Act Your Way to Right Thinking

You’ve got to put yourself in the game and fail enough times, but keep trying harder and doing the things that we’ve talked about on the Coaching Hour in order to succeed.

Remember: you can’t think your way to the right action. You’ve got to act your way to the right way of thinking. You can tell yourself it’s like you to hit that target until you’re blue in the face. But you can’t lie to yourself.

If you hit that target a thousand times, the funny thing is you don’t have to tell yourself that it’s like you to hit that target. You just say, “Get out of my way and watch this.”

The ability to compete is a neurocircuit; just like learning to mount the gun, talking, public speaking, sewing up a blood vein, painting a picture, or building a deck. The more you’ve done something, the more that circuit in your brain can preload and visualize what you’re about to do.

The more comfortable you are doing it and the more you stay in the present and the more your brain can anticipate what’s coming in the future without you worrying about it, the more it can correct everything that you’re about to do and let you slip deep in that zone.

It’s an amazing thing what experience will do for you. The paradox, though, is that most people get so upset when they don’t succeed that they become so judgmental that they never get any good from their experience. All they can remember is “I didn’t win.” They never learn about themselves or evolve as people. And they never evolve as competitors.

This is why we have so many people in the clay target sports that elevate themselves in skeet to AA and sporting clays to master. But they get to a certain point to where they can’t win and they just quit. It’s a five-to-seven-year dropout curve. Rather than looking at being there and competing and continuing to grow and looking at it as an opportunity to help themselves grow as a person learning from failure and moving on at whatever rate they can move, they just throw their hands up and quit. That’s a very unfortunate thing.

This is an excerpt from the November 2013 Coaching Hour podcast. You can listen to it and read a written transcript, along with more than 20 years of archived episodes with your Knowledge Vault membership.