Drawing on his extensive experience as a successful corporate executive, university lecturer, entrepreneur, and ground breaking Olympian, Chris Stokes applies lessons from his professional, entrepreneurial, academic and sporting experience to provide inspiring and informative speeches and to facilitate meaningful workshops aimed at improving your ogranizational performance in a tangible sustainable manner.
There is no real secret to success, no magic formula, no particular gift, no luck. We embrace these things because they give us comfort and helps us to explain to ourselves why we may not be as successfully as we know in our hearts that we can or should be. Success we want to be a simple prescription like 5 minute burgers or 30 day diets. I have here no particular formula for you or your organization to be successful in whatever your calling may be but I offer from extensive experience in business, in sport and in life what I have lived and have seen to be the true sources of success, central to these are:
1. The Audacity to Dream Big
2. The Courage to hold to your goals
3. Willingness to learn and adapt
4. Strength to endure
If you cannot master these and more you will never really know what wonders lie within you, and the world will be a poorer place because of it…take your stance, make your mark.
Major Workshop Topics:
1. Developing Self Efficacy: ‘I can do this’: The challenge before me is huge, learn to bobsleigh a the Olympic level in three days, make a Caribbean island a powerhouse in a winter sport, turn around two companies in two years, overcome personal tragedy, revolutionize the regional learning environment…………., you fill in the blank, whatever it is for you, you must find a way to achieve personally in an extraordinary way, and this begins by building habits within yourself that will lead to external results. In these sessions I will share by experiences, listen to and learn from yours and together we can build the confidence, that no matter how difficult the challenge we can go after it with the personal strength which give us the best chance to succeed.
2. Building High Performance Teams: In the four man bobsleigh event, if one athlete in the sled, any one, from the exalted driver to the lowly pusher, does not do his job with precision and in unison with each of the other members of the team then you not only risk your team’s performance, you risk your team mates’ lives. In developing a website with team members scattered across the Caribbean, Mexico, the Philippines, and India, each group in their own region and with their own specialization needs to understand and buy into the overall vision of what we are doing. You are not being asked to put words on a webpage but rather your are being asked to educate a whole new generation of students in a whole new way with other people separated by distance but unified by a vision. How do we get people from different backgrounds, different egos, with different levels of motivation and commitment to push together, to ride together and to succeed together? It is more art than science, it requires leadership and empathy. In this session we will explore how to build extraordinary teams.
3. Vision, Creating Tomorrow Today: ‘Ninety degrees in the shade’, sand, sea, mountains, rivers, hot beautiful Jamaica, the perfect candidate to be a powerhouse in the sport of bobsleigh. What would make one think this way? ‘ Your current safe boundaries were once unknown frontiers’ someone had a vision, about something, a wheel, a car, an aeroplane, a business, a product, and out of nothing more than the will to imagine, the things of today were created out of ideas of yesterday. What idea do you have today that will change tomorrow? Let us discuss together how to live out of vision and not our of circumstance.
4. Leading through Innovation: The four man sled for the 1994 Winter Olympic Games was a stock sled from the town of Dresden in the former East Germany. I was a sprinter, accustomed to running tall but the handles on these sleds were quite low…simply raise the push bars off the sled….but how can this be was the response, is this allowed…there was nothing to disallow it in the rules, and plenty to allow it in our innovative spirit. The result, a superfast start time and a world beating finish time.
There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why… I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?
Robert Kennedy
5. Developing and Sustaining Extraordinary Business Performance: What is being sporting and business dynasties? Why do some teams win championships only occasionally or not at all? Why do some businesses have good results one year and poor results the next? While another company in the same industry in the same circumstances does well year after year? There is such a thing as a championship spirit and approach. Let’s share ideas on this, look at case studies and see how your organization can develop and sustain extraordinary success.
6. Inspiring and Motivating for Success: Every now and then we need a good old fashioned feel good story with a happy ending that lifts our spirits, inspires and motivates us to get up the next day ready to take on the world, ready to achieve the impossible because you have been inspired by others who have done this. The story of the Jamaica bobsleigh team as told with its challenges and struggles, its near victories, far dreams and ultimate triumph is one of the most motivating stories in history. Here in live from one who lived it, warts and glory. A truly inspiring experience.
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