They have confirmed my belief that the ideas people choose to have about themselves largely determine the quality of the lives they lead. We can choose to believe in ourselves, and thus to strive, to risk, to preserve, and to achieve. Or we can choose to cling to security and mediocrity. We can choose to set no limits on ourselves, to set high goals and dream big dreams. We can use those dreams to fuel our spirits with passion. Or we can become philosophers of the worst kind, inventing ways to rationalize our failures, inventing excuses for mediocrity.
You’re an adult now, and you get to decide. So what’s the decision going to be? You get to write your life story. Will you be heroic or just someone trying to get by? Will you be the star or someone sitting on the end of the bench?
Lebron made only 29% of his 3-point attempts in his rookie season. “Right now, when I get into the playoffs, other teams know that I can’t make the 3, so they won’t even guard me. They just look at me and talk trash to me and say, “Go ahead and take it. We know you can’t make it and you know you can’t make it.”
I’ve worked with enough athletes to know that the godlike images we’re fed by the media can often disguise reality. Superstars have doubts and fears just like the rest of us.
In almost any sport involving motor skills, an athlete gets the best results when he doesn’t think. Once an athlete has learned a skill he needs to trust that skill, focus on the target, and let the shot go without thinking about how to do it or being concerned about the result. In slightly more scientific terms, the subconscious areas of our minds do the best job of controlling motor skills. When the conscious brain gets involved, our bodies tend to become awkward. Doubt has a way of turning on that conscious brain, which is why confident shooters are better than shooters who lack confidence. A great deal of my work with athletes revolves around teaching them how to keep the conscious mind inactive or quiet when they’re performing.
I thought he could benefit from one of the standard methods of sports psychology, visualization. I wanted him to see himself making 3-point shoots. I suggested that he ask the Cavaliers’ staff to make a highlight video for him, about 8-12m long. This video would be a LBJ long-range shooting montage. It would have LeBron making 3s off the dribble. It would show LeBron catching the ball and making 3s spotting up. It could have some of LeBron’s favorite music in the background, helping him to attach the good feelings associated with that music to the act of shootings 3s. He would watch it every night. As he fell asleep, he could conjure up images of himself making 3-point shots against tall, quick, tenacious defenders. He could let them fill his dreams.
It would feed the right sorts of images to his subconscious, helping him become a more trusting, confident shooter.
Derrick, like LeBron and Pat Bradley, has the champion’s first requirement — the attitude he’s chosen, the way he’s decided to see himself.
But there are many people with physical talent, just as there are many people with raw intelligence. I would venture that most people are talented in something, whether they realize it or not. What sets merely talented people apart exceptional people can’t be measured by vertical leap, or time for the 40y dash, or length off the tee, or IQ. It’s something internal. Great performers share a way of thinking, a set of attitudes and attributes like optimism, confidence, persistence, and strong will. They all want to push themselves to see how great they can become. These attributes and attitudes cause champions to work harder and smarter than other people was they prepare for competition. They help them stay focused under pressure and to produce their best performances when the stakes are highest.
On every shot I played this week, I had my mind where it needed to be. I was in the present, focused on that shot. I had a clear picture in my mind of what I wanted each ball to do. I know now I can quiet my mind and emotions and let my body do what it knows how to do under major tournament pressure.
The opposite of this sort of situational optimism is an attitude of fear, concern, and doubt. In a word, pessimism. Pessimism tends to rouse the conscious brain and get it engaged. Our minds are programmed to work that way. In certain kinds of difficult situations, it helps to think things out calmly and rationally. The conscious mind is good for higher-level thinking, but the conscious mind isn’t good for shooting or putting.
Smile a little bit before each putt. Frowning is something your body does automatically when you’ve engaged your conscious mind to concentrate on a problem.
He would get into bed at night after a tournament round and replay every shot in his imagination. But when his replay came to a shot he hadn’t played well, he edited it. He erased the memory of the poor shot and instead visualized himself playing the shot correctly. And Sam would awake the next day feeling refreshed and optimistic.
I told the players to relax, close their eyes, and focus on my voice. I then described scenarios for the upcoming game. In some of them, I described Virginia hitting the floor hot and commanding the game. In others, I described Virginia staying cool under pressure and winning a close one at the buzzer. In one, I described Virginia falling behind early, staying cool, and catching up. All of these scenarios, though, ended in triumph. They were all intended to help the team feel optimistic and confident.
Normally, in that business, only 1 in 25 sales calls results in a sale. That’s pretty daunting, and it’s the reason so many new financial consultants wash out of the business within a few years. Whatever optimism they had can’t withstand the pain of so many rejections. Bob chose to see things differently. Every time a prospect told him no, he said to himself, “Good. I’m that much closer to the 1 person in 25 who’ll say yes.”
Misfortune happens to everyone. Champions just refuse to let it push them into doubtful, fearful thinking. If they miss a fairway, they think about how good they will feel if they make birdie from the woods. If they miss a green, they think about how much they enjoy showing off their chipping, pitching, and bunker play. If they have a bad round, they decide the odds will be in their favor the next time.
People tend to become what they think about themselves. We are each the biggest influence on our destiny. More importantly, we each have the power to construct our own self-image and that the self-image we construct will very likely determine what we become in life.
That’s because a good portion of the trait we call confidence resides in the subconscious parts of the brain. Our subconscious is very susceptible to suggestion. That’s why advertising can be so effective. Your subconscious monitors all the thoughts you have about yourself, and it does so uncritically. If your conscious mind thinks, “I’m a very good salesman because people like me,” your subconscious doesn’t evaluate, deconstruct, or analyze. It simply records. It accommodates the input you’ve provided.
You can think of your self-image as an archive of all the thoughts you have ever had about yourself. However, all thoughts are not equally important. Recent thoughts are more influential than thoughts that occurred further in the past. Thoughts associated with powerful emotions are more memorable, and thus more influential, than thoughts to which you attached no emotion.
Jack sincerely believed what he said. Jack has that sort of mind. He forgets mistakes. He remembers good shots. He refused to feed his subconscious mind with a lot of thoughts about mistakes. He understood that there’s absolutely no reason to relive and remember a missed putt.
That’s a champion’s mind. A champion understands that it’s fine to savor an experience when it’s positive, to remember it, to celebrate it. When an experience is negative, he understands that he can’t let himself get stuck in it. He can see no benefit from ingraining a bad experience by reliving it.
The champion doesn’t care about keeping an accurate record in his own mind. He thinks and remembers in ways that will help him achieve and maintain a confident self-image.
This ability is counterintuitive for a lot of people. We’re taught in school to revisit and think about our mistakes. Our correct answers are passed over and taken for granted; the teacher put a big, red X next to mistakes. I know many golfers who instantly forget all the good shots they hit. To them, good shots are supposed to happen, and there’s nothing remarkable about them.
Rory McIlroy is a personable, modest young man at the dinner table and in the locker room. But he’s learned not to feel that way in tournament competitions. “I just try and have a bit of an attitude, you know? I needed to be a little more cocky, a little more arrogant on the golf course — but just on the golf course.”
Most of them were far and away the best junior golfers in their clubs or their hometowns. In college, they were generally the top players on their teams. Every time they went to practice, their confidence was reinforced because they hit the ball longer and straighter than anyone else on the practice tee. But then they turn pro, and they make it to the PGA Tour. They realize that everyone they see on the practice tee hits it long and straight. It’s a shock to a lot of players, and their confidence can falter.
It’s apparent that the player never learned to develop confidence within himself. He was dependent on his coaches in high school and college to do it for him. His coaches believed in him. His coaches praised him. The player’s subconscious mind internalized all that reinforcement, and he was confident. In the pros, it became evident that the coach believed in other players more. So the player’s confidence in himself evaporated.
They think they’re good at math and science, so they are. Their confidence reinforces the virtues of working hard and getting better, which leads to people telling them how gifted they are, which leads to more confidence.
It’s a 2-pronged approach. Work on needed skills. Work on confidence. But don’t make a confident self-image dependent on perfecting skills.
Speaking of fear, it’s important to visualize not just immediate success but adversity and setbacks. I always had the players visualize falling behind and needing to catch up. What’s important is not avoiding adversity, but how an individual responds to it. You have to develop a mental hardiness that responds to setbacks with energy and confidence.
He told me he had listened to a tape made by a friend for months prior to the tournament, particularly on his flight to the US. The tape was a fictional broadcast by a reporter describing how Save won the tournament. He listened to it, closed his eyes, and visualized it. He did it over and over. His subconscious believed in it. He told me he got to the golf course Thursday already sure he would win the Masters.
In her private life, she said, she is fairly shy and introverted. She likes staying home and reading or watching a movie. But on the night of a show, she transforms herself. An hour and a half before the show begins, she turns into a diva. She feels like she owns the world. She wants everyone around her to treat her like a diva. Only by feeling that way can she put on the sort of show her fans have paid to see.
Great jazz musicians ad-lib. Louis Armstrong just started making up nonsense words if he had to, but he kept on singing, and people loved him. So if you start forgetting words, put a big, cocky smile on your face and make up nonsense. No one will know the difference.
If they’re golfer, I sometimes suggest to them that they imagine that God appeared to them and said, “You’re going to have a great career. You’re going to win dozens of tournaments. You’re going to win several major championships. Don’t worry about it. You just keep working hard on your game. I’ve taken care of the results.”
I learned early in my career that no one can weigh or measure talent.
Greb adapted it to “keep on swinging, don’t stop swinging, you’re going to be a star someday.” He played that song in his mind for hour after hour of practice. He sang it under his breath over a decade in which he averaged about 500 practice shots a day.
You have to be a legend in your own mind before you can be a legend in your own time.
He talked about his attitude. He said he’d learned to be more patient, to be indifferent to what his competitors were doing, to zero in on a small target, and let his swing happen. He didn’t fall into the trap of thinking much about where he stood in the tournament and trying to force things.
He went home and stayed in bed for 3 days, brooding over the feeling that he hadn’t bene giving tennis his best effort. He wondered if he wanted to make the commitment necessary to see if he could be great. Was he willing to put in the time and the effort and be singleminded in that quest? He decided that he was.
And for the next 8 years or so, Pete honored that commitment. He was in his early 20s, making lots of money, traveling to glamorous places to play. But as he recalled it, he lived almost monastically in that period. His life revolved around training and competing. During tennis’s brief off-season, he didn’t take a break.
But you have to love the entirety of what you’re doing, not just the occasional glory and rewards.
If you’re going to play the Tour, you have to love golf all the time. It’s not going to work if you can only love it when everything’s going your way, every putt’s going in the hole, and every carom is bouncing into the fairway instead of OBs. It’s not going to work if you practice every day and only love it when the ball is going where you’re looking. You’ve got to love it when you practice day after day after day and you can’t find it. You’ve got to love it when every putt looks like it’s going in and then lips out. That’s what it’s about.
Skeptics might dismiss learning to love something as delusional. Skeptics, though, don’t understand either the power or the malleability of the subconscious. You can learn to love something if you make an effort to focus on the aspects of that activity that please you, thinking over and over again about how much you enjoy them.
An exceptional person would see the same rain and go out to practice, relishing the opportunity to improve his ability to cope with wet grips and squishy ground underfoot. He’d see it as a chance to get a practice advantage over rivals who would take the day off.
The drinks make it harder to engage the conscious brain to govern behavior.
The cue for this procrastination might be the feeling of anxiety or insecurity that often accompanies the prospect of doing challenging work. Your subconscious is not so good at reasoning that the short-term gain from procrastination is not worth the long-term pain from failing to do your work on time and well.
It’s important to keep your goals in mind as much as you can. Most New Year’s resolutions fall by the wayside when people lose sight of their goals. The conscious brain is engaged when we think about goals. The subconscious takes over when we stop thinking about them.
It means that you never give up. You never give in to doubt, fear, or fatigue. Giving up is the only true loss.
They had better love 1-putting more than they hate 3-putting. I want them to envision every putt they try going in the hole, no matter how long or slippery the putt is.
In sports or in business, if you’re not aspiring to dominate, to be the very best, you’re coasting. ***
Most of the drivers wanted to win. Or I should say they would have liked to win. But they also didn’t want to finish last, didn’t want to blow a tire and wreck the car, didn’t want to look really bad. I didn’t care about any of that stuff. I just wanted to get to that finish line first. And I dominated. One of the reasons I found it easy to win out there is that very few people have that laser beam, that single-minded purpose.
Having a parent who is driven to be exceptionally successful can be rough on the children. Unlike the spouse, the kids didn’t choose to be in a family with someone who’s driven to succeed.
I’ve seen enough Korean golfers to know that in Korea, a competitive golfer who practiced 3 hours a day would likely be considered a slacker.
These people had “learned” that when something bad happened to them, there was nothing they could do to recover. “I flunked my math test. I’m stupid and I’ll never get it. I might as well drop out.”
As I worked with athletes and other people striving to be exceptional, I found that no matter what happened to them, no matter what setbacks occurred in their lives, they found causes to keep trying. They always sought and discovered a reason to believe in themselves.
A lot of players on this losing team might decide, whether they’d admit it or not, that there was no hope. They’d conclude from the evidence of the first 11 games that they were no good — not big enough, not fast enough, not talented enough. They would have, in Seligman’s terms, learned helplessness.
And when their games are right, players with learned effectiveness tend to take better advantage. They’ve learned to love their great days more than they hate their bad days and to hold on to them in their memories longer. They live for their great putts, their great shots, their great rounds, and their wins. They build on their successes. In contrast, players who don’t have the attributes of learned effectiveness tend to play not to lose badly. They worry about having a bad run, a bad year, and losing their cards.
But there’s no cure for nerves.
Every one of the golfers I’ve counseled who have won major championships has been nervous during the final holes of these tournaments. But they’ve learned to perform well despite nerves and the physical symptoms that accompany them — trembling, wet hands, rapid heartbeat, a sinking feeling in the gut, and sometimes even a feeling that breathing is difficult.
These physical symptoms of nerves are the products of inevitable chemical changes that occur inside the body during moments of high stress, changes like a shot of adrenaline. They’re outside our conscious control. So it’s a waste of time trying to avoid them.
What if I told you that on the night before a race I am scared to death that I’m going to get in the car and totally forget how to drive a race car?
Their financial future was heavily dependent on the success of a new album they had yet to make, their first with Warner Bros Records. With millions of dollars on the line, John sat down to write — and couldn’t. He was too nervous. He was blocked.
A good preshot routine is both mental and physical. The player clears his mind and forgets about his last shot and all previous and future shots. There is only the shot to be played. There is only the present moment. He doesn’t think about the consequences of the shot or about the way it will affect the results of the tournament.
Nervousness prods the conscious brain to keep control of the proceedings because of fear. The performer is afraid that he’ll mishit a shot and humiliate himself on TV or miss the cut. If he succumbs to nervousness, he’ll let his conscious brain have control. The performer needs to learn to see nerves as a friend that will help him perform at a high level. Great performers train themselves to have quieter minds as their bodies get excited because they in fact do see nerves as a friend.
We understood that the cure was not to think, “Don’t think about your stroke,” as he started to putt. The subconscious often doesn’t understand the word “don’t.”
I’ve spoken of surgeons who listen to music and chat about many things while they operate. It helps them let go of their fears about the consequences if the surgery doesn’t work. My dad, working as a barber, liked to chat with his customers about whatever interested them.
Most of the consultants, particularly the young ones, have issues with nervousness. These issues can get worse when they are about to try to sell to a prospective client whose wealth is an order of magnitude larger than that of the clients they are accustomed to dealing with.
Every shot needed to have the same level of importance. Holzman believed that part of his job as a coach was ensuring that the players never got too high or too low emotionally. He didn’t want the team overjoyed after victories or distraught after losses.
His voice grew even sterner. “I have not mentioned winning or losing once all year. I would rather lose the game and have you guys play hard at both ends for 40m than win and have you guys tart celebrating with 8m to go. For 32m, you guys played fantastic basketball. You did everything we’ve been practicing. And then you just totally lost focus. 32m isn’t good enough at Kentucky.”
Champions rarely let themselves be influenced much by outside evaluations. They set their own standards, and their standards have much more to do with the process than the outcome.
He decided that when he played competitive golf, he would keep score not by how many strokes he took but by how well he followed his preshot process, mentally and physically, before every shot.
Exceptional people are most always very good at monitoring and evaluating their adherence to a good process and catching themselves when they slip slightly. Average people let themselves get a lot further off track before they catch themselves.
Exceptional people often keep separate lists of practice goals and performance process goals, either on paper or mentally. Practice goals might be things like practicing with scoring clubs for at least an hour a day. Performance process goals involve things like staying in the present moment, accepting whatever happens as it happens, underrating to everything, being unflappable, and totally trusting in your skills during competition.
He always said you have to be willing to go through the fire. He was alluding to what happens when you take a piece of metal ore from the ground. In that state, it’s loaded with impurities. You put it in a fire. In the fire, its impurities are burned away, and the metal becomes stronger and harder.
It’s a given that any player on the PGA Tour is capable of making a birdie on any hole he plays. That means that on most of the holes, most of the players do not play to their capabilities. They fail.
Even at their peaks, the very best players in the world won les than half the tournaments they entered. The good players are satisfied if they win 2 or 3 times a year, or perhaps 10%. And for the journeymen, just making it to the weekend feels satisfying. There are a lot of weeks when journeymen miss the cut, win no money, and leave town Friday afternoon, the taste of failure fresh in their mouths.
How easy it is to have a good attitude when you’re playing well. You remember all your great shots. People compliment you. Your head is filled with beautiful images. But when you’re not playing well, your memories are of missed putts and bad shots. People ask you what’s wrong with your game. It’s easy to become distracted and frustrated.
Sam could not shake the memory of those missed putts, and years later, he blamed those memories for the yips that came into his putting stroke.
That’s one way exceptional people deal with failure. They refuse to remember it.
On the golf course, it’s best to treat failure as an accident.
Dean Smith disabused him of that notion. He told Michael that if he wanted to become the player he could be, he ought to give himself no more than 10 or 20 minutes to reflect on a bad performance. That would be enough to learn everything that could be learned from it. After that, he advised Michael, he ought to think about playing great basketball in the next game — or do something else and not think about basketball at all. “If all you do is keep reliving your mistakes, you’re going to destroy yourself.”
It’s important to understand the difference between diligence and perfectionism and to stay on the diligent side of the line.
For the perfectionist, nothing is ever good enough and every performance is a failure. I saw perfectionists become depressed because they felt they always failed. I saw them give up sports they were good at rather than endure their self-inflicted castigation.
Good practice is usually harder than the competition it prepares you for.
In sport, I find that exceptional people tend to have the same attitude toward the competition. They pay attention to it during their preparation, but they try to ignore it during their performance.
I told myself I was going to go out there and play some good golf and not pay any attention to the other players or Stacy and what they were shooting. If someone plays better than me, then so be it. I can’t control what they shoot. But I can control my game and my concentration.
If a Tour player has a wedge in his hands, he should be able to aim at virtually any pin; if he can’t be that accurate with a wedge, he won’t be a Tour player very long. With a long iron or a fairway metal, it’s a different story.
Elite pros often avoid making shots with particular clubs they don’t trust. They understand that the object of the game is to shoot the lowest score, not show off their ability to hit every shot with every club. That’s one reason they’re elite.
That coach also taught me something about the way exceptional people deal with coaches, mentors, and all the other authority figures they encounter in their lives. When they find someone who believes in them and their ability, they latch on to that person.
I’m unbelievably fragile right now. My whole game has become how well I’m driving it. I’ve started feeling like I can’t even play if I don’t start driving it better. I’m trying a different swing thought with every tee shot. I feel like I’m hearing a million different things from my swing coach and other people.
Don’t think you know what’s realistic for you and this team. Go out there and create your own reality. Being what most people think is realistic is only a way of justifying negative thinking. Go for something great. Do not settle for good, for almost, or for “we came close.”
All winners and losers in life are completely self-determined. But only the winners are willing to admit it.
I’m sorry. In America, no one is stuck in a job. They choose to remain in that job.
There’s no trophy for the player who worked the hardest; the trophy goes to the player who used the fewest strokes, regardless of how he made that happen.