How To Master Stressful Situations

Every boxing analyst is saying Conor McGregor doesn't stand a chance against Floyd Mayweather. And maybe they're right. But I have a different perspective because while I don't know much about boxing, I am a student of human psychology. And I have never seen anyone with a better mental game than Conor McGregor. He is insanely confident, which creates the optimal emotional state for dominating a fight. And a huge part of that confidence is how Conor uses the visualization to see his victories before they happen.

You know, I'm gonna crack him with a jab and he's gonna wobble and I'm gonna put him away early. It's gonna be a first round ko, mark my words. Saturday night when I go out there and put Diego away in the first round, I'll prove my worth. I can't believe I'm gonna say this, but he told Lorenzo and I the other day, I'll bet you $3 million I knock him out the second round.

So in this video we're going to explore just how Conor visualizes differently from most people and, and how this creates the highest percentage chance that he gets what he wants. Obviously his physical training is indispensable, but the motivation to train, the ability to psych an opponent out, and the calm nature he has in a fight all begin with the mental game, which is what you're going to learn to harness today. The first unique thing that Conor does is visualize the pre game. Now all fighters visualize to some extent, some visualize their hand getting raised, some the belt being wrapped around their waist. Some visualize the finishing moment knocking out their opponent. Conor does it differently.

Just listen now, I've already visualized what's ahead of me here. I've already visualized my hands getting wrapped and what might be walking out to the wains, walking out of the cage.

Winning a fight is a multi step process. You show up to the venue, you get your hands wrapped, you warm up, you walk out, you step into the cage, you get announced and, and then you fight. At any one of these moments, a fighter can get hit with a burst of nervousness or an adrenaline dump. It can literally cost them the fight. In some ways, it's no different from a job interview, a big meeting, or even a date. If you let your nerves get the best of you while you sit waiting for the other person to arrive, you're going to be too nervous when they finally do. Conor avoids this pitfall by visualizing everything from the start.

I visualize everything. I visualize this conversation, I visualize the walkout I visualize everything going on. I know I have shots picked out that I'm gonna throw in this fight in five weeks. You know, I have seen everything in my head, and now it's gonna happen. You see it in your head, you're gonna see it before your eyes. That's what I say.

So when he walks out to fight, the whole scenario is familiar. None of it feels new, which means none of it feels scary. Now, we aren't all cage fighters, but let's say you had a big job interview and you want to visualize to help you nail it. Instead of picturing yourself sitting in the interview and smiling or being at the end and signing an offer letter, picture every moment of the experience, from walking into the building feeling confident to answering specific questions that you know you'll get asked, all the way to leaving the office and smiling when you say goodbye. If you can make the entire process feel familiar, you'll be able to maintain your cool throughout. The second important thing Conor emphasizes is the details. Here he is, right after a reporter asks how he so accurately predicted how he would win his first ever UFC title.

I was asking you on Thursday about his right hand. Can I tell you what you told me? I said his right hand would get him into trouble. It's the shot I predicted. I said he'd overload on his right hand. I said I'd slip. I said I'd bang the left hook. Left hook. And that's what happened.

Now, notice how he didn't just say, ah, I saw myself winning this fight, but talks about seeing specific sequences in his mind.

How do you do that? How do you connect these? If you can see it here and you have the courage enough to speak, will happen. So I see these shots, I see these sequences, and I don't shy away from them.

We can all use this strategy from almost anything. Whether it's an important sales call, a negotiation, or just a first date. You can go through and imagine potential twists that the event could take and imagine what your perfect response would be when it happens. In reality, it may go one of any different way, but by imagining yourself handling it perfectly in different variations, you prepare yourself to rock it. No matter how it plays out, Connor also creates physical manifestations of what his vision is, as if it's already happened. Now, there's nothing new about having a vision board. But while it might feel good to look at your wall and see images of a big stack of cash or a beautiful stock image of your dream guy or girl, Conor takes it a step further and does something really unique. For instance, after winning his fight against Dustin Poirier, which was only his fourth fight in the ufc, Conor went backstage, borrowed someone else's UFC belt, wrapped it over his shoulder and took a photo with it. Why? Because he looked at that photo every single day until it became his reality. He did it again before his fight with Nciber, this time with two belts. This was six months before he'd even had his first title shot. And in November 2016, he made it a reality, making the first person to hold two division championships at the same time in the ufc. And now he's done it with Floyd Mayweather, this time with a mural in his gym. In this next clip, you can see he even melds his sparring practice with visualization.

No stone has been left unturned from, like you said, from nutrition, from the cardio side, from the rounds, from the rule set, from the canvas of the ring, from the size, the tension in the ropes.

He's using a ring that's specifically designed to replicate the one he'll use on fight night. This makes sure his practice simulates his future reality as closely as possible. There's a famous quote I love. Everything is created twice, first in the mind and then in reality. Whether it's a phenomenal artist, athlete, or entrepreneur, they envision their greatest achievements in their mind first and then they make it happen. That's why great businessmen are often called visionaries, because their gift is to imagine something and then make their vision a reality. Maybe, as Connor says, his visualizations shape reality. Or perhaps they simply give him the unshakable confidence needed to succeed at a world class level. Either way, he would not be where he is without them.

Did you have faith maybe back then, that your time would come and that you would be able to explode onto the scene as you had? If I didn't, it wouldn't have happened.

Now that said, what makes Conor so special is that he dreams of achieving things that no one has ever achieved. And at the same time, he grounds his visualizations in reality. Look at the lead up to his first fight against Chad Mendez. Chad is a two time all American wrestler. He had taken down all, all of his previous opponents. Listen to this interview from Conor before their fight.

What you gonna do? You can't, you can't even pass guard. You're a white belt on the mat. Well, you get me down, you hold me down, I'll butcher you from the bottom. I'll get back up and I'll butcher you on the feet.

Conor doesn't Say you won't take me down. He says, I'll butcher you from the bottom. Look at Conor's reaction at the end of the first round. After Chad has successfully taken him down, he and landed some brutal elbows. He gets up smiling because he knew he'd be there and survive it. He's happy because the fight is playing out exactly like he visualized it. That may be one of Conor's greatest secrets. Behind all the grand visions and the big boasts, he's an avid student of reality. He looks at past success to model. He watches Bruce lee, Muhammad Ali, R.A. roy Jones Jr. The list goes on. Even his own losses.

I just broke it down into small pieces. Analyzed the fight. Good left hand. Conor's busting Nate up.

Yes, he's watching to see his mistakes, but he's also watching for individual moments of success that he can model in their rematch.

Gained confidence from what I was looking at and how I felt and understanding where I was then to where I am now, and that was it.

And then he will watch that moment, hold it in his mind, replay it over and over and use it as inspiration for how he visualizes the rematch going. That's why while every boxing analyst is saying that Conor's only chance of beating Floyd is to bullrush him, I would guarantee that Conor isn't listening. Why? Because they haven't beaten Floyd in a boxing match. Instead, I'd bet every cent I have that Conor is watching hours of Floyd's fights, just looking for even the briefest moment where he's been hurt or in trouble. And then he will picture himself doing that same thing, exploiting that same pattern over and over until he feels like he's done it a hundred times. Now, one question I've always had with visualization when I'm trying to do it myself is when should I do it? Do you do it right when you wake up? Right before you sleep? Here's Conor's answer. Can you put yourself in the mindset of the guy who's waiting in line with other people?

Always I'm.

You remember what that guy was thinking?

Were you daydreaming of this?

Was that even possible?

Every second of every day I was daydreaming. People are talking to me. And in my head I'm. I'm counting something. I'm counting up a number or I'm. Or I'm knee deep in a sequence. On the mat or in. On the feet. That's my life. Sequences and numbers, nothing else.

Every time he zones out, he's thinking about himself. Fighting. Just listen to how he emphasizes the word frequently. Does it feel the way you thought it would?

Yeah, it does. It feels beautiful. I dreamt this so much, so clearly, so precisely and so frequently that it has manifested itself into reality.

This may sound exhausting until you realize that we all do this anyway. We visualize it all the time. Most people just visualize the bad. So you try to push someone to ask for a promotion and they immediately picture getting shot down. Or you tell them to approach the beautiful person at the bar and they instantly imagine it going poorly and then they freeze up. The only difference is Conor has spent hundreds of hours purposefully visualizing the positive, while most people are unthinkingly visualizing the negative. Check out this clip where an interviewer presses him to imagine what it would be like to lose.

What happens if you do lose to Jose Aldo? That is not in the equation. That does not process in my brain for one second.

It's the reaction most people would give if you asked them, what would you do with a billion dollars? They'd pause for a while and then you get an answer like, buy a boat, get a Ferrari. Things that any millionaire could do. A billion dollars is so much money. It's so outside the their perception of reality, they can't really fathom it. That's how Conor feels about losing a fight.

Can you not allow yourself then, as a fighter to go into that? I could try, but it wouldn't happen. It wouldn't even happen. I couldn't even try and feel that if I tried me best, it's not gonna happen.

So how do you build the habit of visualizing without it taking over your life and ruining your ability to be present? Well, the best solution I found for my life is to visualize while I'm doing mindless tasks. For instance, most people zone out in the shower, brushing their teeth, commuting to work. We can use that time to get hours of extra reps every single day. So when the day finally comes to perform interview, sell, whatever it might be, we'll be leagues ahead of the competition. Okay. The last thing I'm going to touch on is going to be a little controversial. I thought about cutting it, but it's so clearly an important part of Conor's belief system that. That I felt it wouldn't be right to exclude it. And that is don't just think it, speak it.

A lot of times people believe in certain things, but they keep to themselves. They don't put it out there. If you truly believe in it, if you become vocal with it, you are creating that law of attraction and it will become reality.

This is probably the most dangerous part of Conor's reality creating process. Because. Because studies have shown that when you say a future plan out loud to someone, you're actually less likely to go out and take action on it. Why? Because just the act of sharing a goal with a friend can let you start to feel the pleasure of achieving it without actually having to put the hard work in to achieve it. So you give yourself what psychologists call a premature sense of completeness and it saps your motivation. You don't actually want to go out and do the hard work, but because your brain has already given you the good feelings. That's why so many people say they're going to lose weight or leave their crappy partner or quit the job they hate, but they never do. So how do we marry this? With Conor's emphasis on speaking, it's by not visualizing with a sense of satisfaction. Conor visualizes with a hunger. Instead of letting himself get the dopamine hit as if it were reality, he visualizes it and then he thinks about how badly he wants it and he lets it light a fire under him.

I feed off this, I feed off this. I love this stuff. This is what gives me energy. Saying I'm gonna do something, putting it out there for the world to see and then going out and doing it. There's no better feeling in the world than that.

It's clear that Conor lets his boasts about the future fuel him. Listen to his tone here.

The gold belt is what I want. The two gold belts. I was a two weight world champion in the previous organization. Now I'm on the big stage at the ufc. I want that featherweight belt and I want that lightweight belt. That's my goal.

There's almost no joy in his voice. If anything, there's an edge to it. Now contrast that with this next clip.

Always visualize what given would feel like. Given to people who have given to me what that would feel like. I always dreamed I've just shown up one day and be like, here. And that would always give me, like, good feelings.

I've watched every Conor interview I could find and I have never heard him talk about having a dream of giving like that until after he made it a reality. Now, I don't know if Conor knows this consciously or not, but he has a very distinct separation between what he visualizes and speaks of and what he visualizes but keeps to himself. Giving to your family like that, that's the kind of spoken goal that would let him feel that dopamine hit right away. And so for that goal, he kept it to himself. Now compare that to all the other times he's spoken of his visualizations before they've come to pass. They all had a hunger. Speaking those goals out loud clearly made him feel like he had something to prove. This interview is the perfect example of it. Notice how he starts to feel good and allows himself to go there just for a moment.

December 12th in the evening, when we're all leaving the arena and we're coming to see you at the press conference, what are we going to be saying and what are you going to be saying? You know what you're going to be seeing? Something. Something nice, something nice material.

He allows himself to have that happy fantasy for about 10 seconds. Then watch as his tone shifts right back to Hungary.

You're going to see the belt right there in the stage. You're gonna see a banged up Brazilian. Hopefully we see that. Could be, could be somebody else, but you'll see me there with a gold belt, a brand new custom made suit and a smile on my face.

Now it's important to say visualization isn't the only thing that matters. You and I can't visualize our way into koing. One of the greatest boxers of all time, Conor, works his ass off. And he says so himself.

Number one is the hard work pays off. And number two is that dreams come true. And that's what's happening. It's a beautiful feeling when preparation meets opportunity. You know, nothing is impossible.

Conor McGregor shouldn't even be fighting Floyd Mayweather. He's an MMA fighter. But for years he kept it in his mind, visualizing it over and over again until he knew it was going to happen. And honestly, as after watching him for hours to make this video, he's got me sold. I'm convinced that for Conor McGregor, nothing is impossible. For years he's been making predictions based on what he sees in his mind and he's almost always right. So when he does win and he mentions in his post fight interview how it played out exactly as he saw it in his mind, I hope you'll remember this video. Also fun announcement. Charlie's been working these last few days on a new Game of Thrones breakdown and he'll be releasing that on Monday.