapt unlike any other. Whether it's building your team's mental resilience for athletic performance, or business performance, being adaptable is a top key performance indicator.

But how do you take your people to the top and how do you get them to stay there?

We know it’s not about dragging your people to the finish line each day (and if it is, then you need to reevaluate the people on your team).

Instead, it comes down to building a team of independent individuals who work on themselves so that when they come to their jobs they have something of value to offer the team. It comes down to building a culture of getting selfish to be selfless.


If you want to be a top leader, then you must know how to carry out and execute, this message within your team.




selfish and selfless

What Getting Selfish to Be Selfless Really Means

As we said in our previous post, "It’s very simple: if you want to be able to impact others, then you have to possess skills that offer them value.”


This doesn’t mean only thinking about yourself but instead ensuring that you’re working so hard on bettering yourself that you’re able to provide value to your team by doing your job effectively.

It means making sure you get yourself right before going into your performance environment; it means making sure that you’re at your best before you go on your mission with the team.



feeding your brain

Psychological Safety: The Philosophy Behind a Selfish to Be Selfless Team

Research shows that teams that have a “safe” culture, or one where you know that you won’t get punished for being creative or trying something new, and have infinite resources that you can turn to in order to get through obstacles, is a culture that’s full of resilience and success.


When you have a culture that promotes psychological safety, it means that you’re promoting your people to try new things and showing them they have the resources necessary to succeed.


It promotes social support, mental toughness, emotional intelligence, emotional resilience, and psychological resilience to build resilience so they can handle difficult situations. A team's ability to adapt simply comes from a bunch of individuals who know their role, know what they’re capable of, and come together to find a solution during adverse situations.

Punishment only happens when someone doesn’t act in accordance with the values of the team, or organization - not when a mistake happens.

In order to get your people to even take these risks though, they have to be operating with a high degree of certainty, or self-belief.


And this self-belief can’t just be built through positive comments when they do something well (although this helps); this belief comes from each individual on the team knowing that they can handle whatever is thrown at them because they worked hard on themselves before they worked hard on the team.


And as a leader who wants their team to succeed, you must understand that a high performing team is simply a group of individuals who are sure of themselves and their abilities, that come together to accomplish a singular team target.


Promoting a message of getting selfish to be selfless means creating a culture that promotes each individual member on the team to work harder on themselves than they do their job so that when they come together to work on the team target, they’re at their best.


To start helping your team get selfish to be selfless, simply conduct the following 3 sit-down meetings.


Meeting 1: The Personal Development Monthly Sit-Down

Getting selfish to be selfless starts with an individual knowing how to take care of themselves; this allows each individual to come into the team optimized.

Working through a simple target like eating better, or having a better morning or bed time system, is key to optimizing an individual; daily lifestyle habits make all the difference here.

In the high performance world though, it’s crazy to think about having a sit-down about anything other than performance based results (sarcasm) - it’s why only the best teams in the world do it.


Get your people to take care of themselves first before they come into the arena, or office; a 5-10 minute monthly sit-down to help them get clear on just one thing to focus on for the month works wonders.

Each month as you stack habits, there’s more optimization that occurs.


DISCLAIMER: do not mix these sit-downs with performance based sit-downs; keep these two meetings separate from each other or you run the risk of a mixed message. The goal here is to have a clear focus on the individuals personal habits, not their performances.


Step 2: The Performance Based Monthly Sit-Down

In a separate meeting, you want to help your people get clear on their performance based targets for the month.

As a leader it’s your duty to help your people get clear on what matters right now; helping them cut out the noise is mandatory.


If your people are guessing about what they need to work on for the month, then you’re running the risk of wasted time; the quicker you help your people get clear on a target, the quicker you get results.


The process for this is simple: help the individual understand what target they must accomplish for the month, then help them decipher the skills to use/work on for the month in order to accomplish this target.

Host a 5-10 minute performance based monthly sit-down so you can help your people get clear on their targets and actions they need to take to accomplish them.


Step 3: Have Weekly Touch Point Meetings

Now that you’ve helped your people get optimized (personal development targets and actions) and certain (performance based targets and actions), the final step is to hold them accountable by helping them remove obstacles.

We suggest a weekly touch point call that focuses on holding your people accountable to the actions you helped them discover in your monthly sit-downs.

Simply ask these questions:

  1. How is it going with INSERT ACTION HERE?

  2. Is there anything I can help with, or do you have it under control?


You’ll be surprised at how easy it is to help people stay on track while getting through obstacles when you have these regular touch points.


Focusing on the actions keeps the focus on the individual, not the team, which ultimately ends with the team being positively impacted.


And these can be simple phone calls - you’ll find that a 2 minute phone call can prevent a lot of long term catastrophes from happening.


How to Schedule This All

We suggest following this schedule to do this the right way:

  1. On the first Monday of the month have your Personal Development Target Sit-Down

  2. On the first Wednesday of the month have your Performance Based Target Sit-Down

  3. On the Monday’s of each week, have your weekly touch points

For the podcast episode of this article, simply click here. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter, the Molliteum Insider, to get trained weekly, for free, on more resilience skills like this. Like our YouTube channel, and click the notification bell so that you can get trained weekly with us on the Difference Maker Podcast.

Stay resilient.

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