O’Neil Blake, Former College Football Player - Useful Tips for Leaders in Business

O’Neil Blake is a football player who is currently playing on an international team in Austria called the Graz Giants. Although he has been successful in the sport, he recently received his Masters of Business Administration degree in Healthcare Administration. Here are some useful tips for leaders and managers in the professional world.

When you’re serving as a leader in a business setting, you need to trust your employees. Trusting your employees means that you don’t try to micromanage their daily responsibilities, but you give them the space to complete their projects on their own. Remain available throughout the day in order to answer questions, address issues, and keep minds at ease, but don’t abuse your power as the manager.

Make sure you find the time to get to know your employees, and motivate them in the process. Motivation is a major part of your job as a manager, and it means that you have to get to know the people who work for you. Take the time out of your day to talk to your employees, and find out what they enjoy outside of their jobs. This will help work productivity immensely.

Lead with compassion. Don’t get overly upset at the various and unavoidable mistakes you will have to correct as a manager, but take the time to listen to your employees and see things from their perspective. This will make you more approachable as a leader, and it will help you avoid issues later on.

O’Neil Blake is well equipped to be a leader in business, just as he is on the football field.
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O'Neil Blake, Former Collegiate Football Player - Habits of Successful Personal Trainers

In his role as a Football Graduate Assistant at Lenoir-Rhyne University, O'Neil Blake is able to use his experiences in playing the game to offer guidance to younger players who need to adjust to college life. In addition to providing advice on how to balance their educations with their athletic careers, Blake also helps many students with their personal fitness, providing training and coaching services when required. In order to do this, he has needed to develop a number of habits over the years that make him ideally suited to the role, including all of the below.

Be A Role Model

If you don’t practice what you preach, it is very unlikely that the people you are coaching will follow your instructions. Remember that developing respect amongst those you train is crucial to your efforts, so don’t ask your students to do things that you are not capable of doing yourself. Furthermore, any advice that you provide in terms of nutrition or healthy living habits should be advice that you follow yourself, especially when working with younger people who are looking for role models to provide them with guidance.

Know The People You Work With

It is important that personal trainers understand the specific needs of each of their clients, as this allows them to create tailored fitness programs that help them to make gains in the areas that they need to, while also taking into account any obstacles that their clients need to be able to overcome. Those who fail in the industry tend to approach it with the mindset that they can knock together a few different workouts without really putting much thought into it.

Get Educated

As a personal fitness trainer, you need to be an authoritative source of information that your clients can trust. If you are unable to demonstrate your knowledge of the industry whenever it is needed, you will quickly start to lose the trust of the people you are working with. As such, you need to endeavor to update your knowledge base whenever you can, while also being capable of explaining why you are placing your clients in certain fitness plans and what they will be able to achieve should they follow your instructions.

Learn To Listen

As a former college football player who now provides the benefit of his expertise to current students, O'Neil Blake Football recognizes that there are many different things that a personal trainer must do to connect with clients. Understand the value of listening to the people that you work with, rather than dictating to them. This will allow you to gain a better understanding of their goals in life, while also putting you in a better position to help them through personal issues that might affect their training.
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O’Neil Blake Football - Defensive Backs Coaching Tips

O’Neil Blake is a former university football player currently studying for his Master of Business Administration at the Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory, North Carolina. He lettered in three sports, football, soccer, and track and field while attending Osceola High School in Kissimmee, Florida in 2007. In 2010, O’Neil Blake graduated from high school and received a football scholarship to attend Glenville State College in West Virginia. He later transferred to the Lenoir-Rhyne University. Here are a couple of defensive backs coaching tips you can use.

Think “Pass”

One of the first things for the defensive player to do in a game is to think “pass”; however, when he is sure it is not a pass, he can run and pursue the ball carrier. Your keys for determining runs are when the ball crosses the scrimmage line, or when the opposite team’s linemen are moving downfield.

Backpedaling

Backpedaling is an essential technique your cornerback needs to learn. To execute this technique, your defender should maintain a posture with his torso forward, shoulders over his knees, and chin over his toes. The head is kept down, with the elbows bent at 90 degrees. Maintaining this posture will help him maintain balance and allow him to execute sudden breaks on short passes.

O’Neil Blake started playing football in high school after moving to the United States from Jamaica. He is currently pursuing his Master of Business Administration with emphasis on healthcare administration and is expected to graduate in May 2016.

Source; ​http://www.active.com/football/articles/6-tips-for-coaching-defensive-backs
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O’Neil Blake Football - Qualities that Make Great Leaders

O’Neil Blake is currently studying for his Master of Business Administration at the Lenoir-Rhyne University and played football on the university football team. After moving to the United States from Jamaica, he started playing football in high school. O’Neil Blake is a promising football player. Football is one sport that helps build leadership skills in its players, something that is needed in the business world. Here are a couple of qualities that make great leaders.

O'Neil Blake Football

Honesty

If you are in a leadership position, or you are leading people, you need to have a high level of honesty. Your employees and your business are reflections of yourself, and every honest and ethical action you make will have a direct impact on your team. Honesty is a very important part of leadership. If you want to see your team walk in honesty and integrity, you should lead by example.

Delegation
As a leader, it is important that you learn how to trust your team and delegate responsibility to them. You will have to share your vision with them and trust them to run with your vision, otherwise, it will be quite impossible to build a strong team. Trusting your team with your vision and ideas is a sign of strength and leadership. The key to delegating responsibility to your team lies in identifying their strengths and capitalizing on them. If someone on your team is good at negotiating, you might want them to go out and do what they do best in the field. This will help build trust and confidence in your team, and positively impact the productivity of your business.

O’Neil Blake learned important leadership qualities while playing football.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/tanyaprive/2012/12/19/top-10-qualities-that-make-a-great-leader/#24e122ce3564

O’Neil Blake Football - An Often Grim Subject

O’Neil Blake left Glenville State College in West Virginia in search of a more challenging academic environment and a great football program. He found both at Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory, North Carolina, where he began taking classes and practicing with the football team in the summer of 2012.

He did well on the gridiron and in the classroom and graduated Magna Cum Laude in the spring of 2014. “I started graduate school the following fall,” he recalls. “I am currently in my final semester of graduate school here at LRU, and I am on course to graduate this May.” He is working toward his Master of Business Administration with a concentration on Health Care Administration.

In spite of his workload, he is able to keep up with some of his non-academic interests, such as African American history. The history of Africans in North America is an often-grim subject that deals with some of the worst aspects of humanity, but also some of the best. The first Africans, kidnapped into slavery, arrived in North America around 1619. American independence did not arrive until late in the next century, but after it did slavery was still allowed, and even acknowledged in the Constitution, which guaranteed the right to possess a “person held to service or labor,” a clear reference to slavery. It was not until nearly a hundred years later that slavery was abolished. Even then, another hundred years passed before serious advances were made in civil rights. Even with the election of an African American president, it is a journey that has not yet come to an end.

O’Neil Blake also enjoys reading leadership literature. He has kept up his involvement with football as a graduate assistant and Cornerbacks Coach for the LRU football team.

Sources: http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/black-history-milestones
http://www.lrbears.com/profile.asp?playerID=2045
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