PNTV: With Winning in Mind by Lanny Bassham (#137)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got another great book with winning in mind by Lanny Becham. Amazing guy, amazing book. We've got Philosopher's Notes, my favorite five big ideas. Lanny is a former gold medalist in the Olympics rifle shooting. He won a silver medal in one Olympics. Wanted to win the gold, realized that he couldn't handle the pressure. He choked under pressure. Wanted to figure out how to get his mind right. He's been at this for 40 years. He's created something called the mental management system. In this book he walks us through it in just a genius way. I'm excited to share five of my favorite big ideas. Now we're going to start with the first one. It's 90% mental. If we want to win, whatever that means for us, whatever domain we show up in, it could be as an athlete or as a parent or an entrepreneur or an artist, whatever. It's 90% mental. If you talk to a top performing individual, they're going to tell us that it's 90% mental. You get to a certain level of skill and then it's all how you show up with your mindset. Knowing that, Lanny asks us, how much time do you spend in your day getting your mind right again? It doesn't matter whether you're an athlete or an artist or an entrepreneur or a parent. Do you spend any time trying to get your mind right? If 90% of your performance is dictated by your mental state, it would make a lot of sense to put a lot more time into optimizing that. That's the first big idea. We just need to understand how important it is to train our minds and to do some of the stuff we're going to talk about today that we talk about all the time. Now. The next big idea is, did I win? Did I win? And Lanny tells a story that is just amazing. He's working with a PGA golfer. He works with a bunch of golfers and Olympic teams, etc. He's working with this professional golfer who hasn't won in a few years, right? So they're doing their year end planning, looking ahead and thinking about what goals they want to set for the next year. And Lanny says, look, let's not set a goal to win a tournament. We haven't won a tournament in a while. Let's set the goal to focus on execution, to focus on the process because it's good execution of the mental and physical dynamics. And that leads to good scoring, which leads to Winning golf tournaments. Let's not focus on winning golf tournaments. Let's focus on the process of winning golf tournaments. And the golfer just loved this and he made his theme for the year, this process is primary. Process is primary became this golfer's obsession. He's all about the moment to moment execution of effective golfing, right? Not thinking about winning tournaments or not, not the outcomes, but the process which we talked about yesterday in the war of art, we're going to talk about again and again and again because it's the heartbeat of optimal living to focus on this moment. It's the power of now in a really active, engaged way. So anyway, this golfer is all about the process, all that, right? And he's in his fourth tournament of the year. Tory Pines down in San Diego. He's on the 18th hole in the final round. He's got a 30 inch putt. Now the crowd knows that he needs to make that putt to win and he has no idea. He's so focused on the process being primary that he's just going to step up and execute that shot as well as he has any other shot that day in the tournament. That's all he cares about. He sinks the putt, his playing partner gives him a handshake and he thinks he's just being polite. End of the round. Thank you. You know, he got great round and he didn't even know he won the tournament with that putt until his wife ran onto the green. His wife runs onto the green, he says, did I win? Did I win? Can you imagine that? It was a million dollar putt and they didn't even know it was for the win because he was so focused on the process. Now you tell me how you would show up if you were thinking about the outcome. 30 inch putt, a million dollars. What's that going to do for you if you're obsessing about that? This is a million dollar putt. I've got to make it. I've got to make it. I've got to make it 30 inches. Okay, let me analyze it. Let me analyze it. You're going to obsess and you're going to stress yourself out and take yourself out of executing well. But he was so focused on the execution, he didn't even think about the outcome. He, he just went through his routine and made a shot. That's all it was about, was that moment being in the moment. Process was primary. That's just a nuts story. Did I win? The guy didn't even know he had a million Dollar putt at stake. I just think that's remarkable. Process is primary. John Whitten talks about this. It wasn't about winning championships for him. It was about having perfect practices. We wanna show up and see if we can make today a masterpiece is what Wooden told us. Can we make today a masterpiece? Can you make today a masterpiece for you in your life? I did a video not too long ago about that. I'll put a link to it in this video. How I go about making today a masterpiece and some ideas on that. But think about this process is primary. Let's focus on executing well. Next big idea is good shots. This is what we want to remember. Good shots. Now Lanny talks about three different domains that go into his mental management system. We have the conscious, the subconscious and then our self image. Right. We're not going to go into detail on that right now. Check out the book for more on it. But we basically want to discipline our conscious mind such that we can rewire our subconscious mind and create a new self image. And one of the ways we do that is by focusing on what works. We don't want to obsess about what's not working. We want to think about what is working. So he says, we want to recall our good shots. He talks about some of his teammates on the US rifle shooting team and the guys would never talk about their missed shots. And once he was at a training event and he was talking about the, he was involved in some event where he got 398 out of 400. So a rifle shooter goes for a 10. That's a bullseye. If they miss, they get a nine. He made every single shot but two. He got two nines and the rest of them were perfect tens. And someone in the audience said, what was going through your mind when you got those two nines? And he says, why would you want to talk about the two nines? Why wouldn't you want to talk about all my tens? What was going through my mind when I got all those tens? That's what we should be thinking about. But too often we're thinking about what went wrong and we groove that into our mind and we create more of it. We, we need to obsess about what's going right in our lives. We're going to talk about that more in a moment with self image. But recall the good shots. That's who you are. You're a strong, powerful, successful human being. Think about that. Don't think about your misses and your bad shots. Really, really big idea. The next One here is rehearsal. So rather than call it visualization, he calls it rehearsal. Imagine yourself doing the performance that you engage in as well as you possibly can rehearse it. It's kind of mental imagery that we've been talking about a fair amount, but he calls it rehearsal. And he's amazing what he would do. He talked about this time he went for a perfect score and how he got it and how he went through every single step in the process of what he would do from the very beginning of the meet, through that event, all the way through to see and to feel again and again and again. We what it would take. And he said he won a gold medal thousands of times before he won it. In reality, he rehearsed it again and again and again. Now it's really important to note that he did not rehearse putting the gold medal on. How wonderful that would feel. And the big check he might get for an endorsement or sponsorship or whatever. That's outcome focus. That's not making process primary. He obsessed and he rehearsed about what he would do such that the outcome would be a natural byproduct. Huge difference we want to focus on. Anyway. He had this one story where he was in the army and he was stationed somewhere that was 250 miles away from the closest shooting range. He literally couldn't go out and shoot for two years. He only shot six days in two years. And those were both tournaments, three day tournaments that he was in. The only time he actually shot a rifle in those two years was when he was competing and he won both of them. But what he did was every single night, Monday through Friday or whatever it was, five days a week when he put his. His family would go to bed, he'd spend two to four hours rehearsing the perfect shot in what he would do when he would compete. Pure imagination, pure rehearsal led to him winning the two events that he went into. Ridiculous. There's all kinds of studies that prove that just visually imagining doing something well will improve your performance. Unbelievably cool. Rehearsal is a big idea. The final big idea is self image. So we talked about our conscious mind, our subconscious mind and our self image. He has a great phrase which is tied to these good shots. He says, that's like me me. That's like me. That's like me to crush it. That's like me to have a perfect shot. That's like me to have a perfect score. So whatever it is that you do in your life. And again, you could be a salesperson. You could be a mom, you could be whatever, an artist. You rehearse yourself doing it to the best of your ability. And anytime you find yourself performing at a high level, say to yourself, that's like me. We need to have a self image that is high. It's like a thermostat. You're not going to perform above your self image. You need to crank your thermostat up such you can maintain a higher level of performance that's like me. And your self image that you have right now, he says, is a function of all the imprints you've had throughout your life. Positive, negative, negative, negative, negative, positive, positive, negative, negative, negative. All the little chit chat going on in your head, all the criticisms and whatever you've gotten or praise you've gotten in your life, imprint, imprint, imprint, imprint. And if you want to create a higher level self image, you need to have better imprints more consistently rewire your brain. You want to recall the good shots, rehearse top performance and affirm a higher self image. That's like me. Just love that. So when you find yourself doing something great, whether it's in your rehearsal or during your day, say, that's like me. It's like me to do that. Perform at a high level. So there you go. Super quick look at this great book with winning in mind. Lanny Becham, awesome guy. I'll put some links down below to learn more. 90% mental top performance. We need to invest more energy into our mental game. Did I win? Million Dollar Putt. Did I win? So obsessed on the process as being primary. Good shots, recall those. Not the bad shots, the good shots. Rehearse again and again and again. He won his gold medal thousands of times before he actually won it. And your self image, boost it. That's like you to crush it. Hope you enjoyed. I had fun. What was the biggest idea you got out of this? How can you apply it to your life more consistently starting today? Take it from theory. Make it embodied practice. And I look forward to sharing more with you soon. All right, have another awesome day. See you.