Read This Book Tonight To Help You Win Tomorrow

HOPE.

It’s the secret sauce.

How’s yours?

If you’re feeling less than hopeful, here’s what you can do to boost it...

First, and most importantly: GET A GOOD NIGHT OF SLEEP!!!

Never forget that your physiology drives a LOT more of your *psychology* than you may realize. When you’re feeling hopeless and the world is feeling a bit out of control, it’s ESSENTIAL that you control the controllables and get your energy dialed in by dominating your fundamentals.

Eating. Moving. Sleeping.

How are you doing with those?

What’s one thing you KNOW you could do to optimize?

Get on that.

Then...

Remember the SCIENCE of Hope.

There are THREE parts.

1. You need to have an inspiring goal/a vision for a better future.

2. You need to believe you can make that better future a reality.

3. You need a plan to make it a reality.

Quick inventory...

How are you doing on each of those?

And...

What’s ONE thing you can do TODAY to boost your hope?

You got this, Hero!!

I immediately thought of wisdom from three different authors and their books when I read that: David Reynolds’s Constructive Living, Bob Rotella’s How Champions Think, and Richard Wiseman’s The As If Principle.

First, Zen therapist David Reynolds.

In Constructive Living, he tells us: “Our behavior is controllable in a way that our feelings are not. There is a very special satisfaction for the Artist of Living who works within life’s limits to produce a fine self-portrait. The more control we develop over our actions, the more chance we have of producing a self we can be proud of.”

He also tells us: “Feelings follow behavior.”

And, perhaps most importantly, he gives us the most important question we can ever ask ourselves—ESPECIALLY when we feel overwhelmed by negative emotions and don’t (insert whiney voice) *feel* like doing anything: “Now what needs to be done?”

Then we have Bob Rotella and his thoughts on acting like a champion before you are a champion. Rotella has worked with some of THE most elite performers in the world. To put in perspective, his golf clients have won over 80 major championships.

He tells us: “Jack [Nicklaus] told the golf team... ‘You have to be a legend in your own mind before you can be a legend in your own time.’”

Then there’s Richard Wiseman who wrote an entire book on the science establishing the truth of William James’s statement: “If you want a quality, act as if you already have it.”

His book is called The As If Principle.

In it, he shares one of my all-time favorite exercises to create a new identity.

He tells us: “It might be helpful to think of your old personality as being on vacation for two weeks, so you have an opportunity to act like a different person. It is important, however, that you play out your new role twenty-four hours a day, even when you’re alone. The As If principle will cause you to feel like a new person, and the new you will soon become part of your actual identity.”

Note: This isn’t just rah-rah, pom-pom waving self-development stuff.

Here’s how Aristotle put it 2,500 years ago: “Whatever we learn to do we learn by actually doing it; men come to be builders, for instance, by building, and harp players by playing the harp. In the same way, by doing just acts we come to be just; by doing self-controlled acts, we come to be self-controlled; and by doing brave acts, we become brave.”

That’s from a chapter called “Balancing Caring Too Much Versus Too Little.”

Here’s what we need to know...

Too much of a good thing is NOT a good thing.

Of course, when I read that I think of Aristotle’s Virtuous Mean. As we’ve discussed (see Notes on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and this +1 on Aristotle’s Doctrine of the (Virtuous) Mean), every virtue (and pretty much every good thing) has a vice of deficiency and a vice of excess.

For example, courage is a virtue. If you have too little of that virtue, you are a coward. If you have too MUCH of that virtue, you are rash.

Dr. Gilbert tells us that MOTIVATION has a virtuous mean. You want to care JUST ENOUGH but not TOO MUCH.

How do we get it right? Well, before the passage above he tells us: “If you want to screw up any performance, just use these ‘14 killer words’: ‘This is it.’ ‘It’s now or never.’ ‘It’s do or die.’ ‘There’s no tomorrow.’ These words make something special when it’s only important. When athletes make something special they perform worse. Every time you compete—it is important. It’s never special. Start thinking this way. It’s the way a winner thinks!”

P.S. If you want more wisdom on the subject of how NOT to choke, check out Sian Beilock’s great book appropriately called Choke.

She tells us: “When athletes think about themselves screwing up, they are more likely to do so.”

And: “People choke under pressure because they worry. They worry about the situation, its consequences, what others will think. They worry about what they will lose if they fail to succeed and whether they have the tools to make it. They may even conjure images in their head of the unwanted outcome—the flubbed performance, the missed shot, the fall on the ice.”

Plus, she echoes Dr. Gilbert’s wisdom above when she tells us: “Although you might think that a ‘no excuses’ policy is always best, if you are able to take some of the pressure off yourself during an important test by reinterpreting the situation as something less stressful, less diagnostic of your ability, or less ‘do-or-die,’ you may be able to turn a potentially poor performance into a good one.”

My go-to for high-pressure situations? “I’m excited!”

Here’s some more practical wisdom on the subject...

That’s from a chapter appropriately called “Release Your Mental Emergency Brake.”

Dr. Gilbert offers two ways to release the ol’ brake in your brain. First, as we just discussed, you need to shift from NEEDING to win to *wanting* to win. Then, you need to quit thinking about winning and simply focus on FULL EFFORT.

Dr. Gilbert is a QUOTE MACHINE. Every chapter features some great quotes at the end. Here are a few of my favorites from this chapter:

College football coach Bud Wilkinson says: “We compete, not so much against an opponent, but against ourselves. The real test is this: Did I make my best effort on every play?”

NFL quarterback Vinny Testaverde says: “I would tell our offense not to worry about winning or losing. Just take one play at a time. Focus on that one play, when it’s over—regardless of the result—put it behind you and focus on the next one.”

Leo Tolstoy says: “There is only one time that is important—NOW. It is the only important time because it is the only time we have power and control over.”

And, Dr. Gilbert himself puts it this way:

“DO NOT feel that you have to win.
DO NOT feel that you must win.
DO FEEL that you want to win.
DO NOT focus on winning.
DO focus on giving a full effort.”

Sounds good to me.

Remember: Full effort = full victory.

LET’S GO!

I’m loving those fives steps to persistence. Makes me think of Targeted Thinking. The recap: What do you want? What do you need to do to get it? Do it. Repeat. Forever.

I also love those five rules along with the passage that comes shortly after that one...

“Here is a riddle before we finish... Question: There are three frogs sitting on a log. One frog decided to jump off the log. How many frogs are left on the log?

Typical answer: Most people think the answer is ‘two.’ That’s logical. Three minus one equals two. Logical, but wrong.

Correct answer: Three. There are three frogs sitting on a log. One frog decided to jump off the log. Just because the frog decided to jump doesn’t mean it did jump. There is a huge difference between decision and action.

Message: There is a big difference between deciding to use the techniques we have been talking about and actually using them.”

It’s time to move from Theory to Practice to Mastery together... TODAY.