STEP TWO: GET MENTALLY PREPARED

There are many ways to think about mental preparation, but in my experience, it boils down to one thing: developing a tolerance for risk. I have never encountered a worthwhile choice that wasn’t coupled with some element of risk. As I see it, a choice without risk is either a false choice or a choice not worth making.

Imagine you’re offered your dream job, or your dream investor comes along, ready to fund your business venture. On the face of it, accepting the job or taking the money might seem like a no-brainer. But whether you realize it or not, every opportunity comes with certain risks—often critical ones.

If history has taught us anything, it is that the future is largely unpredictable. You might accept that dream job today only to lose it tomorrow. You might grow your start-up to rival Google or Facebook, and then watch it become the next Blockbuster Video. Indeed, risk is all around us.

And yet, risk assessment doesn’t inform our decision to the extent that it should. When I was eighteen and invested everything I had and everything I was into becoming a paratrooper, there was no guarantee that I would get in. But I was completely dedicated to the decision. I gave it my all. Of course, so did each of the other hopefuls seeking admittance. The numbers were stacked against me. The only thing I knew for certain was that I felt good about my choice, and so I accepted the risk of failure. It is rare to change your mind when you feel good about something, no matter the risk.

As you prepare for Hell Week, I want you to remember this good feeling. We have a word for this in Norwegian: godfølelse. To go for godfølelse (gofø'lls) is to create the best possible life, one that fulfills and excites you every day. When we follow that good feeling, what we are really doing is letting our emotions determine our actions. That’s a positive thing, despite the bad rap emotions often get—especially in the business world, where leaders are supposed to be steely and unflappable. I take the opposite view. In my experience, life-changing decisions are always emotional reactions, and the stronger the emotion, the more confident you will feel that your decision is the right one. If all the data you can gather is telling you to change careers to a safer, more stable line of work, you won’t do it if you are passionate about your current occupation.

In the last chapter, I talked about the car accident that changed my life. The words of my father and minister were instrumental in my recovery, but there was one other influence that’s worth mentioning here. At the encouragement of a close friend, I traveled to England to listen to Tony Robbins, the life performance coach. (I sat on the edge of my chair for three days; the seminar was a game changer for me and motivated me to do what I do today.) Tony has many interesting and important ideas in the motivational speeches he gives, but what I respect the most about his teachings is the emphasis on emotion. “What is your motive for action? What is it that drives you in your life?” he asks. “I believe emotion is the force of life.”

I couldn’t agree more, and yet our culture tends to value information more highly than feelings. So even though we base most of our major choices on feelings, we like to tell ourselves that the opposite is true, that we actually base our choices mostly on information. That simply isn’t the case, which is why the first step of Hell Week is about letting go of that risk-obsessed voice of reason and instead focusing on your feelings, which are what drive us into action.

Think of your own ultimate dream. You can either listen to your feelings that are screaming for you to pursue it, or you can obey the numbers that say you will never beat the odds. Risk is essentially information on possible outcomes. Whichever outcome you respond to with the most emotion is more often than not the course of action you will pursue. When you listen to your emotions and decide to go for it, you will find that no amount of information on other possible outcomes will dissuade you. Emotion is the true influencer of your decisions, not information.

It’s not enough to understand rationally that being overweight is unhealthy, or that smoking can cause lung cancer. Everybody knows these things, but people go on overeating and smoking. Change is not driven by information. You can study how to become better at anything, but if you are expecting your behavior to change based on the information you garner, you will be waiting a long time.

If you study your life choices, you will come to realize that each one has been driven by an emotion. If you make up your mind to stop being overweight, the choice is driven by a desire to feel better about your body. If you decide to concentrate solely on landing the big-fish clients, it’s because you are tired of being mediocre and working hard with little payoff. But there is no need to wait until you are fed up to decide to change. Through mental training, you can learn to channel your emotions today.

One of my key roles as a mental trainer is to help you use your emotions to effect change. You want to become a better version of yourself and dare to pursue your dreams. All of us do. But to do that, you have to feel strongly that you are doing the right thing. If not, you will end up focusing on the risks of change and you will find yourself becoming emotionally motivated to play it safe. You will not change. You will stay where you are.

Have you ever attended a leadership course? You leave for the course with a vision of yourself as an empowered leader with improved management skills, but when you return to the office, you are met with your old self. If the training didn’t invigorate you on an emotional level, you remain the same person you were before you took the course. Nothing has changed.

If we want to become better, why do we need emotion? Why don’t we just change anyway? The answer, I believe, is that humans don’t actually like to change. Change is painful and it involves the unknown. It’s human nature to resist change, to avoid or postpone it. The only way to create the necessary momentum to break this pattern of sameness is to appeal to your emotions.

How do I stir up the emotions of my clients? I provoke them deliberately. I get them out of the stupor of their comfort zone. Many people from the sports and business worlds have never made the decision to go all out, to truly go after their goal. They hope to reach it someday. They might even believe it will happen, but hoping and believing are no guarantees of success. They’re essentially just dreaming. The power of change resides in you making up your mind to really do it—to act as though you must. There is no other way.

This is the decision I provoke in my clients. If a client reveals a motivation for achieving a goal, then we’re really getting somewhere. If you can’t formulate why you want to change, then your emotional attachment to your desired outcome is too weak. When you put your motivation for achieving a goal into words, you begin to realize that results will not magically materialize on their own. You are the one who has to make some changes. More important, you are coming close to realizing your emotional motivation for change.

When I work with top athletes, I often say, “If you keep doing what you have been doing, you will continue getting the same results, year after year. Best-case scenario, your career will end with a fifth ranking. Is that what you want, or are you ready to make some changes?”

To someone who wants to lose weight, I might say, “Where will you be in five years if you continue eating the same foods you are eating now? You will most likely weigh at least an extra twenty pounds. An extra twenty pounds! This means you will be less fit, less energetic, and feel even more miserable than you already are.”

Here’s another hard truth about human nature, in addition to its resistance to change: most people are inherently lazy. We get in a rut and we stay there. We simply shuffle along on the track life placed us on that is most likely taking us somewhere we don’t really want to go. To shake people out of the numbness of life, it helps to ask provoking questions: Do you expect something to happen on its own? Is this really what you want? Do you want to be a comfort-oriented middle manager for the rest of your career? Is this really your peak?

In addition to asking yourself the tough questions, you need to work on building up your resilience. Here are some strategies to work on before Hell Week to help build up your mental toughness.

THE ACTION PLAN

Silence the negative voices. It’s easy to blame yourself for being stuck in a rut. You focus on all the wrong choices you made. Or you tell yourself that your heart has never been in it. To break this pattern of pessimism, you literally need to turn off the negative voices in your head. It requires deliberate focus and concentration. As you prepare for Hell Week, I want you to be vigilant of these negative thoughts and defuse them by making the conscious decision not to listen to them. You might even go so far as to yell the word Stop! in your mind. Do whatever it takes to break the negative thought cycle so that you can point your thoughts in a positive direction.

Learn to deal with discomfort. An entire day of Hell Week will be devoted to getting outside of your comfort zone. During the preparatory stage, I simply want you to imagine the feeling by asking yourself some of the same provocative questions I ask my clients. What would happen if you lost it all tomorrow? How would you respond? What would you do first? Be as realistic as possible in these doomsday scenarios. See yourself rising from bed, getting dressed, and putting your life back together. This thought experiment is designed to reveal your resilience, which in turn should instill higher levels of risk tolerance.

Embrace your silly side. I already mentioned the power of skipping, as in skipping down the street, to lighten your mood and help with relaxation. It’s also a good way to get out of your comfort zone. Picture a judge skipping to the courtroom or a college president skipping across campus. Kind of unimaginable, right? Onlookers might even think they looked foolish. But what if that judge or president made it known that skipping was his or her way of destressing and that it was essential to the work they did? The action would probably then be perceived differently, as the action of an enlightened man or woman. Obviously there is a time and place for silliness—the judge wouldn’t skip while court was in session, nor would the president during a commencement speech. But in the right setting, embracing your silly side is an effective way to get outside of your comfort zone.

Be okay with “I don’t know.” Imagine you’re asked a question that you don’t know the answer to. Now imagine it’s a question you really should be able to answer and is being asked by someone you don’t want to look stupid in front of. In that situation, most people will do their best to feign knowledge in some way, or maybe they’ll try to deftly change the conversation so their ignorance isn’t exposed. Admitting they don’t know is too uncomfortable. But why? Is there anyone in the world who knows everything? Of course not. And even the most intelligent among us have huge gaps in their knowledge. Saying I don’t know is a great way to get outside of your comfort zone. And I think you’ll find that it leads to a lot more learning.