When my son Olly was six, he fell in love with football.

 

I was happy he'd found a passion so young, but I assumed it was a temporary stage. And I was surprised by how much our lives changed.

 

Weekend mornings started at 7am. Saturdays were spent on rainy pitches shouting encouragement. We became world experts at getting mud off every kind of surface.

 

Then, after years of training and hard work, my son's skills began to fall into place, his performance continued to make leaps, eventually leading to a trial at Tottenham Hotspur Youth Academy.

 

By then I was fully onboard with Olly's love of football. The surprising fact is, though, it wasn’t my son’s successes that convinced me.

 

It was his failures. The sight of him and his young teammates missing goals, losing possession, losing games, and carrying on.

 

Not just carrying on, but acknowledging mistakes, embracing change and trying something different.

 

In business, it’s hard to find a more useful quality than resilience – not just at a personal level, but an organisational one.

 

Being able to cope with failure is especially relevant for sales teams. Our work can be hard and fatiguing – you hear "No" a lot.

 

And the truth is, in sales, we lose far more deals than we land. Taking risks results in dozens of defeats and a few brilliant victories

 

Once, when discussing his inventions, a colleague of Thomas Edison’s said, “Isn’t it a shame that with the tremendous amount of work you have done, you haven’t been able to get any results?”

 

Edison replied, “Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work.” Failures aren’t the opposite to success, but stepping-stones leading towards it.

 

But it wasn't just that my son learnt to tolerate failure. More interesting, to me, was that over time, he thought less about wins and losses. As his coach said, victory is dependent on a thousand factors, most of them beyond the control of any one player

 

He began to prioritise what he could control – his progress. What he brought to the game. How it compared to the last game. What he could learn for the next.

 

Psychology research shows that even in the most challenging environments, having a growth mindset leads to greater success than a results-oriented approach.

 

In sport and business, focus on improving our own performance lowers anxiety around risk, improves problem-solving skills and increases resilience and optimism.

 

All in all, on the football pitch my son was gaining a skillset that any recruiting manager would love to see.

 

Athletes know what it takes to be elite - work, training and discipline. So do the best salespeople.

 

In today's market, nothing can be taken for granted. We need to be at our best to thrive in challenging conditions – to consistently bring maximum value to partners in every respect. That takes a lot of practice, training and skill. As furniture designer Charles Eames said, "Success is doing the ordinary things extraordinarily well."

 

One last way Olly's love of sport inspired me; I took it up myself. I enjoy working out in the gym. I discovered a passion for snowboarding. And my brief stint as white-collar boxer Raza "the Dog’s" Baloch… well, that’s a story for next time.