PNTV: The Champion's Mind by Jim Afremow (#282)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got another great book, the Champion's Mind by Jim Afremo. The Champion's Mind Subtitle How Great Athletes Think, Train and Thrive Great book. Jim Afromo is one of the world's leading sports psychologists. He works with elite performers and athletes in basically every sport you can imagine. A lot of our members recommended this book. I finally read it, thrilled that I did. Packed with big ideas. I've got a handful of my favorite here. Five of them I'm excited to take a quick look at. Let's start with number one, Vision plus Daily. So Jim talks about his favorite vision of what a champion looks like. And he describes the experience of the head coach of the University of North Carolina's soccer team who one day was driving to work early and drove past a deserted field and saw one of his athletes playing there, practicing by herself. Kept on driving and then later that day, he put a note into her locker saying something along the lines of, a champion is the one who's bent over exhausted, pouring sweat while no one else is looking. They're putting in the effort when no one else is there to pay attention to whether or not they're doing it. That athlete that he watched practicing while he drove by, Mia Hamm, who went on to be one of the greatest soccer players ever. Extraordinary athlete, a true champion. And he makes the point that you need to have a vision, a dream that's big enough to inspire you to do that, to be bent over, sweating, exhausted, when no one's looking, putting in the extra efforts that you can be a true champion. So it begs the question, what inspires you that much? We talk about the motivation equation, right? So scientists agree with this, and I'm going to keep on repeating this equation until it's tattooed on your brain science. Pierce Steele, who wrote the procrastination equation, which is basically low motivation, won the equivalent of the psychology Nobel Prize for his research meta analysis of hundreds of research papers on motivation. He came up with this equation. Motivation equals expectancy times value over impulsivity times the way now you need to have, if you want to have a high level of motivation where you're going to show up and put in that type of effort over a sustained period of time. Championship motivation. You need to value a goal. You need to be super, super fired up. Intense desire about something that you expect, you believe you can achieve. So what do you want and what do you really want? Not kind of sorta, but what do you really want. You may not even tell anyone else you really want. If you knew you could not fail, what would you do? That's the type of intense burning desire that gets you out practicing on a field before your coach is even driving into work. Now, of course, you almost certainly will need to line that up and set up your dominoes so you don't overwhelm yourself. What's your next domino you're going to knock over and then show up daily. You've got your vision, right, of what you want to achieve. And then what do you do today and tomorrow and the day after tomorrow? Again and again and again and again and again. Repeat. That's the basic idea of vision plus daily. But think about that. What truly fires you up? Second big idea is a fun one. Ugly but effective. UBE plus good bad days Champions know how to play ugly and still be effective. They know how to have good bad days. U B E G B D Right. Too often in kind of the sub elite performers, when they're not playing well, they crumble. The truly great champion performers know they're not going to perform perfectly. So when something doesn't go the way they want it to go, they're able to recover quickly. One of the ideas I talk about in the note that I'm not going to talk about in depth here is the idea of what mental toughness really is. Mental toughness isn't gritting your teeth and saying to yourself, be tough. It's being able. Jim tells us it's being able to respond to adversity quickly, to jump back in, to play ugly effectively, to have good bad days when you just don't have it. You can play what Rory McIlroy calls scrappy golf. Jack Nicklaus talks about the fact that the best play poorly well. So you need to see when you get a little wobbly during your day, going through your life, how do you show up? How do you respond? Does the whole thing fall apart or do you pull it together and have a good bad day? Ugly but effective. It's a really, really important thing. I talked about it in confidence 101. We're going to keep on coming back to it. And I should say the whole point here and why I love sports books is the fact that sports are just a perfect metaphor for life. And Jim makes the point that we may not be. Very few of us are Olympians and professional athletes, right? But we can all be champions. We can all show up and be peak performers in our own lives. And I looked up the root of the word champion. I always like to look at the etymology of words, right? The word champion, do you know where it comes from? I didn't until a few hours ago. It comes from medieval Latin for the word that means fighter. And a champion is a fighter who wins what Socrates describes as the greatest battle of all, the battle of life. To have the best within you, be victorious over the lower within you. To be a champion of that is what this is all about. And why I always come back to sports books and mental training and toughness books is it reminds us that we can be champions in our own lives. So there you go.

Ube, G, B, D. Next big idea.

Is sand in hand. Then we've got a little inverted U here. So if you picked up a handful of sand, right, and if you squeeze it really hard, what will happen? If you hold it so tightly, the sand will literally squeeze out of your fingers. On the other hand, you can scoop up some sand and you can hold it too lightly, and then the sand will just fall right out of your hand, right? Squeeze too tight, don't hold it tight enough. There's something in between that we want to focus on. That's the level of intensity we want to have as we perform, right? We want to hold it strongly enough that it's. It's in our hand, but not so tightly that we grasp, we get attached to outcomes or not caring enough. We're just kind of sort of just falls out of our hand. I talk about the inverted U. Everything follows this way, right? We're basically, you increase this variable and you increase performance to an extent. Then you keep on squeezing and you decrease performance, right? Low performance, high performance. As you go across this x axis, everything works that way. You can throw caffeine into that. A little bit of caffeine can help. But too much drives you a little nuts. Well, you need to put a little bit of pressure on yourself to do well. But if you put too much pressure on yourself, you're going to crack, you're going to fall apart. You, you need to have a certain amount of structure in your life, right? But if you put too much structure in your life, you're going to get rigid. You need a little bit of spontaneity. But if you have too much spontaneity, you're going to have chaos. There's always a middle path, a golden mean. You need to find it as you show up in your life. That's the basic idea of sand in hand. Our fourth big idea is another really good one. Good, better, best. This is all about how to evaluate performance. So champions have have a championship way of evaluating their performance. And the first thing they do is they look at what's good. Almost all mental training coaches say that most of us evaluate our performance wrong incorrectly. Most of us start after we do something and say, what did I do wrong? What do I need to fix? Now, that's important. Of course we want to talk about how to approach that, but you need to start with what was awesome. So he says, look, after you perform, ask yourself three questions. One, what went well? Right. What did I do well? What was good about my performance? Start there, celebrate it. Do more of that, right? First step, you need to start there. Second step is, okay, what could I do better? What could I have done better? What needs work is another way we describe it, right? Lanny Basham in With winning in mind. I talk about this all the time. Needs work. You look at it neutrally, right? Like a supportive coach, not beating yourself up, saying, I can't believe I did that again. But saying, hey, what could I have done better? Yeah, you know, I could have done that better. And then the third question is, what do I need to change to be my best? If I want to be my best, what do I need to do differently? So I celebrated the good. I noticed what I could do better, and then I made a concrete decision of I am going to change this particular behavior. That's awesome. Good, better, best. Think about it as you review your next performance or look back at your last one. It's a good little frame to use. Fifth big idea is a fun one. Sustained obsession. Sustained obsession. Jim quotes a gold medal winning rower from the 1984 Olympics who in his book said to aspiring Olympians, he said, look, if you want to become an Olympian, I have two words for you. Two words, Sustained obsession. And this guy said, hey, look, the obsession part's easy. Anybody can get fired up about anything. The hard part is sustaining that obsession over the extended period of time it takes to actually show up and become an Olympic gold medalist or crush it. A champion in whatever domain you're inspired by. He says, that's a tough nut to crack. Sustained obsession. When I read that, I thought of Smokybot. You might remember we talk about Smokey. Grant Cardone in the 10x rule had a great vision. He said that when you think of the fable the Tortoise and the Hare, you got the hare that starts out strong, super fast, and he burns himself out. Then you have the tortoise who's slow and steady. And Grant says, okay, so the Moral of the story is be slow and steady. Don't burn yourself out. But Grant says, look, what if there was a third character in that fable? And the third character had the best qualities of both. He had the speed, the hare and the endurance of the tortoise. And Grant says that third character would smoke him and then the book would be called not the Tortoise and the Hare but smoked. So my playful adaptation of that that I bring into my work quite a bit these days is smokeybot. That character. We have the hare, the tortoise and we have Smokey Smokeybot who is both who's able to be obsessed fast in it and to sustain that steady over the long run. So a tough knot to crack is sustained obsession. And the guy to crack it is smokeybot. You want to be intense and you need to be in it for the long haul. And again, you're only going to do that if you have a strong vision that fires you up, that you're committed to showing up to daily. You got to be willing to have ugly but effective days. You're not going to have great days every single day. But you want to get good at having good, bad days, playing poorly. Well, third idea here was sand in hand. Remember, you want to have the proper amount of intensity. You don't want to cling too hard. You don't want to be too mellow about it. Right? You need to find that right level of intensity where the sand stays in the hand. And then we have good, better and best awesome way to evaluate our performance. That's a super quick look at a few of my favorite ideas from the Champion's Mind. Jim Affomo. Awesome stuff. Check it out, I think you'll love it. Thank you Jim for the great book. I hope you enjoyed. What was your favorite big idea? Think about it, write it down, explain it to someone like they're five and most importantly, figure out how you're going to embody it in your life. I'll be sharing more of these ideas in a class I'm going to create called Peak Performance 101 as part of our membership program. If you're not part of that yet, sign up and have another awesome day. Alright, see you.

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