Values and Goals
There is a nuanced difference between motivation (your engine) and values (your credo). The engine is what motivates you; the credo is what you care about at your core. For example, someone who grew up financially insecure may be motivated by money and value security. People who value ambition will be motivated by success and its trappings. Competitiveness as a value is correlated with winning as a motivator. When Eric first starts working with clients, he asks them to think about their credo, which requires thought and reflection and is often an enlightening experience. This process can entail looking at motivators, which are usually more obvious, and examining the connection between motivators and values.
Optimal performance happens when motivators and values are aligned: the things that drive you are based on your core values. This isn’t always the case; sometimes we discover that the things that drive us are misaligned with our values. Maybe we crave that new car or promotion because of external factors rather than internal ones. When such misalignment occurs, people often end up rethinking their engine.
Hard things and adversity are part of life, regardless of your life stage, profession, family status, or anything else. Stuff happens. It will happen again. The best performers don’t have a secret way of avoiding these things, nor are they somehow wired from birth to keep it cool. Rather, they learn what their default response is, then work to improve on it.
Mindset
Let’s say you are a skier. You love nothing more than cruising down snowy hills, carving turns and feeling the cold wind on your face. In your closet you have all the gear: skis, poles, winter clothes, and a big clunky pair of ski boots. Now, let’s say a friend of yours invites you to go play basketball. Would you show up wearing those ski boots? Of course not! Ski boots are completely wrong for playing basketball (or anything besides skiing).
Get it? The sport is your role, the gear is your mindset. To be excellent in each one of your roles, you need to choose different mindsets for those roles and deliberately transition between them when you transition between roles. You need to kick off the ski boots and throw on the sneakers.
Retired Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell tells a great story of mindset shift. One day he walked into the office of one of his instructors. As Marcus tells it, “This guy was the meanest instructor I ever had the pleasure of meeting. The toughest, fastest, strongest; boy could he yell at you.” That day, when Marcus walked into the office, the mean tough guy was cooing into the phone, saying, “Now sweetheart, I’ll read you the story when I get home, I promise. I love you.”
When he saw Marcus, he instantly switched mindsets. “He always had these sunglasses on,” Marcus recalls. “When he saw me, he hung up the phone, nodded his head so that the sunglasses dropped perfectly into place, then proceeded to cuss me out like I had never been cussed out before!” Sometimes a transition routine can be as simple as donning a cool pair of shades.
Process
When people are struggling, not doing well at their jobs or other field of performance, there is a strong temptation to make a change. The right answer, though, is to not act, at least not immediately. Instead, create and consult an empirically based feedback loop. Collect information about the performance from your coaches and from yourself, but make sure it’s valid: quiet your emotions so you can look at things more objectively, listen only to coaches whom you have vetted (no baristas!). Examine your process and outcome: Before the sales call, how did you prepare? During the meeting, how did you cover things? What was the result? Once you have done this analysis, then you can start to think about what aspects of your process you may want to change.
If you decide to make a change, do so one step at a time. Blowing up everything and starting over might feel good, but it’s rarely the best tactic. Instead, isolate one or two components of your process, adjust them, and see what happens. If you are trying to make a chocolate cake and it doesn’t come out well, you don’t change the ingredients, baking temperature, and baking time. That’s just hoping things will get better. The smarter approach is to tweak one or two things, collect more data, then iterate again.
While you consider change, remember that the correct thing to do might be to not change anything. Hot streaks and slumps both come to an end, as performance naturally regresses toward a mean. Bad outcomes can come from good processes. Poor performers react to those bad outcomes; good ones don’t. Nathan Chen made a few mistakes during warm-ups before the 2022 Olympics men’s long program. The old Nathan might have made a change after those stumbles, altering his program or overconcentrating on those particular parts of the program during the competition. The new Nathan brushed them off and stayed consistent to his process. His attitude had completely transformed. The mistakes weren’t something to fret about or react to. He knew they were rare and was happy to have them out of the way.
Adversity Tolerance
To Dr. Joe Maroon, the neurosurgeon, stress and mindset are inextricably linked. “Stress is a good thing,” he says. “We need it. To be a better athlete you need to work your muscles physically. Stress does the same thing to your mindset. It conjures up your focus and intensity when you are working on something. There is good stress and there is distress. The best performers learn how to deal with distress so they can get back to the good-stress mode.”
Cliff diver David Colturi says something similar. When he stands atop his perch looking down at the water a hundred feet below him, he gets scared. “For elite performers the fear and stress is never absent. It’s going to be there, so how can I use it? I try to leverage it as a motivator. If I have anxiety about something, like giving an interview or a talk, that motivates me to prepare more and perform better. Fear helps me get better day in and day out.”
It’s not to say that stress is good. Sometimes it is triggered by challenging life events that we are better off not having to experience. But regardless of whether the stress stems from major issues, mundane ones, or something in between, it is a signal to our body and mind that something important is at hand. This in itself can be beneficial.
Don’t get rid of the nerves. Use them. Nerves are your body telling you, this matters. It’s important to have a bit of fear. It heightens senses, keeps you aware, and tells you it’s time to make something happen. When you’re on the battlefield, you don’t want to be a Gandhi. Is that really the best way to be when you’re in a fight?”