Talk to marathon runners, and most of them will tell you the same story about the stretch between mile 21 and mile 26.
That’s where the monsters lurk.
When you get to mile 21, it isn’t a question of whether you can physically survive the last stretch. You can. It’s a question of whether the mental monsters will find you and convince you otherwise.
Katie Sutton felt like one of those monsters was riding on her back at mile 24. She had come out fast and run sub-seven-minute miles for the first seventeen miles—a terrific pace. She told herself that it was a perfect day, and her body felt terrific. All she had to do was bring it home, and she’d shatter her personal best.
But when she got to mile 24, she felt like she wouldn’t be able to run another step. Her lungs were searing with pain, and her legs throbbed with every step. If she was going to make it to the end, she would have to get her mind right and confront the monster that had tightened its grip on her, whispering you never should have gone out that fast, and it hurts too much. . . . You should stop.
Katie was no stranger to pain. A former competitive distance runner for Texas Christian University (TCU), she had been training for her first marathon after college when she’d started experiencing some strange physical symptoms. She went from running eighty miles per week to barely being able to complete a mile before becoming completely exhausted. After a grueling round of tests, Katie’s doctor delivered the terrible news. Katie had breast cancer. But fourteen rounds of chemotherapy, thirty-two sessions of radiation, and two surgeries later, she was pronounced cancer-free.
The cancer was gone, but one of the remnants from the disease was the leftover negative chatter in her head. Katie got back into training, but when she started running the longer distances, those thought monsters would swirl—You’re never going to be the same runner again. . . . Why bother?
Over time, Katie beat back the monsters with a mental training routine like the one you’re going to learn in this chapter. She learned a mental ritual to help her develop her mental toughness and replace the negative thoughts with thoughts emphasizing desire over fear and strength over weakness—Today I am strong. Today I am healthy. Today I am a beast. And she gained conviction about conquering the next challenge through visualization. During what we call her “Mental Workout,” Katie used segments of visualization to intensely focus on the visceral feeling of success in her next performance—especially pushing hard through the most difficult part of the run.
By channeling the power of her mind this way, she set herself up to defeat the negative thoughts before they even came to her. Instead of having to beat them back and silence them, she established a wall that was difficult for them to penetrate in the first place. She went on the attack, instead of playing defense.
In that brutal moment of mile 24, her only goal was to finish those last three miles. Her mind wanted her to pay attention to the fire in her lungs and the agony in her legs, but Katie knew that the more she thought about the pain, the more the pain would grow.
So she defaulted back to her identity statement: Today I am strong. Today I am healthy. Today I am a beast.
She started repeating it, over and over. Katie pushed through to mile 25, where she encountered a steep hill—designed to weed out the weak at the end of the race. Using the visualization technique she had learned from the Mental Workout, she pictured herself charging up the hill and picking up speed as she made it to the crest. As she pictured defeating the hill, she realized that her mind had wandered for a few minutes, and she was already on the downslope, gaining speed.
In the last mile, Katie’s speed was back. The pain in her legs was a dull memory, and her lungs opened up into the runner’s high she loved so much. The monsters were gone, and she crossed the finish line in her personal best time.
She didn’t conquer the marathon with her legs, or with her physical training. She beat it with her mind, and by learning how to talk to herself.
The concept of “self-talk” is an old and established one in psychology. Simply put, it’s the inner monologue you have with yourself inside your own head about who you are, what you believe, and how you feel about what you’re doing.
Unfortunately, it is completely normal for your inner dialogue to have a negative slant. You must remember, beating yourself up verbally often does more damage than physically harming yourself.
You must remember, beating yourself up verbally often does more damage than physically harming yourself.
Self-talk is the voice in your head driving you to put in the extra time on an important project at work. When you’re worn out at the end of the day and you want to pick up and finish tomorrow, it’s self-talk that rallies you to keep going. Conversely, if you’ve decided you’re going to go to the gym three days a week, and today is gym day, self-talk is the voice in your head you’re arguing with in bed as you wrestle over whether or not you’re going to get up and go.
At a deeper level, your self-talk represents your self-image—the way you see yourself. Ironically enough, Dr. Maxwell Maltz’s Psycho-Cybernetics—the book that produced so much misunderstanding about the formation of habits—was the same one to first touch on the very important idea of self-image, and how it governs a lot of what people are ultimately able to accomplish.1
Maltz’s theory about self-image is a simple one. He said that a person will not be able to consistently overperform or underperform the self-image he or she has. In other words, if you fundamentally believe you’re an average performer (or a terrific one, or a terrible one), you won’t consistently be able to do a lot better or a lot worse than that baseline self-assessment.
Since self-image is determined by what you consistently say to yourself about yourself, you have the power to direct your self-image by directing your self-talk.
Since self-image is determined by what you consistently say to yourself about yourself, you have the power to direct your self-image by directing your self-talk.
We’ll say that again, because it is very important: By directing your self-talk, you can direct your self-image.
By building a self-image that represents who you truly are and want to be, you can essentially program yourself to be ready for success. To do it, you need to master two tasks. First, you have to become aware of what you’re saying to yourself. Then, you have to commit to stop giving yourself permission to use negative self-talk. Berating yourself—even in a joking manner—doesn’t help in any way. It damages your self-image, and we want you to stop doing it, right now and from now on.
THE PCT TRAP
Many people believe that they’re at least somewhat at the mercy of their thoughts. Doubt and negativity just pop in from time to time, and sometimes you become obsessed with the problems on your plate. And, they say, there’s nothing you can really do except try to ignore those thoughts and wait for them to pass.
But if you think like most people, you will be like most people—average. Mentally tough people know nothing could be further from the truth. If you work on controlling your thoughts, you’ll get better at it.
Yes, the human mind’s “default” setting is to focus on the problems or weaknesses. The problem with focusing on the problem, though—which is called “problem-centric thought,” or PCT—is that most people do it at the expense of considering a solution or personal strengths.
In fact, lots of people are being trained into problem-centric thought by mental health professionals or “self-help” guides because of the misguided (but well-meaning) idea that talking about a problem is akin to making your problems go away.
Unfortunately, there’s no empirical evidence to show that idea actually works. Just talking about a problem—and moving your problem-centric thinking to the forefront—doesn’t do anything to solve that problem. Actually, it usually just makes the problem grow in size, thanks to something called “expectancy theory.”
It goes like this: When you focus on something, it literally occupies the forefront of your mind. Other thoughts and ideas are pushed to the side. As that thought goes, so do the feelings and behaviors that follow. That which you focus on expands. Focusing on the negative is essentially like fertilizing the weeds in your yard.
That which you focus on expands. Focusing on the negative is essentially like fertilizing the weeds in your yard.
It’s actually the flip side of channel capacity on full display. You’re focused intently on one thing, and your mind is using all of its horsepower on that one thing. In essence, what you’re focusing on grows larger.
So, if you think mostly about your problems, and place all of your mental focus on them, you’re growing them larger in mental terms. They soon are occupying much more mental and emotional space than they normally would or should. That’s when you start to lose perspective and run the risk of making decisions out of fear or even panic. It’s the equivalent of trying to win a football game without ever putting your offense on the field.
What does enhance self-image? Learning to talk to yourself about what you do well and how you want to improve. Concentrating on solutions instead of problems, and bolstering that focus on the positive with self-talk and visualizations. In the words of Dr. Don Miguel Ruiz, bestselling author of the book The Four Agreements, “the human mind is like fertile ground where seeds are continually being planted.” Whatever seeds you plant in your mind are the ones that will grow—so use this knowledge to plant seeds for the things you want to achieve.2
What does enhance self-image? Learning to talk to yourself about what you do well and how you want to improve.
Think about the last time you ran into a particularly thorny problem at work—something you worked on that was in the middle of not turning out the way you hoped. How did you talk to yourself before, during, and after that situation?
Is self-talk something you’ve ever consciously considered?
As we’ve been saying, the mind is more powerful than most people even comprehend. It would be a tragedy to waste that power by literally polluting it with negative and self-limiting thinking.
BUILDING A MENTAL PICTURE
Visualization has become a kind of catchword in sports—something you hear many athletes talk about in their post-game interviews.
It certainly makes sense when you’re talking about a complicated physical process, like hitting a golf ball or a fastball. The player gets a huge benefit by actually “pre-seeing” himself or herself going through the act of making the big shot or kicking the game-winning field goal, complete with the surrounding scene and the emotions that come with doing it successfully.
The act of visualizing the action before it happens gets the mind and body prepared to actually do it in real life when the time comes. It is priming the mental and physical pump. Players who visualize their game are calmer, better prepared, and much more likely to succeed in high-pressure situations.
The act of visualizing the action before it happens gets the mind and body prepared to actually do it in real life when the time comes. It is priming the mental and physical pump.
Visualization is a technique that you can use to help yourself even if your job never takes you within fifty miles of a batter’s box or a tee at a PGA Tour event. The act of pre-seeing the important events in your day-to-day life in an office or at home is just as valuable as it would be if you were doing it as a professional athlete. The exact same principles hold true. By seeing yourself doing the things you’ll soon have to do for real, you’re getting your mind and body prepared early. There will be fewer emotional surprises when you get to the real event, and you will feel infinitely more prepared.
For example, Tom coaches a prominent Fortune 500 executive who received a big promotion at his firm. With that promotion came much more public responsibility—giving talks to shareholders and presentations to other large groups. The executive was terrific at the business of running a division and had a very strong technical background, but public speaking was something he had never enjoyed, and he really hadn’t had to do it before as part of his work.
So Tom worked with him using the same process he had used with his basketball team years ago. They worked together to develop the executive’s visualizing skill. First, they went through the next presentation the executive was scheduled to give. Tom asked him to imagine himself being introduced, and to focus on controlling his breathing. Then he imagined himself at the podium giving the beginning of the speech—not watching himself, but looking out at his audience, as if he were really there. In his mind he went through the main point of the presentation, still at the podium, and eventually visualized delivering the actual finish of the speech—how he was going to wrap it up.
The executive went through this process several times before the presentation, and when he walked up to the podium at the event itself, he felt like he was in familiar territory. He executed the steps just as he had been visualizing them over the past week—breathing during the introduction, nailing the opening, explaining the main point, and then sailing along to the finish.
THE MENTAL WORKOUT
As we said in the introduction, when Jason had one chance to convince the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team that he could bring value to the clubhouse, he picked the Mental Workout as the piece to share with the team in his ten-minute window. It’s that important, and it can produce amazing results.
Jason designed the version we teach to world-class professional athletes and Olympians. It is designed to put them in an ideal mental state for competition and to integrate their mental performance with their physical training.
Most of us mere mortals don’t have such a strong physical component in our day-to-day jobs, so the version we’re going to teach you here was designed specifically for nonathletes, and is geared specifically toward mental performance and consistency in the business world. Done properly, it will take you about a hundred seconds to complete—which means that if you have time to brush your teeth, you have time to strengthen your mind. It has five basic steps:
1. Centering breath (breathe in for six seconds, hold for two, exhale for seven)
2. Identity statement (personally tailored positive self-talk)
3. Personal highlight reel (visualization of past and future success)
4. Identity statement (personally tailored positive self-talk)
5. Centering breath (breathe in for six seconds, hold for two, exhale for seven)
We’ll go over each step in more detail below, and the steps are summarized again in the accompanying table. Your mind is a muscle just like your bicep. If you want your bicep to become stronger, you must complete bicep curls on a regular basis. The same is true for your mind. If you want to become mentally tough, you must complete mental workouts consistently.
Muscle deterioration begins within seventy-two hours of your last workout. Just as this is the case with your bicep, it also holds true for your brain. The goal should be to never let two days go by without some type of physical activity, nor should you go two days without completing a mental workout.
Centering Breath
To start your Mental Workout, you will give yourself some oxygen: breathe in for six seconds, hold that breath for two seconds, and then breathe out for seven seconds. When you modulate your breathing this way, you’re controlling your state of arousal and corralling your body’s natural response to stress.
The biological response to pressure is an elevated heart rate. Unfortunately, when your heart rate increases, your ability to think effectively decreases. A very powerful way to control heart rate is to do a centering breath. Breathing in for six seconds, holding for two seconds, and then exhaling for seven seconds gets air into your diaphragm and slows your heart rate, thus allowing your brain to operate optimally.
Identity Statement
Once you complete the breathing, recite your personal identity statement to yourself. Marathon runner Katie’s is an awesome example: Today I am strong. Today I am healthy. Today I am a beast. You’re free to use hers, or you can come up with one of your own—as long as it fits a few basic criteria. It needs to emphasize one of your positive qualities, and it has to pinpoint something you want to become.
The identity statement is a personal mantra that, when repeated over and over, will manifest itself into reality. Written in the present tense, an identity statement includes positive adjectives that describe the characteristics of the person you want to be and the level of success you want to achieve. When it comes to identity statements, let desire guide you. Don’t worry as much about your current reality but, rather, focus on who you want to become. As the research on identity statements makes clear: the further from the truth, the more impactful.
Examples:
I am full of positive energy, I make $1 million per year, and I am an awesome mother and wife.
I outwork the competition every day, I am the most effective salesperson in the country, and I experience true love as a husband and a father.
Think it, see it, become it. I improve every day and I am consistently excellent as a leader, executive, and parent.
Repeating your identity statement in your Mental Workouts causes you to believe in yourself and in your ability to accomplish great things. It is a proactive approach to overcoming all the normal negative stuff that goes on in between a person’s ears.
Personal Highlight Reel
Next, quietly visualize your own personal highlight reel for sixty seconds. See in your mind’s eye three things you did well the previous day, and mentally rehearse the three most important things you need to do to in the upcoming twenty-four hours. In many ways, your mind works the same way a dominant Major League pitcher’s does. He’ll spend his sixty seconds visualizing himself hitting his exact spots with his slider and fastball, and following his first-inning game plan, while you’ll picture things like giving a PowerPoint presentation at a sales meeting, or having a one-on-one with your supervisor that afternoon. The more specific you are in your visualization, the better. Just like the athlete, you are preparing yourself for success.
Visualizing is one of the most powerful tools in the field of performance psychology. It is safe to say that a person cannot perform at his or her potential without consistently using visualization as a pre-performance technique. To get the most out of visualizing, pay attention to the following three guidelines.
Guideline 1: Use the first-person vantage point. Visualizing from the first-person point of view means looking at the video through your own eyes, so you see the things you would actually see while performing the task or skill. If you know you have a sales meeting with a client over lunch, then visualize exactly what you will see, say, and feel while sitting in your lunch seat looking across the table at your client. Visualizing in this way will help make the mental image a three-dimensional experience that feels real enough to increase your confidence and skill most efficiently.
Guideline 2: Emotionally feel the way you want to feel. The video you play in your head needs to capture the emotional experience you want to have. Why? Because through visualization, you create your reality, and reality involves emotions. When you allow negative emotions, such as anger, embarrassment, or doubt, to creep into your performances, you will not deliver the performance you need to succeed. One way to banish these emotions is to consciously replace them with productive, positive emotions during visualization. The goal should be to feel and experience confidence in your visualizations.
Guideline 3: Visualize at the desired speed. Make sure to watch your mental clip in real speed—the speed you want your performance to be.
You may be wondering how you can visualize, for example, the delivery of an eighty-second script, a three-minute sales call, or a thirty-minute presentation at real speed if you have only a thirty-second block within your Mental Workout. That’s a good question. You’ll need to pick the most important specific moments within those events to run through in your visualization clips (for example, thinking through exactly what you will say in the first ten seconds of the presentation). Many people visualize in generalities, not knowing that it is far less effective than visualizing the details. The key is to visualize specific moments of success. Doing so allows for the success to actually generalize out to other areas that may not have been visualized. An NFL running back might see himself having a successful first run of the game, for example. Including detail and specifics when visualizing that very first run will set him up for increased success in each run thereafter as well.
Once you have a basic comfort level with visualization—and we mean just that, “comfort level,” not expertise—you’re ready to use one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal to improve your mental performance.
The rest of the Mental Workout is simple. After the highlight reel, once again repeat your identity statement. Then, bring yourself out of your focus-building concentration by completing another round of centered breathing—in for six seconds, hold for two, and out for seven.
Now, you’re ready to focus and perform.
Plenty of our clients in the worlds of both sports and business have given us strange looks when we first introduced the Mental Workout as something they should try. All we can tell you is that the clients who have integrated it into their daily routine have seen huge benefits from it—something that shouldn’t be so surprising.
After all, you wouldn’t expect to build a lot of physical strength or endurance without training your body. Why would you expect to improve your mind without some kind of workout for it? Completing Mental Workouts develops the mental toughness necessary to control your self-talk. Having the strength between the ears allows you to replace negative thinking with thoughts that emphasize the positive.
We’ve been using this strategy with our clients for years, and there is no doubt, Mental Workouts will help you develop the mental toughness you see with high-level performers. You will train yourself to become the “go-to” player who makes the game-winning shot. When it comes to Mental Workouts, you can’t afford not to try it.
The Big Why: What you think—or how you talk to yourself—dictates how you feel and behave, which in turn dictates if you will succeed or fail.
The Inversion Test: If you learn to talk to yourself in a positive way, you will find yourself consistently on the attack, thus speeding up the realization of success. If you continue speaking to yourself with negative tones, you will routinely play on the defensive—reducing your chances of success and increasing the time you spend stuck at the wall of underperformance.
Act Now: Take two minutes and attempt to complete one Mental Workout right now. Don’t expect perfection or anything even close. Just try to work through the five steps.
Some examples of 100-second Mental Workouts from our clients:
PRO ATHLETE
Step 1—Centering breath (inhale for 6 seconds, hold for 2, exhale for 7, for 15 seconds total).
Step 2—Identity statement: I am more mentally and physically prepared than the competition. I am a dominant Major League pitcher (5 seconds).
Step 3—Personal highlight reel:
• Remembering 3 “done-wells” from the previous day (30 seconds total)
Spent 5 minutes reading before bed (10 seconds)
Made great nutrition choices at breakfast and lunch (10 seconds)
Discussed concerns with Yadi (10 seconds)
• Imagining 3 “done-wells” in the upcoming day (30 seconds total)
Spending 20 minutes in video room and identifying 1 weakness for each hitter I will face (10 seconds)
Starting strong, staying strong, finishing strong in pre-game warm-up (10 seconds)
Attacking mentality in first 3 pitches in the first inning (10 seconds)
Step 4—Identity statement: I am more mentally and physically prepared than the competition. I am a dominant Major League pitcher (5 seconds).
Step 5—Centering breath (inhale for 6 seconds, hold for 2, exhale for 7, for 15 seconds total).
FINANCIAL ADVISOR
Step 1—Centering breath (inhale for 6 seconds, hold for 2, exhale for 7, for 15 seconds total).
Step 2—Identity statement: I am the happiest, healthiest, and best family man, friend, leader, and financial advisor in the world. I have a relentless solution focus and I always attack—no excuse (5 seconds).
Step 3—Personal highlight reel:
• Remembering 3 “done-wells” from the previous day (30 seconds total)
Expressed my concerns to the Smiths about them not keeping enough emergency money in cash in their account (10 seconds)
Completed my Success Log before leaving the office (10 seconds)
Had great energy with Susan and the kids at home last night—played 2-inning game of kickball even though I was tired from the day (10 seconds)
• Imagining 3 “done-wells” in the upcoming day (30 seconds total)
Calling high-net-worth client first and asking 4 feedback questions without getting defensive (10 seconds)
Seeing myself Organizing Tomorrow Today at precisely 3:00 p.m.—writing on paper “3 Most Important / 1 Must” (10 seconds)
Leaving the office by 5:00 p.m. to be home by 5:20 (10 seconds)
Step 4—Identity statement: I am the happiest, healthiest, and best family man, friend, leader, and financial advisor in the world. I have a relentless solution focus and I always attack—no excuse (5 seconds).
Step 5—Centering breath (inhale for 6 seconds, hold for 2, exhale for 7, for 15 seconds total).
SOFTWARE SALESMAN
Step 1—Centering breath (inhale for 6 seconds, hold for 2, exhale for 7, for 15 seconds total.
Step 2—Identity statement: I outwork the competition every day, and I am the most effective and precise presenter in the country (5 seconds).
Step 3—Personal highlight reel:
• Remembering 3 “done-wells” from the previous day (30 seconds total)
Was up by 5:00 a.m. and completed my workout by 5:45 (10 seconds)
Kept my focus in two client meetings and had excellent closes on both (10 seconds)
Forced myself to go “lights out” by 9:00 p.m. in preparation for the long day coming up (10 seconds)
• Imagining 3 “done-wells” in the upcoming day (30 seconds total)
Getting up by 5:00 a.m. and working out by 5:45 (10 seconds)
Starting strong, staying strong, finishing strong on product call (10 seconds)
Step 4—Identity statement: I outwork the competition every day, and I am the most effective and precise presenter in the country (5 seconds).
Step 5—Centering breath (inhale for 6 seconds, hold for 2, exhale for 7, for 15 seconds total).