That was stupid! Why in the world did you do that?! What the heck is wrong with you?! Here are six reasons why that won’t work.
What we say to ourselves creates the mindset that we walk through life with. There are two voices in your head vying for dominance. “The Hater” beats you down and can be the biggest barrier to success while “The Championship Coach” is encouraging and the biggest catalyst for success. You must begin to train and nurture The Championship Coach to speak to you in a way that empowers you and moves you forward past challenges and failures and quiet The Hater when he urges you to just stay in the bed or just lay down and quit.
You Are in Charge of Your Mindset
The good news is that you are in control of which of those voices you feed and listen to. One way to think about a thought from The Hater is that it’s like a bird flying over your head. You can’t always control whether or not it flies over, but you can stop it from settling in and making a nest.
Carol Dweck has a PhD from Yale and is a professor of Psychology at Stanford. She is an expert in mindset and it’s effect on performance. Her research shows that people have either a growth mindset or a fixed mindset.
People with a fixed mindset believe that who you are is fixed and you don’t have an ability to change. The intelligence, drive, and all other talents God gave you are what they are and that’s it. As a result, when you hit an obstacle or fail, you feel like it’s better to quit or lower expectations than keep pushing because you gave all you had and did the best you could. The Hater feeds on this mentality.
People with a growth mindset believe that with hard work and effort, the talent they bring to the table can be improved and developed in a way that overcomes challenges. Failure is a place to learn the current limits and determine the way to put in the work that will lead to success the next time. How hard you’re willing to work is more important than your IQ. The Championship Coach has a growth mindset that is always prepared to go back to the drawing board.
Haters Gonna Hate
When you listen to The Hater, in the worst case, you’ll quit before you even have a chance to achieve the goal you’ve set for yourself. In the best case, you’ll notice inconsistent performance. The ups will only last until The Hater gets loud enough to pull your confidence down, distracting you from the plans you’ve made.
In sports, the phenomenon is known as choking. Keanu Reeves in the movie The Replacements called it quicksand. Everything is going great and according to plan and one thing goes wrong, then another, and another. All the while The Hater is doing his best to point out your continued failures and remind you of past bad outcomes. Before you know it, you live a life of underachievement.
Don’t Underestimate the Heart of a Champion
Driven by The Championship Coach, you can achieve heights unimagined. Reid Hoffman, one of the founders of LinkedIn is known to have said, “Starting a company is like throwing yourself off the cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.”
LinkedIn initially did not have people sign up fast enough to meet their goals. Continuing at that slow pace would mean that they’d hit the ground before the plane was built. But The Championship Coach, that voice in their head, let them know that with hard work, and a thoughtful process, they could find a solution. And they did.
Once they discovered and implemented a small tweak, sign ups accelerated. They discovered that it was powerful to allow users to upload their address books so they could immediately see who else was on LinkedIn. The site became a place where valued business connections were made and developed. It became so valuable that Microsoft bought LinkedIn for $26 billion.
Having The Championship Coach as the voice in your head also brings a quiet confidence and peace of mind. It’s empowering to have the belief needed to conquer any obstacle in your path every time things look like they may be against you. You don’t worry about setbacks because you know they’re temporary and a natural part of the process.
Know Your Why
In order to begin to reprogram your mindset, you have to retrain that inner voice. And the first place to go to is to get clear about why you’re doing what you’re doing. Perhaps you aren’t in the job you love, but you love your family and you want to provide them with financial security. Maybe you have a passion to change the lives of children or love solving complex problems. Whatever it is, get clear about it and write it down.
Once you are clear about your purpose, you must revisit it regularly. Once a week, you should read over your why and ingrain in yourself the mission you are on. Then when times get tough, The Championship Coach can remind you why you can’t quit. If your why is big enough and clear enough, you will endure much more than you ever thought you could.
Celebrate the Wins
It’s amazing that many athletes often feel the most depressed when they are at height of success and reach the pinnacle of their field. Bill Johnson II, wrote that in the field of professional athletes, there are “as many as 25% experiencing depression.” Those of us in the working world can feel the same emptiness when we achieve a position or financial goal that we’ve been working so long and hard for.
But remember, when you accomplish these goals, you’re fulfilling the why or purpose God made you for. Give yourself permission to celebrate the successes when you achieve them. Write them down and mark them with sincere gratitude and joy. Then when you’re facing a rough patch and The Hater tells you that you’re not good enough or that your plans will fail, you can look back on these big successes and know that if you’ve done it before, you have the ability to do it again.
If you haven’t achieved big goals, celebrate the small ones. You got up on time. You’ve worked out 3 times this week just like you planned. You made the right number of sales calls. These small successes can strengthen the mindset that if you are faithful with little, you can be trusted to be put in charge of much higher levels of responsibility and succeed there as well.
An online technology company called Twitch was struggling to find it’s way as a business and could not raise any more investment funds. They set a small goal of just being profitable each month. When they met it, that small win gave them the space to sit back and think about how to pivot their company. They came up with the idea to be dedicated to live streaming video game play and built their company around that. Their timing was perfect as this was becoming very popular and the cost of online video was going down fast. Eventually the business grew so successful that Twitch sold to Amazon for $970M!
Find Your Desired State
And no I don’t mean the beaches of California. We’re talking state of mind. Sometimes you’re frustrated with the lack of progress and it’s making you upset. Your preferred state is one of peaceful perseverance. You may have gotten into an argument with someone and you’re replaying the argument over and over. That can get you distracted and keep you from moving forward and getting the job done.
At times like this, you have to know that it’s The Hater that is the voice in your head amping you up to get more frustrated or replay the argument with better comebacks than the ones you could think of in the moment. The Hater is trying to get you off track. Now that you know whose voice it is, train yourself to ignore it and listen instead to The Championship Coach and get back to the right mindset.
Write a New Script
One of the most powerful tools in my arsenal of returning to my desired state is for The Championship Coach to respond to The Hater with powerful passages of Scripture. One I love is that God didn’t give us a Spirit of fear, but of power love and self control. When I used to make cold calls or even now when I’m making a phone call or having a conversation that I’m nervous about, I say this scripture and when I hit the word power, I start dialing. It gets me over the hump every time.
Another good source to use to write a new script is positive affirmations. Some people dismiss this as nonsense, but they miss the simple truth. You’re playing a script in your head regardless, why not choose the script that motivates, encourages and drives you. As you become aware of the scripts that The Hater is feeding you, write them down. If you were trying to encourage a friend who was saying they were feeling the things you wrote down, what would you say to build them back up? That is the new script for The Championship Coach.
Tim Ferriss, who is the Author of NY Times #1 Best Seller 4 Hour Work Week and listed as one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Business People” among many other accolades, discusses his morning routine on his podcast. One of the tools he is faithful to is the 5 minute journal. A key component of it is a daily affirmation that you intentionally carry with you throughout the day.
Assemble all of these scripts before you are in the battle field and practice employing them when you get stuck in a negative mindset throughout your day. You’ll notice that you spend less time spiraling downhill and more time on the activities you intended to accomplish.
Assemble a Great Team
Make some good friends in the real world. Many of us have “friends” on social media and it can be good up to a point. But sooner or later, you have to account for the fact that we are human. And humans desire interpersonal connections that come from physical interaction. And another thing to remember, having good friendships is hard and takes work. But the work you put in pays big dividends.
There are many positive effects to meaningful friendships according to Wellness Coach Rosemary Morris. They will
- Increase your sense of belonging and purpose
- Boost your happiness and reduce your stress
- Improve your self-confidence and self-worth
- Help you cope with traumas
- Encourage you to change or avoid unhealthy lifestyle habits
It’s equally important to enlist the wisdom of mentors. These are people who have life and business experience and can help guide you along your path. They are invested in your success and can help you avoid pitfalls or accelerate the learning curve. I have personal, professional, and spiritual mentors and I’m looking for more to help develop myself in areas where I want to get stronger.
There may also be times when you’re stuck in a place you can’t get out of or you may be dealing with a clinical issue and need the help of a professional counselor. It can help to work with someone who doesn’t know you or any of your history with the training to be an objective ear who will listen to and help you work through the issues you’re facing. Whether it’s famous actresses like Gwyneth Paltrow and Catherine Zeta-Jones or college students adjusting to life on campus, many types of people could benefit from counseling. It can help get your mind in the right place and strengthen The Championship Coach.
Take Back Control of the Conversation
Many things are going on in our minds when we are facing challenges big and small. Often we are not aware that The Hater is driving our mindset. We can get pushed to a place where one small defeat turns into a self flagellation session where we call ourselves all kinds of names and end up beating ourselves up so bad that success is painful if not impossible.
Instead we have the power to take control of the conversation going on in our heads. We can train ourselves to nurture, strengthen and rely on The Championship Coach or get outside help from friends, mentors or possibly professional counseling. In any case, we can develop a powerful growth mindset that will inspire us on the path through perseverance to the development of greater talent leading to success. In the end, we can authentically enjoy the achievements because we fulfilled our why, our purpose!
