Research shows that helping others and cultivating social.
Mental Toughness. I started to see where I had missed the boat, and I realized it wasn’t by much.
I had been close to world- class mental toughness, but got derailed due to a few major mistakes: check to see if you’re making any of these errors in thinking that cost me my dream. I listened to too many people.
Everyone around me had an opinion about how I should train, compete, and think. Looking back now I realize that all of these people meant well, but most were middle- class thinkers who didn’t even understand world- class thinking. What I discovered is that the world class builds mentor teams of people who are far more successful then they are, and that’s where they go for coaching and advice. They tend to block everyone else out.
My friends were all . In other words, they were nice, average people. Middle- class thinkers believe the world- class results are for other people.
What is gratitude exactly? Gratitude is an important positive emotion that has many benefits. Think you know about them? Read more about it here. Rediscovering the Positive Psychology of Sport Participation: Happiness in a Ski Resort Context.
They refer to world- class thinking as . My mom told me when I was 5 years old to be careful whom I hung out with because I would begin to think like them eventually. I wish I had paid more attention to that advice.
Mistake # 3. I didn’t know that consciousness was contagious. I had no idea that the middle- class thinkers I was spending most of my time with were literally rubbing off on my thought processes, habits and philosophies. I had started out thinking like a champion and getting world- class results, but the more I hung around people with middle- class consciousness the more I became like them. As a matter of fact, the less success I had, the more they seemed to accept me. I think it made them feel better about their own middle- class results.
Mistake # 4. I didn’t understand that world- class habits, actions and behaviors are driven by world- class expectation. I always thought desire was the driving force behind motivation, but I was wrong. Everyone wants great results in their life, but how many people do you know putting in a Herculean effort to get those results? Probably very few, and the reason says more about their level of expectation than it does about their desire.
When I was 1. 0 years old there were only a handful of kids in the world who could beat me. When I walked on the court with anyone else, I always expected to win. Therefore I was extremely motivated to train and practice. My expectation of success kept me outworking my competitors.
When my ranking started to drop and my positive expectation followed, my motivation began to wane. I still had the desire to win, but I no longer expected to win. Mistake # 5. I didn’t know that behavior follows belief I didn’t know anything about the law of cause and effect. I didn’t know that if you want to upgrade your results, you go straight to the cause.
If you want to find out why you are getting the results you’re getting in any area of your life, do a through examination of the beliefs you have that surround that area. Beliefs are the cause and behavior is the effect. If you upgrade what you believe you will upgrade your behavior, and when you upgrade your behavior you upgrade your results.
When I believed I was a champion, I trained like a champion. When I believed I was washed up, I trained like a loser.
These are just a few of the many subtle mistakes I made that cost me my dream of being a professional tennis champion. After studying professional performers for 2. I have identified dozens of what I have come to call, . I call them . Not to sound clich. As I have traveled along this road uncovering the mental toughness secrets of the world class I have implemented as many of these ideas as possible.
But that being said, here’s what I’ve experienced over the last 2. Every time I discipline myself to think and behave like a champion, I get world- class results. The same is true for our clients. It’s so predictable it’s scary”I don’t want to sound like I’m speaking in . We all know that life is not black and white, but varying shades of gray. That being said, I challenge you to read my new book, 1.
Mental Toughness Secrets of the World Class, and then tell me that these are not the answers to world- class success, fulfillment and happiness. Harvard Business School has reviewed it.
Fortune 5. 00 CEO’s have read it. Multi- millionaire entrepreneurs have studied it, and everyone seems to say the same thing: The answers to world- class thinking are contained in the pages of this book. Studying them will give you an edge over your competitors. Following through and acting on them will change your life.
Mental Toughness moves people from good to great. As a Mental Toughness consultant to some of the most successful Fortune 5. America, I’ll give you the bottom line on what mental toughness training does: It moves people from good to great. Quite honestly, low level performers don’t seem improve much through mental toughness training. Neither do the ego driven types who think they already know it all.
I regularly advise executive teams to purge these two groups of people from their companies. Lazy people are afflicted with too many bad habits and are too expensive to retrain. Egomaniacal performers have a closed belief system that is rooted in fear. Their ego is a shield used to mask feelings of inferiority.
These people can also be retrained, but it can take years to transform a fear- based thinker into a world- class thinker. A person who is terrified of his or her own inadequacies will cling to their egocentrism for dear life. Mental Toughness Training targets the . These people are open- minded, successful, and aware that there is always a higher level of performance to be attained, no matter how good they already are.
These people often climb from middle- class to world- class results very quickly, and it all begins with their thinking. The 1. 77 Mental Toughness Secrets of the World Class opens their minds to how the great ones think, and then asks them this critical thinking question: “ Do I think like that?”How about you? If you’re ready to supercharge your thinking and catapult your career, don’t read this book: Study it. It’s to easy so read because each Mental Toughness Secret is self contained and stands alone. Each Secret has an “Action Step” to follow.
I hope you will take advantage of the lessons it teaches and get the results you’re after. I wish you the very best! Sincerely,Steve Siebold. Founder. Mental Toughness University. P. S. Be sure to read Secrets # 4. After you study this book for a while, email me and let me know what you think.
Be sure to include the successes you’ve had as a result of applying these ideas. My email address is steve@govesiebold.
Building Resilience. Douglas and Walter, two University of Pennsylvania MBA graduates, were laid off by their Wall Street companies 1. Both went into a tailspin: They were sad, listless, indecisive, and anxious about the future.
For Douglas, the mood was transient. After two weeks he told himself, “It’s not you; it’s the economy going through a bad patch. I’m good at what I do, and there will be a market for my skills.” He updated his r. He then tried six companies in his Ohio hometown and eventually landed a position. Walter, by contrast, spiraled into hopelessness: “I got fired because I can’t perform under pressure,” he thought. The economy will take years to recover.” Even as the market improved, he didn’t look for another job; he ended up moving back in with his parents. Douglas and Walter (actually composites based on interviewees) stand at opposite ends of the continuum of reactions to failure.
The Douglases of the world bounce back after a brief period of malaise; within a year they’ve grown because of the experience. The Walters go from sadness to depression to a paralyzing fear of the future.
Yet failure is a nearly inevitable part of work; and along with dashed romance, it is one of life’s most common traumas. People like Walter are almost certain to find their careers stymied, and companies full of such employees are doomed in hard times. It is people like Douglas who rise to the top, and whom organizations must recruit and retain in order to succeed. But how can you tell who is a Walter and who is a Douglas? And can Walters become Douglases? Can resilience be measured and taught? Thirty years of scientific research has put the answers to these questions within our reach.
We have learned not only how to distinguish those who will grow after failure from those who will collapse, but also how to build the skills of people in the latter category. I have worked with colleagues from around the world to develop a program for teaching resilience.
It is now being tested in an organization of 1. U. S. Its members may struggle with depression and post- traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but thousands of them also experience post- traumatic growth. Our goal is to employ resilience training to reduce the number of those who struggle and increase the number of those who grow. We believe that businesspeople can draw lessons from this approach, particularly in times of failure and stagnation. Working with both individual soldiers (employees) and drill sergeants (managers), we are helping to create an army of Douglases who can turn their most difficult experiences into catalysts for improved performance. Optimism Is the Key.
Although I’m now called the father of positive psychology, I came to it the long, hard way, through many years of research on failure and helplessness. In the late 1. 96. I was part of the team that discovered “learned helplessness.” We found that dogs, rats, mice, and even cockroaches that experienced mildly painful shock over which they had no control would eventually just accept it, with no attempt to escape.
It was next shown that human beings do the same thing. In an experiment published in 1. Donald Hiroto and me and replicated many times since, subjects are randomly divided into three groups. Those in the first are exposed to an annoying loud noise that they can stop by pushing a button in front of them. Those in the second hear the same noise but can’t turn it off, though they try hard. Those in the third, the control group, hear nothing at all.
Later, typically the following day, the subjects are faced with a brand- new situation that again involves noise. To turn the noise off, all they have to do is move their hands about 1. The people in the first and third groups figure this out and readily learn to avoid the noise. But those in the second group typically do nothing. In phase one they failed, realized they had no control, and became passive. In phase two, expecting more failure, they don’t even try to escape.
They have learned helplessness. Strangely, however, about a third of the animals and people who experience inescapable shocks or noise never become helpless. What is it about them that makes this so? Over 1. 5 years of study, my colleagues and I discovered that the answer is optimism. We developed questionnaires and analyzed the content of verbatim speech and writing to assess “explanatory style” as optimistic or pessimistic.
We discovered that people who don’t give up have a habit of interpreting setbacks as temporary, local, and changeable. We created the Penn Resiliency Program, under the direction of Karen Reivich and Jane Gillham, of the University of Pennsylvania, for young adults and children. The program has been replicated in 2. Philadelphia to Beijing. We also created a 1. We’ve found that it reduces depression and anxiety in the children under their care.
Casey, Jr., the army chief of staff and former commander of the multinational force in Iraq, asked me what positive psychology had to say about soldiers’ problems, I offered a simple answer: How human beings react to extreme adversity is normally distributed. On one end are the people who fall apart into PTSD, depression, and even suicide.
In the middle are most people, who at first react with symptoms of depression and anxiety but within a month or so are, by physical and psychological measures, back where they were before the trauma. That is resilience. On the other end are people who show post- traumatic growth. They, too, first experience depression and anxiety, often exhibiting full- blown PTSD, but within a year they are better off than they were before the trauma.
These are the people of whom Friedrich Nietzsche said, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”I told General Casey that the army could shift its distribution toward the growth end by teaching psychological skills to stop the downward spiral that often follows failure. He ordered the organization to measure resilience and teach positive psychology to create a force as fit psychologically as it is physically. This $1. 45 million initiative, under the direction of Brigadier General Rhonda Cornum, is called Comprehensive Soldier Fitness (CSF) and consists of three components: a test for psychological fitness, self- improvement courses available following the test, and “master resilience training” (MRT) for drill sergeants. These are based on PERMA: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment—the building blocks of resilience and growth. It is a 2. 0- minute questionnaire that focuses on strengths rather than weaknesses and is designed to measure four things: emotional, family, social, and spiritual fitness. All four have been credited with reducing depression and anxiety.
According to research, they are the keys to PERMA. Although individual scores are confidential, the GAT results allow test takers to choose appropriate basic or advanced courses for building resilience. The GAT also provides a common vocabulary for describing soldiers’ assets. The data generated will allow the army to gauge the psychosocial fitness both of particular units and of the entire organization, highlighting positives and negatives. At this writing, more than 9.
The army will compare psychological profiles with performance and medical results over time; the resulting database will enable us to answer questions like these: What specific strengths protect against PTSD, depression, anxiety, and suicide? Does a strong sense of meaning result in better performance?
Are people who score high in positive emotion promoted more quickly? Can optimism spread from a leader to his troops? Online Courses. The second component of CSF is optional online courses in each of the four fitnesses and one mandatory course on post- traumatic growth. The implications for corporate managers are more obvious for some modules than for others, but I’ll briefly explain them all.