Inspiration is a powerful thing.
Coach Wooden’s father, Joshua, raised his children to live by two sets of simple rules. The first set dealt with integrity:
• Never lie.
• Never cheat.
• Never steal.
The second set dealt with adversity.
• Don’t whine.
• Don’t complain.
• Don’t make excuses.
And when Coach Wooden graduated from the eighth grade, in 1924, his father gave him a printed card. On one side was an inspirational poem by the Reverend Henry van Dyke, a Presbyterian minister who wrote many popular stories and hymns in the early twentieth century. On the other side was a seven-point creed that included advice like “Make each day your masterpiece.”
Wooden took the two sets of three rules and the advice on that card (which he carried with him in his pocket to the day he died in 2010) and used them every day in more than seventy years of coaching and mentoring.
The thousands of people Wooden touched were in turn inspired by Joshua Wooden’s gesture nearly a hundred years ago. To this day, you can listen to the words of the all-time great players mentored by Wooden—Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Walton, Gail Goodrich—and hear Wooden’s influence, down to the exact language he used with them in practice decades ago.1
Our goal in this book—and in every seminar we teach—is the same as the one Coach Wooden had for every practice he ran: we want you to leave a little better than you came in.
Here, we’d like to share five real success stories from families who embraced the concepts we teach and changed not just their lives but the lives of their children. In many ways, these families may be like yours. And their transformations didn’t come from some kind of dramatic meteor strike from outer space or thunderbolt from the sky. It came from methodical, incremental improvement—and the determination to make those improvements stick.
You can do it, too.
THE LANGUAGE OF A LOSER
Marcus Lopez hadn’t yet attended one of our classes, but he received one of our audio CDs from a financial advisor friend who had. Marcus listened to the CD so much that it actually got stuck in the slot in his car radio—so he ended up listening to it much more often than he had planned. He didn’t realize just how often until he was driving back from a golf tournament that his ten-year-old son had played in.
His son had a tough round, and he spent the first part of the car ride talking about all of the problems with his game—everything from his clubs to the condition of the course to the fact that everybody in the tournament was a better player than he was.
When the ten-year-old took a breath, his five-year-old brother chimed in. “That’s whining, complaining, and making excuses,” he said. “You’re speaking in the language of a loser.”
That lesson became one that all of Marcus’s family shared together on a regular basis. It led to a little game: When one of the kids heard something on television that sounded like whining, complaining, or making an excuse, they’d almost automatically point it out. Marcus would start the next sentence: “That’s the language of a . . . ,” and the kids would say, in unison, “. . . a loser, Dad.”
Coach Wooden would have been pleased to learn that children were learning to adopt the “no excuse” mentality.
GRAPPLING WITH THE MENTAL WORKOUT
Brian Blough is a very successful business owner from Georgia who attended one of our seminars and incorporated the Mental Workout into his routine the first day after the program finished. He had so much success with it that he shared the process with a number of other colleagues in his area—and with his sixteen-year-old son, who wrestles on the high school team.
In his second year on varsity, Brian’s son had the ups and downs you would expect from a younger competitor. As he progressed through the season, his record hovered around .500. But as he got to the end of the season and started facing tougher competition, he began to wrestle much more conservatively.
After a conversation before one of his matches, Brian realized that his son was letting the prospect of competing against talented wrestlers get in his head. That night, he introduced him to the Mental Workout, and took him through all of the steps he had learned in our seminar. They created an identity statement, and his son began to visualize a highlight reel of success from his previous matches, and pictured in his mind’s eye what he wanted his next match to look like.
In the next match, his son took the mat looking much calmer and more confident. A few weeks later, he wrestled extremely well in the sectional tournament—where he also advanced to make it into the state tournament. After a great showing in the state tournament, he’s looking forward to a complete off-season to further develop his mental and physical skills—and to making an even longer run in next year’s tournament.
BUILDING MENTAL TOUGHNESS
Rosey Hayett thought the principles he learned from Tom and Jason would be perfect to use in his role as a youth sports coach. Some of the most valuable material for the young athletes was on the subject of mental toughness.
Hayett’s alpine ski racers faced some of the most daunting pressure of any youth athletes. Ski racing itself is a physically demanding sport that requires tremendous fitness and athleticism. The conditions are often brutal—cold weather, unfamiliar terrain, bad snow conditions.
As hard as that all is, the mental demands might even be tougher. The difference between first and fifth place is usually measured in hundredths of a second. One tiny mistake can blow up what was otherwise a great run. To compound the performance pressure, racers often have to go to the top of the slope and wait more than an hour to go down the hill, giving them plenty of time to think—and get nervous. A sound mental approach is absolutely crucial in the sport—especially for young athletes.
The team Hayett coached adopted Mental Workouts for each racer—the centering breaths, positive self-talk, and visualization helped to calm each of the skiers before their events and increased their confidence during runs. They also modified their practice routine to start treating training runs as if they were real, competitive ones—which helped them develop more tolerance for pressure.
By any measure, the tools were a success. On Hayett’s team there were skiers from many small towns around northern New Mexico, and they regularly competed against larger, better-funded teams from higher population areas across three states. With the help of the mental workout, their team won the Southern Series championship four times in five seasons and produced a dozen Junior Olympic champions.
PRIORITIZING THE PROCESS
John Mark Brown is an Edward Jones advisor who went through one of our training seminars a few years ago. He started to see some great improvement in his business in the twelve months after the seminar, to the tune of a 19 percent increase. But it was the effect the training had on John’s family life that proved to be the most valuable gain of all.
John’s daughter Regan had been born four months premature and was diagnosed with cerebral palsy. She worked hard and pushed herself to lead the regular life of an elementary, junior high, and high school student, but she had her share of challenges. One day, about four months after John took the seminar, the superintendent of Regan’s high school called. She asked what the family had been doing differently, because Regan’s engagement and participation in her classes had gone way up.
John was stumped for a minute, then realized that the act of concentrating on the process of his business—the one rule he chose to hit hard after training—was spilling over into his family life, too. He was choosing to concentrate on the process of family time. Everybody in the Mark house was more engaged and working together, focusing on the process of growing and improving without worrying so much about the outcome or achieving perfection. Regan was feeding off that positive energy—with great results.
Regan graduated from high school with a B average and is now going to college.
FROM PERFECTION TO PERFORMANCE
Jeff Gayanski had always tried to motivate and push his kids the way he had been taught—to relentlessly attack until you got the results you wanted. It had worked for him. Jeff was a managing director for a Fortune 500 company, and he had found great success during his professional career by focusing harder and harder on getting those results.
But Jeff’s family life wasn’t keeping up with his professional life. He felt burned out with the relentlessness of work pressure. It was a phase that had come and gone before, but this time it seemed to be lasting much longer. And more importantly, Jeff’s daughter was struggling, and he didn’t know how to help her. None of his usual motivational tools were working.
Jeff was noticing some dramatic changes in his seven-year-old. She was obviously distressed about something. She was very emotional over small things, bursting into tears almost instantly over little frustrations. She was dealing with her anxiety by pulling her eyebrows out. Imagine how difficult it would be for a seven-year-old to have to go to school without eyebrows!
Doctors eventually diagnosed Jeff’s daughter as having high anxiety, and said the family would need to learn how to deal with it the best they could. Jeff came to one of our seminars right about the time he was at his low point both professionally and personally. He was desperate, and he thought that if he could improve his work numbers, he could give himself some more breathing room at home.
It took a few days, but we showed him that he wasn’t his results. He was his effort.
Jeff resolved to stop focusing on his numbers and to start concentrating on things he could control. He trained himself to answer three simple effort-based questions every day:
1. What three things did I do well today?
2. What one thing do I want to improve tomorrow?
3. What is one thing I can do differently right now that can help me make that improvement?
In the made-for-TV movie of Jeff’s life, he would have answered those three questions on the first day, and everything would have solved itself immediately. Jeff lives in the real world, though, and it took a lot of determination—and some pain—to establish the new habit. Most days, he didn’t want to bother to take the three minutes to answer the questions. But he doggedly did it, forcing himself to check off the box every day.
Jeff started noticing how much less anxiety he felt when he answered the questions. Then, he started to see an uptick in his results—ironically enough, right when he committed to not worrying about them. More importantly, the benefits began to seep into his home life. Jeff wasn’t coming home tired and stressed out. His wife and kids now enjoyed the time they had together each night. The more Jeff talked about the process he had learned in class, the more his wife wanted to know about it. Maybe the new process could help their family, and do something for their daughter. Maybe this new definition of success could reduce some of the frustration she was feeling. They decided to try. They started a new ritual. Every night, at dinner as a family, they decided to go around the table and identify one thing each did well that day.
Shockingly, Jeff’s daughter started to respond. This one simple change helped her stop focusing so much on all the negative things in life and to be more aware of the good. Her stress level went way down, and her smile reappeared. In addition, she began using centering breaths to battle anxiety when she felt it coming on. A few months later, she went back to school for the first time in many years with all of her eyebrows intact.
Her confidence grew to the point where she even started joining extracurricular activities. At the low point, she never would have considered playing on a team, because of the fear she wouldn’t be able to handle the pressure. Last fall, she hit nine service winners in a row to win the title for her volleyball team. In more ways than one, she’s a hero.
KNOWING SOMETHING DOES NOTHING. DOING SOMETHING DOES
The success stories we’ve told in this chapter (and in this book) all have one thing in common. The central people in them are doers. If the commitment to doing isn’t there, success doesn’t exist.
It’s up to you to change the lens through which you see the world. Instead of telling yourself you aren’t special enough to get all the things you want in life, start telling yourself I deserve it—and then start deserving it by taking action!
PICK ONE . . . AND WE MEAN IT
Our main priority for this book has been to give you a variety of techniques you can use to increase your success—and to give you permission to choose only one of those techniques to attack at a time.
Ritualizing one change will bring you much more success than if you try to bite off everything at once—just like taking the entire bottle of aspirin isn’t the right solution for muscle pain. Remember, done is better than perfect.
We can already read the minds of some of you looking over this paragraph right now. The whole concept of choosing just one thing doesn’t apply to you, right? You’re too advanced, too smart, and too special. It’s great to have that kind of self-belief, and often, it’s something you can use. But in this case, you’re wrong.
In almost twenty years of working with some of the most successful and talented people in the world, we’ve seen the power and the value of focusing on one improvement at a time—no matter what kind of physical and mental horsepower you bring to the table.
Once you’ve nailed your one improvement for three consecutive months (and 90 percent completion is how we define “nailing it”), you’re ready to move on to the next challenge. By doing it this way, you’re actually speeding up the growth process. It won’t all happen overnight, but your improvement will be steady, and it’ll be lasting.
Play Hard, Play Smart
Everything we’ve been talking about in this book has been designed to give you the information you need and the motivation to use it. Taken together, those two things produce the single most important factor in human performance—confidence.
If you watch any sport on television, you’ve certainly heard “confidence” used as a catchphrase, or shorthand, for being “in the groove.” “He’s playing with a lot of confidence,” or, “She really needs to make this shot to get some confidence back,” are things announcers say all the time. And it’s certainly true that confidence is what often separates one athlete from another. Two athletes may both have world-class physical skill, but the one who has just a little more of that mental and emotional intangible is the one who has the better chance of success. So you probably won’t be surprised to hear that confidence is just as big of a factor in everyday life, for everyday people, as it is in NCAA basketball games, NASCAR races, or Olympic sprints. Confidence matters just as much for you and me as it does for Lebron James, Jordan Spieth, or Ronda Rousey.
Think about the times in your life when you’ve had a lot of confidence—and when you’ve had less of it. And think about how easy it is to lose confidence.
It’s happened to all of us. You’re feeling great about work, but then you run into a bad manager who puts you into a sidespin. Or things are running smoothly at work and one of your children runs into a problem that is complicated and hard to solve.
It happens. Life is how you deal with it when it does.
Confidence isn’t some kind of magic trick. It isn’t something people are automatically born with. It’s something you can learn, and something you can practice. It’s what we’ve been teaching folks in dozens of training seminars all over the country.
If you apply even just one of the lessons from this book—and choose wisely—you’re going to set up your own process for making your confidence grow.
As a reminder, we want to leave you with a few guidelines to help keep you on that confidence track.
1. Choose wisely. Your mind is like a powerful fire hose. Don’t dilute the strength by splitting the stream and aiming at a bunch of different fires. Pick one concept at a time and fully acknowledge the limits of channel capacity.
2. Nail it—90 percent of the time. Once you’ve chosen, give it time to work and become habit. For the next three months, concentrate on that one concept and make it second nature.
3. Improve, not perfect. If you expect perfection in anything—yourself, your spouse, your kids—you’re setting yourself—or them—up for failure and disappointment. First, understand that just the act of deciding to make a change and trying to improve sets you apart from most people. Benjamin Franklin said it first, and he was paraphrased by General George S. Patton: “Most people die at a very early age, only to be buried 40 or 50 years later.” Congratulate yourself for taking the initiative, and keep pushing for improvement—not perfection.
4. Evaluate smartly. When you do improve, recognize it. Don’t be critical about the size or speed of improvement. Congratulate yourself, then write down what you want to continue to improve. Making the effort is winning in and of itself.
5. Repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition. . . . Mastery only comes from effort and repetition. You wouldn’t expect your five-year-old to be able to tie her shoes the first time. In the words of the Zen master Suzuki, if you lose the spirit of repetition, your practice will become difficult. This was one of the absolute cornerstones of Coach Wooden’s teaching.2
6. Be your own best cheerleader. Friends, family, loved ones, and colleagues might recognize the things you’re trying to improve, and they might not. It’s up to you to reinforce your own positive feelings. When you make progress, don’t hesitate to celebrate it. You’ll build a feedback loop that recruits your mind toward the next reward.
The Big Why: Life is hard and most people are overwhelmed. It’s important to remember that you can do it. You have the power to improve. When you take action on your one thing, you will deserve the success you experience.
The Inversion Test: People who try to take action on too many things become overwhelmed to a point of inaction. People who try to take action on one thing become energized to a point of action.
Act Now: Pick one thing from the list of chapters to attack. Evaluate yourself weekly on your completion rate. Make it a goal to nail your one thing each week at 90 percent or better.
Chapter 1: Organize Tomorrow Today
ACTION TOOL: Identify daily your “3 Most Important / 1 Must.”
Chapter 2: Choose Wisely
ACTION TOOL: Every day, no matter what, take action on your “1 Must.”
Chapter 3: Maximize Your Time
ACTION TOOL: Choose one of the three time-maximization tools described in the chapter and commit to following it (“Attack the Open Space,” “Prioritize the Priorities,” “Trim the Fat”).
Chapter 4: Win Your Fight-Thrus
ACTION TOOL: Win fight-thrus by asking yourself two questions: How will I feel if I win the fight-thru? How will I feel if I lose it?
Chapter 5: Evaluate Correctly
ACTION TOOL: Complete Success Logs a minimum of three times weekly.
Chapter 6: Learn How to Talk to Yourself
ACTION TOOL: Complete Mental Workouts a minimum of three times weekly.
Chapter 7: Learn How to Talk with Others
ACTION TOOL: Before meetings and presentations, spend three minutes three times daily for three days mentally rehearsing what you will say and how you will say it.
Chapter 8: Become Abnormal
ACTION TOOL: Identify the one “virus” that is most affecting you, and take the action now to vaccinate yourself.
Here is how some of our clients tackled this assignment:
PRO ATHLETE
I am going to work on choosing wisely. I feel like there are actually two steps to this goal. First I am going to commit each and every day, no matter what, to complete my “1 Must.” If I am going to finish my career strong, this has to be done. The other side of it for me is that I am going to do a better job of choosing wisely what I commit to. I am always telling people that I will do this or that without really giving much thought to whether or not I will actually follow through. I am going to really work on only saying things that I fully intend on following through with. I will choose more wisely.
FINANCIAL ADVISOR
There is no doubt what I need to choose to focus on. I need to get organized. I am going to attempt every day to identify my “3 Most Important / 1 Must.” The rule I am setting up for myself is that before I am allowed to take my first bite of lunch I will spend a few minutes getting organized for tomorrow. To help with accountability, I am going to ask my assistant to come in and remind/ask me if I have completed my OTT before she takes her first bite of lunch each day.
PHYSICIAN
The one thing I am going to commit to moving forward is beating the “no excuse” virus. I am keenly aware that my one “go-to” excuse has been “I am too busy making money.” This excuse has caused me for years to become stagnant. I don’t read anymore, and that used to be a big part of making personal improvement. The worst part is I hide behind that excuse when it comes to being a good husband and father. I am embarrassed and heartbroken that I have allowed this to go on for so long, but I am committing to not using that excuse any longer.
We have one last thing to say. Be relentless about improvement; your progress has no limits!