Who holds your scorecard? Is it held by you or by everyone else?
If you buy a new car and the judges in the neighborhood or at the office don’t give you perfect 10s on the scorecard, does that affect you?
I am guilty of outsourcing my scorecard. I have numbers all over the place that are an external scorecard. I have the numbers of sales at work. I have the number of books sold. I have the number of page views, and blog views, and emails opened. That external scorecard can take up a lot of space in my life. It takes up space where my internal scorecard should sit.
The internal scorecard is telling me that I am being kind to others, I am being a good husband and father, I am doing things that I like and have meaning in my life. I need to focus more on the internal scorecard and not the external scorecard.
The internal scorecard makes me feel good. The external scorecard makes me feel anxious.
When I outsource my scorecard, I feel like the gymnast who has completed their routine and now stands before the judges. This judge flashes up a 9.0, that judge flashes up 8.5, the final judge flashes up 5.5. I am drawn to the 5.5 and I wonder why that judge does not like me. I don’t ask why the others thought I did a good job, but I ask why that one person thinks I did not do a good job.
If the internal scorecard shows the same things, I can look at where I fell short.
I can look at the 5.5 and realize that I did not do a good job as a father the other day. I told my daughter that we as a family would put away the electronics for the night and play a board game. She was fired up to do that and when I opened my computer and started doing my own thing, she asked me how the board game was going and stomped upstairs. That was her flashing a 5.5 for my parenting skills.
I eventually went upstairs and talked to her about my decision making. We both admitted that I was wrong and then we went downstairs and started up a game of Crainium. She may have flashed an 8.5 for my parenting skills before she went to bed. That would have been OK with me.
