Confidence is Overrated: Chapter 14 "Remove the Thinking"

Confidence is overrated. Chapter 14, an informal reading by the author Travis Thomas. That is me. Here we go. Chapter 14, remove the thinking. Quote, your passion is waiting for you. Let's try that again. Chapter 14, remove the thinking. Quote, Your passion is waiting for your courage to catch up. End quote. Isabelle Lafleche. Do you remember when you brushed your teeth this morning? Do you remember the dozens of times you checked your mirrors while driving on your way to work? Doing the dishes and putting them away last night? What were you thinking about? My guess is that you did these tasks and dozens of others on mental cruise control. You've been doing them for so long they've become a habit. You don't need to concentrate as you put the toothpaste on the brush or consciously think about noticing that car in your blind spot. It's natural and effortless. It doesn't require your thinking, but you're still focused. You are not consciously thinking your way through the action, but your focus is still present and engaged. As soon as it's not, mistakes happen. Getting lost in conversation while driving or checking a text on your phone, and now your attention to the task at hand has switched. So maybe you don't notice the motorcycle coming up from behind or the deer grazing on the side of the highway. You're no longer focused on the right things. In sports, being focused doesn't mean being conscious of the thousands of mechanical movements happening in your body. If you try to consciously move your, your muscle by muscle, you're stuck in over your head. Let me try that one again. If you try to consciously move yourself muscle by muscle, you're stuck in your head. Standing over a golf shot and thinking through multiple mechanical movements is almost a guarantee of a bad shot. Being focused and thinking are not the same thing. Talk to anyone who's been in a flow state or in the zone, and they will tell you that as soon as they think that they are in the flow state, they lose the flow state. You don't think your way into a flow state, but having the right focus will help you get there. The more you think during your performance, the harder it will be. That is why when I work with athletes, I have them choose 2 to 3 actions to focus on. Taking actions gets us out of our heads and into our body, focused on the moment. By simply focusing on our actions, it makes it harder to think about how we feel. our fears, outcomes, or mistakes. It forces us to respond to the next play, the next moment, without getting lost in our judgments or feelings. It sounds simple, and it is, but it's not easy, and it's not a mystery. In improvisation, when I am focused on making my scene partner look brilliant and listening and building off of their ideas, it helps me keep out of my own head. Setting my intention for my performance gives me focus and then frees me up to engage with the moment, not my thoughts. Instead of thinking my way through the scene, I am focused on responding to the newest idea and then moving it forward. When I get lost or frazzled and retreat into my thinking brain, I lose the connection I had to the present moment. In an interview with NPR, French World Cup champion and one of the greatest soccer players in the world, Kylian Mbappé, was asked what he focuses on before a penalty kick. He admitted that thoughts come into his mind of missing the shot and all the negative things connected to missing. But then he said, you need to immediately focus your attention on staying in the moment and just focusing on the shot. The shot, not the result. I love that he admits that the thoughts of make— of making or missing appear, but then the focus shifts to the action. Again, this reinforces that our goal is not to control our thoughts, but to manage and focus our attention. So what is it that helps us focus our attention? Habits build routines. You don't have to remember to brush your teeth. It's a habit. It's part of your routine. You don't have to remember, I hope, to check your mirrors while driving. It's a habit. It's part of the routine you developed when you were a new driver. At some point, it became so natural you no longer need to remind yourself to do it. During Argentina's 2022 World Cup match against Poland, Lionel Messi scanned, which means checking his shoulders by looking over both shoulders, roughly 680 times. That rate is 35% higher than exhibited by Premier League forwards. That's by Josh Lawless in The Sports Bible. Hmm. For a 90-minute game, Messi is focused on the game on the moment while his unconscious thinking scans the field 680 times. Imagine if he tried to think his way consciously through all those actions and still be able to get the ball. And clearly, this level of habit and routine didn't happen overnight. Players are taught and trained at a young age how to scan, and it requires a lot of conscious effort and attention to do so. The more they do it, The easier it gets, the less they think about it. Over time, it becomes a habit, a habit built by routines. All of us have habits, whether we know it or not, and all the habits we have developed are the results of either our conscious or unconscious routines. I'm not an expert on habit creation. See The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. But I know they are the key to building a mental system that responds consistently to the moment. When I'm working with athletes and leaders, I want them to identify the behaviors they attribute to their success. When you play a good game, how much sleep did you get the night before? What did your meals consist of? What was your mental focus? What were you focused on during the performance? What was your emotional state? We want to identify all these factors in order to make the random repeatable. We want to take unconscious competence and turn it into conscious competence. If I know what to do and have a good performance, then all I need to do is focus on my routines and trust the process. It's not a mystery that needs to be solved every time. And as you can see, it eliminates the thinking. Remove the thinking, and what do you have? Freedom. Brian Johnson, the founder and CEO of Heroic, is a routine machine. Every part of his day, every part of his day is fully optimized and intentional. But he wasn't always this way. It has been a shift in the making for a long time. Years ago, when he was struggling to give up fast food and eat healthier, one of his mentors recommended that in order to make progress, he needed to fully commit 100%. In fact, his mentor told him 100% commitment is much easier than 95% commitment. At 95%, you give yourself permission to pull into a McDonald's every once in a while. As a result, every time you pass one, you think to yourself, "Is this the once in a while?" It becomes a constant mental gymnastics filled with what? More thinking. Instead, when you commit 100% and say, "I never pull into McDonald's," there is no contemplation. You can feel the urge, but there is no decision behind the urge. You stick to your routine. It's not a choice. No thought needed. Steve Jobs had numerous pairs of the same pants and turtleneck. He wore the same outfit every day. It was one less not-as-important thing to think about each day. Less thinking, more freedom. If I were to ask you what color Tiger Woods wore on every Sunday round of golf, do you know the answer? Of course you do. It's red. Every Sunday, every round, the same color. No thinking needed. The red shirt also served as a mental trigger, a message to his opponents and a message to himself. Final round red. It's winning time. When we create healthy, effective, and intentional routines, our habits change. When we change our habits, our behaviors change to match. Routines become habits. Excuse me, got lost there. Routines become habits, and our behaviors are the result of our habits. The more intentional our routines, the more consistent our behaviors. Our behaviors dictate our performance. It's that simple, but it's not easy. It requires discipline. It requires effort. It requires sacrifice. But over time, if we stay with it, it will stick. And then it will eventually shift from thinking to being. It will just become a natural part of who you are. And how is this connected to courage? As we've been learning in this book, courage is more important than confidence. Confidence comes after courage. But if we are stuck thinking, we are in our headspace over 70— we are in our Excuse me. But if we are stuck thinking, we are in our headspace where over 70% of our thoughts are reinforcing negative ideas. The more we think, the more stuck we become. The goal is to take courageous action regardless of what we're thinking. Essentially, we want to remove thinking from the equation and fall back on the actions and behaviors that have proven to improve our performance. We want to focus on our routines. If you're an athlete and you wake up not feeling confident, you don't stay in bed. You get up and start going through your morning routine. As your day progresses, when different distractions try to pull you in different directions, you stick to your routines. You don't go through the day thinking about what needs to be done next. You just stick to your routines. Trevor Mowatt would use the analogy of going to the grocery store with a specific list compared to just figuring it out once you get there. Without a list, you wander aimlessly through the store having to think about what you need, and depending on how you feel at that moment or how hungry you are, there's a good chance a lot of extra items end up in your cart that aren't needed or helpful. As a result of your lack of plan and purpose, you end up spending and wasting more time, energy, and money. But when you have a list, you go into the grocery store with clarity and intention. Go down the aisles that have what you're looking for. Instead of looking and contemplating all the options, you stay focused on the only things that are on your list. You maximize your time, limit the distractions, And walk out with what is good for you regardless of how you feel while you're there. By sticking to the list, you keep your focus on what's important, not your feelings. The same goes with courage. Hmm. When we think about what we need to do, it opens the door for all the negativity to rush in and stop us in our tracks. But when we focus on the actions, the steps, the items on the checklist, our routines, it eliminates or at least minimizes our thinking. Again, confidence comes after, and the same goes for thinking. Once we have done the job performance or played the game, then we can reflect and deconstruct what we were thinking and how we were feeling. Our feelings and thoughts are important. And not to be ignored. The key is understanding when it's time to think and when it's time to act. Courage creates action; thinking halts it. When we are stuck, odds are we are spinning our wheels thinking. The solution is to fall back on our routines, trust our habits, and act. James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits. States it beautifully when he says, you do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. Routines create habits. Habits become our actions. Our actions dictate our performance. Thinking— that comes next chapter. Here are your chapter 14 reflection questions. Number 1: When is the last time overthinking stopped you in your tracks? Question 2: Is there a habit you know that will improve your performance? What is it? And number 3: What daily routine can you create that will help you develop this habit? That, that concludes chapter 14. We'll see you for chapter 15.