This was Jim Fannin’s day:
He woke up in Chattanooga at 4:30 a.m. He took calls from heavyweight boxer Lance Whitaker, major-league baseball players Alex Rodriguez and Jose Cruz Jr., the general manager of a Toyota dealership in Florida, the chairman of Bridgeview Bank, two sports agents and a U.S. Olympic equestrian.
He fielded an instant message from Dan O’Brien, winner of the 1996 Olympic gold medal in the decathlon. There were calls from a couple of other major-league players. He flew home to Chicago to meet with a reporter.
All before noon.
“Tonight I’ll get calls from nine golfers,” he said over salad at a west suburban restaurant. “And I have a meeting at 4 and a business dinner tonight at 7.”
Fannin is a performance coach, using a system that has taken him more than 20 years to develop. He advises athletes and non-athletes alike on how to reach a peak mental state that will increase their productivity.
Mind over matter, you could say.
“This is not a motivational pro-gram. It’s thought management,” he said. “You think less, produce more and improve your quality of life.”
Fannin, 54, of Burr Ridge has built his program around what he calls the SCORE Performance System (Self-Discipline, Concentration, Optimism, Relaxation and Enjoyment). The SCORE system, he said, is a collection of single tools that people may do individually but when done together are more beneficial.
“He gives you parameters, how to focus and go about whatever you do,” said White Sox third-base coach Joey Cora, who was a client from 1994-99, during his playing career. “Sports, business, whatever you want to improve on. He gives you the tools and then he helps you use them.”
By balancing all five parts of SCORE correctly, Fannin said, a person reaches what he calls the Zone, a mind-set where learning is maximized, there’s a heightened awareness and failure is not an option.
“That’s his specialty, the Zone,” said Chicago Fire soccer team captain Chris Armas. “It’s getting locked into a state of mind where you feel you can do no wrong.”
“I’m in it every day,” Fannin said of the Zone. “I haven’t had a bad day in 30 years. I might have a bad moment, but I get up happy and I go to bed happy.”
A deathbed promise
The SCORE program originally was offered privately to athletes and businesses–Fannin said he was “basically a high-priced consultant.” But he began making it more available after the death of his mother five years ago. On her deathbed, Fannin said, his mother told him, “Your SCORE program–go for it. Let everybody see it.”
“I made a deathbed promise to my mother. I don’t know how that comes off, but that’s when I made up my mind.”
He sold the west suburban tennis club he owned and his real estate holdings and began making the SCORE system available to the masses. People without Rodriguez’s money–he’ll earn nearly $22 million this year playing shortstop for the New York Yankees–can sign up for a one-year membership, which lets them view a 13-part video series, get updates from Fannin and go through a library of hundreds of audio files.
There are tests they can take, they can analyze where they stand, and they can get tips on how to improve their performance in life’s various arenas.
Fannin currently has a client list of 27 individuals and four companies. Through the years, his list of clients has included golfers (including David Leadbetter and Martha Nause), tennis players (Betsy Nagelson and the Norwegian Tennis Federation), the NBA’s Grant Hill and Doc Rivers, equestrian Schuyler Riley and Creed drummer Scott Phillips.
He also does 20 to 30 one-day seminars for businesses a year, and he offers 10 seminars a year for junior high and high school students.
Grades and sports
“They come with two goals, an academic goal or a sports goal,” he said of the young participants. “Something that’s short term and measurable. Most of them want to make a particular grade in some subject, or they have an athletic goal. I show them that an hour of algebra or an hour of basketball are exactly the same. You can get in the Zone for either one, and the result will be that you’re at your best.”
He also sells a series of CDs, such as “Business in the Zone,” “Tennis in the Zone” and “Sports in the Zone,” at $29.95 each.
He declined to say what he charges an athlete, but the one-day seminars cost businesses $12,500, and a yearlong contract with a company runs into six figures, he said.
Not a little of Fannin’s income goes to phone bills. Last month he logged more than 6,000 minutes on his cell phone.
“I call him a couple times a week,” said Armas, who has been a Fannin client for two years. “Before a game, maybe after a game. We’ll talk about my performance or maybe my role in a game coming up.”
Fannin grew up in rural Kentucky (“dirt road, outdoor plumbing, and my bedroom floor had most of the wood missing because of termites”). He attended East Tennessee State University on a tennis scholarship; he played tennis professionally for a while and coached the sport as well.
In the early to mid-’70s, he started developing the theories that became the SCORE system. He asked tennis stars such as Bjorn Borg and Chris Evert Lloyd why they were successful. Almost all of them, he found, said they had visualized their successes.
Visualization became a key component in the SCORE system. The other main cornerstone is self-awareness, which includes stress management, the recognition that we are all performers–phone calls, meetings, sending e-mails and helping the kids with homework are all performances, he said–and thought management.
Fannin said that he noticed that the elite athletes, whom he refers to as “world champions,” have a different mind-set that makes them successful.
“A person has 2,000 to 3,000 thoughts every day,” he said.
“A world champion . . . doesn’t have 2,000 or 3,000 thoughts. Only about 1,200. Worrying, anxiety, frustration, jealousy, embarrassment, guilt and all those negative words aren’t there.”
The idea of concentrating on the present isn’t a SCORE exclusive.
“In general, and there’s research to back this up, the people who are most successful in life will spend 80 percent of the time focusing on what’s in front of them at that given moment,” said Matt Krug, a sports psychology consultant and president of the Midwest Institute of Performance in Milwaukee.
“About 10 percent [of their thoughts] are in the past and 10 percent in the future. For athletes that’s important because if I’m above a putt, I really need to focus on reading that putt and all these things instead of focusing on whether I missed this putt in the past. . . . It’s just getting people to take that step of getting past the past failures and focusing on what they need to do in the here and now.
“It may seem like a simple thing,” Krug said, “but in actuality, especially when people are under pressure, it’s a difficult thing to do.”
Cora, whom Fannin calls the most disciplined student he has ever had, said Fannin got him to focus on certain goals. He declined to be specific as to what Fannin helped him accomplish but said the SCORE system “helps you in everything. Not only baseball, not only sports, but with everything.”
It was through Cora that Fannin hooked up with his highest-profile client, Alex Rodriguez, the New York Yankees’ All-Star third baseman and the American League’s reigning Most Valuable Player.
At Cora’s suggestion, A-Rod met with Fannin eight years ago when he was a struggling rookie, batting a puny .230 early in the 1996 season. By the end of the season he had hit .358 with 36 homers and 123 runs batted in. He was named player of the year by The Sporting News and the Associated Press and finished second in the Most Valuable Player voting.
There are limits
But can Fannin help a middle-age, church league softball player hit Randy Johnson fastballs?
“I can’t teach you to hit a baseball like A-Rod or hit a jump shot like Michael Jordan,” Fannin said. “But I can show you how to think like they do when they’re at their best.”
When Fannin’s phone rings, it could just as easily be a CEO as a ballplayer.
“I can do this for salesmen, tailor it,” he said.
One Chicago business that has benefited from Fannin’s system is the Bridgeview Bank Group. Chairman Peter J. Haleas met Fannin through a mutual customer about seven years ago, when the bank had about $200 million in assets. Fannin set a goal of $1.5 billion in assets by the end of 2005, and the bank is now at $1.2 billion and on target to reach the goal.
“There are a lot of parts to our success story,” Haleas said. “But is Jim a big part of it? Absolutely. I’m doing the day to day and our CEO is doing the day to day. But in terms of having this goal and we’re focused on the goal and we’re optimistic about reaching the goal, and we’re having fun doing it, absolutely I credit Jim for that.”
Haleas said that Fannin has also helped him personally.
“I’ve become a better father and a better chairman and a happier person as a result of his techniques, his program.”
“I’ve read, we all have,” Fannin said, “how humans use only so much of their brains. The SCORE system is a way to use more of it. It’s not surprising what people can accomplish. It’s more wonderment.”
The 90-second rule and other winning advice
Here are a few nuggets that performance coach Jim Fannin offers clients as part of his SCORE (Self-Discipline, Concentration, Optimism, Relaxation and Enjoyment) system.
Michael Jordan’s tongue: How many times did we see Jordan make a spectacular play on the basketball court with his tongue hanging out? That’s because he was relaxed and his jaw was unhinged, Fannin said. And when one’s jaw (and consequently the rest of the body) are relaxed, the muscles will follow the performance that you have pictured in your mind. If you’re relaxed while hitting a tennis ball or making a sales pitch, you will enjoy a positive performance.
Fannin tells his clients to periodically check themselves for negative stress or tension. Are they grinding their teeth? Are they holding their breath while going about their business? Are they tense, jaws clamped tightly shut, as they sit in traffic? The solution is to unhinge that jaw, take a deep breath and relax. And be like Mike and stick your tongue out.
Dress rehearsal: At the end of your workday, take a sheet of paper and write down one to five things you will accomplish the next day. Before you leave work, visualize achieving those things in your mind. Picture yourself finishing that sales report that’s due next week. It’s a mental mini-rehearsal that takes only a second.
“You see it as if were so,” Fannin said.
Turn over the sheet of paper and go home. When you come back to work, turn the paper over and begin your work.
“At the end of the day, tear the paper up and throw it away,” Fannin said. “Do not keep the list. Take out a clean sheet of paper and start the list for the next day. Now, after three days the same thing is on the list, do one of the three D’s: delete it because you’re not going to do it, delegate it or do it immediately.”
Eliminating unpleasant thoughts: The SCORE system includes an exercise to help a person with his or her optimism.
Shut your eyes and drop your head to your chest. Think a bad thought, something very upsetting. With eyes shut, raise your head toward the ceiling, keeping the bad thought. Drop your head back to your chest. Repeat the process. Then open your eyes.
“From thousands of seminars, for approximately 84 percent of the people who did this exercise, when their head went up the negative thought either disappeared or they had to think about it a little more,” Fannin said. “When they dropped their head, the negative thought became a little more robust. Mom was right: Keep your chin up.”
The 90-second rule: If you’ve been away from someone that you love for at least two hours, the first 90 seconds back with them has more impact on the relationship than three hours later. Start by preparing to see that person again. Call them on the cell phone from the driveway when you get home. Close the door on the part of your life you just left–work, school, running errands, whatever–and concentrate on the first 90 seconds back with loved ones.
“You need to ask them questions,” Fannin said. “Give them more of your energy. That first 90 seconds says I love you, I missed you, I care about you, I value you, I need you in my life.
“How many times have we violated that rule in our lives? You come home, `Not now, Daddy’s tired.’ `Let me read the paper.’ `Crappy day at work, don’t bother me.’ You’ve violated the 90-second rule big time. Next thing you know, no one will be waiting at the door, not even the dog.”
The 5-second rule: You are only as good as the 5 seconds after every performance, and what you do in those 5 seconds determines whether your optimism grows or declines. Say you miss a short putt on the golf course. You can dwell on it, likely affecting your next putt negatively, or you can clear your mind and tap in the next putt. Don’t go into the past. Instead, act as though the error or mistake didn’t happen, then mentally go over it correctly, and then gather your energy for the next challenge.
Palm tree or oak? When faced with a situation that could lead to anger, think of a palm tree. A palm tree reacts to a hurricane by bending with the wind. You should react to a disturbing situation by letting the negativity pass. When the storm is over, you’re still standing tall. An oak tree would be unbending in a hurricane and would suffer broken branches or maybe even be uprooted. If you’re inflexible, there could be unpleasant consequences. Being a palm works most of the time–though, Fannin said, there are times when it is best to be the oak.
–William Hageman
Control thoughts to control results
According to performance coach Jim Fannin, you can shape the results of your actions by managing your thoughts. It’s done through his SCORE System.
– SCORE represents Self-discipline, Concentration, Optimism, Relaxation and Enjoyment.
– Everyone has a SCORE level, which fluctuates daily.
– A champion–in athletics or the business world–is aware of his or her SCORE level and uses various mental tools to make adjustments.
– Balancing all five aspects of the SCORE level puts a person in the Zone, a mind-set in which failure is not an option.
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For more information on Fannin and his system, go to www.zo necoach.com.
