I have recently read an excellent book called <With Winning in Mind> by Lanny Bassham, who is a former multiple Olympic gold medal winner.
This is a book you shouldn't miss out if you're looking for a new perspective on personal growth or just personal development in general, because he comes at it from a sports psychology angle which is different for a lot of us.
One of the interesting things he says in the books is that 95% of all winning is accomplished by 5% of the participants. And skill alone will not make you a winner, because just under that top 5% are thousands of very highly skilled people who place high but fail to actually win.
That's true in any endeavor where there are a lot of people shooting for the top, but of course only the special few make it to the victorious victory lap. The question is what separates the winners?
The answer is how they think. Winners are convinced they're going to finish first, where everyone else just has this feeling of hope. There's a huge difference there in the conviction to win.
He went on to interview a lot of these people who had won gold medals and became the elite few among all those thousands of skilled people, and the 5% of those winners he talked to, they all agreed elite performance is literally 90%, at least, mental game. So 10% is that skill and the physical stuff, but 90% is what's going on in your mind.
It doesn't matter what you're doing, you don't have to be an athlete to be doing this. If you're trying to excel in business, at your job or in other areas of life, like your health and fitness or building a strong family, all this stuff comes down to how you process the world and your interactions with other people, mentally.
The question is what percentage of your time and money do you spend training the mental aspect of this?
Let's say you want to write a book. You know some particular topic really well but your mental game is off and you lack confidence. You don't understand where your feelings of inadequacy come in. You don't understand what trips you up or makes you feel fearful of writing this book.
As you go through the actual steps to write that book, these negative mental tapes are playing and the words you write down on the paper come across differently, even though you know the subject really.
You can do all the steps, the exact step-by-step process of what it takes to write a book. From writing the outline to expanding the chapters, to a full edit, to formatting it for Kindle or Amazon or whatever you want to do. But if your mental game is out of whack, the quality and substance of that book is going to be way off, versus someone who has a strong mental game.
How much time do you spend with self-analysis, looking for areas of opportunity to improve or where your mental game may be tripping you up?
Do you have a negative self-image, or do you have negative tapes playing that are preventing you from either taking actions or speaking your mind or doing things you need to be doing to be successful?
People often forget these tapes are playing, and so they can't even correct the problem anymore.
That's why I wanted to write about this today. This is a wakeup call for all of us to start investing way more of our time into mental training and examining how we think. Examining any negative thought patterns that are going to be blocking us even though we think we may be doing all the right steps but not getting the results we want.
What's going on beneath the surface? How are we tripping ourselves up at an invisible level, in deep-rooted thoughts that may not even be hitting us at a conscious level? Take some time today to get in touch with your inner most thoughts.
Maybe it means picking up a book like <With Winning in Mind> by Lanny Bassham? Or you can read another legendary book called <Psycho Cybernetics> by Maxwell Maltz, where he dives deep into this aspect of self-image and you can only grow to the level that you see yourself growing and see yourself performing.
So if you see yourself as just average or you don't see yourself as making it big, like some of the people you admire, then you never will and you need to work on adjusting that self-image. Start there and see if you can uncover any mental patterns that may be blocking you.
And by doing this, you're probably going to want to carve out even more time. So maybe you start with half an hour today, examining your mental game, and do that for a few days and within a week you bump that up to an hour because you're starting to see some positive benefits. It will be a stunning experience for you.
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