Focus Magazine of SWFL Cheers To Your Style | Page 67
Stay Cool
& Succeed
By Ginny Grimsley
We all ask ourselves the same desperate question from time to
time:
How am I going to make this work?!
“No matter how well we’ve done laying the groundwork for everything to run smoothly – becoming educated, choosing the right
spouse, treating others well -- we all face situations that challenge
us,” says Dr. Robert J. Cerfolio, a world-renowned cardiothoracic
surgeon known as “the Michael Jordan of lung surgery.”
“If we can keep our cool and adhere to some basic principles, we
can not only meet any challenge – we can perform with excellence.”
A high-performance athlete in high school and college, Dr. Cerfolio
parlayed his talents and focus into pursuing his medical career
and creating a happy family with his cherished wife, Lorraine, and
their three sons.
Photographer Kulish Viktoriia
But after battling breast cancer, Lorraine recently passed away.
Cerfolio, author of “Super Performing at Work and at Home: The
Athleticism of Surgery and Life,” shares the principles that helped
him through that greatest of all challenges and lesser ones along
the way.
“Apply these principles in work, sports and life in general, and you
can become a super performer,” he says.
• Pressure equals opportunity. It’s when something matters
that the pressure starts to build; this is where the rubber meets
the road for sports-to-life analogies.
“In sports as in life, remember your training; follow through just
like you did during practice; visualize success; believe it will happen,” Dr. Cerfolio says. “With friends, for example, high-pressure
moments can be those times when they need you. The best way
to have great friends is to be a great friend.”
• Strive to hit .400 every year – keep your eye on the
prize; write it down. “My high school gave out an award each
year to the best student athlete in each grade,” he says. “I wrote
down that I wanted to win the Klein Award in the ninth, 10th and
11th grades, and to win the most prestigious award at the senior
graduation, the Deetjen Award.
He accomplished most of those goals, and a key to those achievements was writing them down and placing the paper where, for
four years, he could see it every night.
“By writing them down, I had made my goals clear and objective.”
• Lean toward a “we-centered” ego rather than a “mecentered” one. “When I traded in my baseball uniform for surgical scrubs, I noticed the importance of stripping the many layers
of the ego I once had,” Dr. Cerfolio says. “This is really important:
Your ego doesn’t need to be visible to everyone -- or even anyone
but yourself.”
Being a top performer requires ego – it helps fuel self-confidence
and provides some of the motivation necessary to achieve. But it
should not hinder the performance of your team: your coworkers,
friends and family. Over time, by keeping your ego to yourself, it
becomes easier to enact a team-oriented ego, rather than a “meoriented” one.
• Time to quit? Rub some dirt on it. In life, work is unavoidable,
so embrace it, go big, and appreciate the rewards. No matter how
difficult the challenge you face or how much it may hurt to meet
that challenge, push through and give it your all.
“Yes, there’s a chance you won’t succeed, or won’t succeed to
the degree you’d like. But you stand zero chance of success if
you don’t meet that challenge and give it everything you’ve got,”
Dr. Cerfolio says. “You owe it to yourself and your team, whether
that’s your ball team, your family team or your work team. When
you sign up for any team, by definition you promise your time, effort and 100 percent commitment. You have to be at every game
and every practice on time and ready to go.”
www.superperforming.com
FOCUS of SWFL 2014 67