Whether you’re an athlete, entrepreneur, teacher, parent, manager, or - fill in the blank here -, what percentage of your game do you think is mental?
When Lanny Bassham, our Olympic gold-medal-winner, asks elite performers that question, they all say that elite performance is 90% mental.
90%!!!
Then he asks them what % of their training time and money they spend on their mental game.
The answer? Their answer is almost always very little-nothing or less than 10%.
As Lanny says: That makes no sense.
So, we need to be mentally tough. Got it. How?
Lanny tells us that one of the key variables to peak performance is fine-tuning our Self-Image. He tells us that how we behave will always be inline with how we see ourselves. Our Self-Image is what “makes you act like you.” If we have a poor Self-Image, we will never consistently perform better than that Self-Image.
The good news: We can Optimize our Self-Image.
And, Lanny tells us, we MUST Optimize our Self-Image if we want to reach elite levels of performance.
He tells us that our current Self-Image has been formed by countless (!) “imprints.” Therefore, if we want to change it, we need to bombard ourselves with a constant diet of positive imprints-removing the negative internal chit-chat and never talking about things we don’t want to see in our lives while affirming all the things we do want to see come to fruition in our lives.
We want to rehearse our optimal performances and, each time we perform at our best-from the rehearsed visualized moments to the most mundane real moments-we want to affirm “That’s like me!!!”
“That’s like me to nail that presentation.”
“That’s like me to meditate for another day in a row.”
“That’s like me to show up and crush a workout even when I didn’t feel like it.”
“That’s like me!!”
“That’s like me!!”
“That’s like me!!”
We aggregate and compound small win after small win as we carve our new Self-Image.
Adapted fromoptimize.me
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In the world as we know it today, we face shmiras einayim challenges at every turn. It's very easy to focus on moments where we do things and look at things that we shouldn't have. Those thoughts are only compounding our mis-steps and failures. The key to growth is to focus on our successes! Each time we do something positive or overcome a potential negative, pat yourself on the back and say: "That's like me!!".