PNTV - The Psychology of Winning by Dennis Waitley

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson.

More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got the Psychology of Winning by Dennis Waitley. So Dennis Waitley is kind of an old school modern self development guy. He sold 10 million audio programs in the 20th century and 21st century and just a super popular kind of get things done, rock your greatest life self development guru. And this book is packed with big ideas. I'm excited to jump right in. We've got a lot to cover. So the first big idea here is he says that the psychology of winning. And again, winning, just as he defines it. It's not about getting straight A's or winning an athletic competition. It's about living at our highest potential. It's about being, becoming better and better and more alive human beings. That's the idea here. And he's looking at what makes those types of people tick. And again, we're going to look at some of the big ideas as he sees it. The first one is it's all about how we take something, it's all about how we interpret it. Now I talk about this in every single note, so I'm not going to go into detail on it because we've got some other stuff I want to cover. But this isn't just self help, you know, kind of fluff. This is deep scientific stuff. How we interpret our environment is what it's all about. And I have a couple of different quotes here that I think you dig. So he's got a big idea called I call it the inventory bag. He says one of the most important things we can do on a daily bet, on a daily basis is to fill up our bag. Our bag. He says we want to pay attention to our blessings. We want to pay attention to our accomplishments. We want to pay attention to our goals. B, A G blessings, accomplishments, goals. We want to fill up our bag every day. And we know this scientifically that gratitude is just huge. To appreciate our blessings is huge and to appreciate our accomplishments is huge, deeply builds our self esteem and does extraordinary things for our overall well being. And in fact, gratitude, as I mentioned a lot of these notes, is one of the key ways and most effectively easy ways to boost our levels of happiness. Shift from the complaining, criticizing the blaming, all the things that are wrong and focus on all the amazing things in our life. No matter what's going wrong, I guarantee you you can find five times as many things that are right. From the fact that you're alive to the Fact that you were born to all the amazing things that have happened throughout your life and are going on right now. So B A G blessings, accomplishments, goals. Highly recommend you check it out in the note. I have some space for you to journal that press.

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Journal that right now. It would be a great thing to do. I actually do something very, very similar and it's huge on a daily basis. It's really fun stuff. I'm going to do a lot more videos, by the way, on my journaling process. I'm going to do probably just a lot of them. I'm excited about that. Next big idea is stay staying on target and scoring a hit. He talks about the fact that we're kind of like, well, we're goal directed and goal oriented individuals. And he talks about the fact that it's kind of like having a missile, a guided missile. You got to have a clear target and then you adjust as you're moving toward your target. And we talk about this in Psycho Cybernetics as well. And Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about it in flow, how important goals are.

It.

It literally focuses our consciousness in really powerful ways. That is one of the hallmarks of optimal and effective living. So he talks about this and he says we need to make sure that our targets aren't undefined. That's not going to help at all or too far out there. If it's out of the range, out of the scope, then we can't use our guidance system to get there. We just get overwhelmed and it kind of fizzles out. So having effective goals that really inspire us, that we're moving toward is huge. We're going to talk about that a little bit more in here. But first I want to talk about another big idea. He talks about the fact that stress is good, a certain level of stress is good, and in fact it's very good. And he tells a story about Earl Nightingale back in the day. He went to the Great Barrier Reef and he noticed on the Great Barrier REEF which, what, 1800 miles? Right. The Great Barrier Reef extends around Australia, New guinea, that area. Right. Is that where it is? Yes, New guinea to Australia. Haven't been there yet. Excited to check it out. So Great Barrier Reef, there are two sides to it, apparently. One is kind of on the mellow side where there's not a lot of activity. And the other side is where the ocean just pounds it. What's fascinating is this side that's totally mellow, no stress at all is dead. This side is where the Bright, amazing, vibrant coral exists. And Nightingale said, why is that? And the guide said, well, you know, it's the stress that they feel that keeps them alive, that actually keeps them stronger and vibrant. And it's the exact same thing in our lives. Look at an Olympic athlete or a sprinter, for example. It's because they push themselves so intensely, they stress their body so much that they're so alive. There's a vibrancy that comes when we find that healthy edge and we push ourselves, and then our body recovers and strengthens itself exactly like the coral does. Of course we need to recover. We need to be smart about it. But Tall Ben Shahar says, it's not that we work too hard, it's not that we train too hard, it's that we don't recover enough, right? So it's not that we're facing too much stress in our lives per se, it's that we don't have enough recovery built in. We're wasting what we need to be doing with recovery on false recoveries like the beer and the wine and all the other stuff that unplugging with the tv, that is not real deep recovery that we can get through meditation, the relaxation response through other means. So really, really powerful idea. Point here is stress is good. Don't try to avoid it. Just have a healthy relationship with it. Motivation. He talks about how cool the word motivation. I never thought about it like this comes from the word motive. What's your motive? That's what motivates you. What's your why? Why are you excited about something? What's your motive? That's your motivation, and that's how you keep yourself inspired. We just talked about that in Emotional Intelligence, the last episode, how important self control and being able to motivate ourselves is. The next big idea is kind of tied to the stress. So two forms of stress. He likens it to butterflies and moths, right? He says butterflies are good. You know, you get little butterflies in your stomach, you get a little bit nervous. That's good. All that energy is actually really good for us. It's essentially helping us perform at our optimal state, at our peak state. So butterflies are cool. We want to smile with them and just kind of flow with them. Moths, on the other hand, are not cool. Moths eat away at things, right? Moths form ulcers. They eat away at us. So we want to have a healthy relationship to our nerves and to our energy. Butterflies and moths. We talk about it in the book Overachievement as well. He's got some awesome ideas that I highly recommend. Check that one out over achievement. We have a PNTV episode on it, and that note is one of my favorite ones, and that book is awesome. Well, quickly I'll just say overachievement. It's all about going out and rocking it. Like truly living an extraordinary life, pushing it as far as you can. And he talks about the fact that if you really want to do that, imagine that you're a race car driver. If you're a race car driver, you want the strongest, the most powerful engine you can possibly have, a V12. Now you got to learn to drive that thing, right? Because if you don't know how to drive it, then you might get in an accident. But if you're committed to winning races, you wouldn't swap out your V12 for a V4 just because it's a quieter ride. It might be a quieter ride, but you just got rid of all of your power and there's no way you're going to win any race with a V4 when you need a V12 to really go out and perform. And his thing is, don't try to just get rid of stress. Learn to manage it, learn to work with it and to perform with it at that edge. Really cool idea. We talk about more again in the book overachievement. The next big idea is personal optimism and enthusiasm. He says the hallmark of a winner is their personal optimism plus their enthusiasm for life. That's when you know you've reached a certain level that you want to be at. He also talks about the importance of concentrating all your energy, right, and getting completion. So when you come up with an idea or you have a project or you're doing something, complete it. On a macro level, if it's a business or a project rocket, and on a small level, if it's, you know, something as mundane as getting the bills out of the mailbox. Well, get the bills out of the mailbox, open them up, write the check, seal them up and walk back out and put them in the mail. Don't have them sit there as an incompletion, stressing you out as you walk by them every day. Completions are huge. We talk about it more here and in the book Focal Point by Brian Tracy. The final idea is planning our ideal lives. He says it's insane that most people spend more time reading the news, see, studying the newspaper, planning a vacation or preparing a Christmas shopping list than they do planning their ideal lives. So what can you do? What's your ideal life? Imagine you can do anything you want and you had everything you wanted in your life. What would that look like? Spend time thinking about that and moving in that direction. I have some ideas what you can do on that in the note, but we need to spend time thinking about our ideal lives if we want to have it pretty straightforward. We well, that's psychology of winning in a nutshell.

Hope you dug it.

Look forward to sharing more with you soon. As always, have an awesome day. See you.

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