Archives For success

Time Will Tell

May 14, 2013 — Leave a comment

There’s a lot to be said about procrastination and whether it’s bad.  Personally I don’t believe we procrastinate to intentionally hurt ourselves.  In our right minds we are always looking to gain and benefit.  At worse procrastination is a focus issue that can be solved.

We procrastinate because we need a little more pressure applied to perform at our best.  We need urgency.  This is a good thing but also a telling one.  If you want to know how bad you really want something look at how much time is left when you procrastinate to the point of urgency.

The larger the period between when you feel enough urgency to act and the completion date and time of that task the more you want it.

The Art Of Adaptation:  Knowing how bad you want to succeed will help you do just that. 

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6… wait, 7… well, technically, 8 Ways To Become The Best

September 12, 2012 — Leave a comment

Who doesn’t want to be the best at what they do?  We all want to at least improve, at least the people with some type of drive.  If you have an ounce of drive in your bones you are like me and always search for ways to improve or strategies that will help you.

Growing up my dad always said, “It doesn’t matter what you do in life.  Just be the best at it.”

At first I thought it was cheesy.  Like he stole it from a movie or some song he heard on the radio.  Who says those things to kids right?

It was funny though, the more he said it the less I was able to resist the truth or merit in it.  Soon enough it didn’t matter if he was repeating a phrase he heard.  He was like me.  He found that a phrase like that helped him and the way he viewed his world.

That phrase was his tactic for self-improvement.  I soon began to see how it applied to his life.  We are close and from what I gather from other people he is an intelligent man.  Could have been anything he chose.  He had the opportunity to work in the construction industry and become a small business owner which provided for him and his family for over 30 years.  And yes, he did become the best in his field for a time.  At least in the place where he operated.

I think about this phrase all the time now.  It has become ingrained in me.  I’ve heard it over and over.  I have adopted it as one of my strategies for motivation and now pass it along to you.  I do this along with 7 other ways to become the best in what ever it is that you are pursuing.

Here they are:

1.  Pick a skill to work on:  It doesn’t matter if you have to learn to communicate better, manage finances, listen more often, pick up a language or simply develop a habit.  Pick one thing and put 100 per cent of your effort into that until you have succeeded.  This brain works more effectively when focusing on one this at a time.  Don’t spread yourself to thin.

2.  After you have picked a skilled to work on, identify and use three strategies that will help you:  For instance I have chosen to learn French.  Three strategies I have identified are; study for at least 15 minutes a day… everyday, post sticky notes on every item I don’t know the name of in French and practice making sentences with them until I know the vocabulary and meet with a native French speaker once a week to practice verbal communication.

3.  Choose a mentor:  You should find someone who has confidence and skill in the area you are looking to develop.  Ask that person if he/she would mind giving you feedback about your progress.

4.  Expect success.  Not perfection:  You have to be realistic.  I’m 24 years old.  I haven’t learned another language.  I can’t expect to pick up a French book read it and then read, write, speak and understand the language perfectly.  When I say this people think, of course who would think that.  You would be surprised.  Many people are so hard on themselves.  I am guilty of this too.  People who are driven want to do it… now.  I get that and hats off to you for the effort but if it isn’t coming easy, beating yourself up over it won’t make it happen any quicker.  Chill out!

5.  Practice. Practice. Practice:  This biggest determinant in your success in developing a skill is how much time and effort you put in.  Remember it take 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at something.  We are looking to be the best… so get at it!

6.  Be patient:  I have zero patients… I’m working on it.  Realizing that this won’t happen over night is hard, especially when you are working so diligently at it.  It helps me to really think about the 10,000 hour bench mark which is backed my scientific analysis as the point where expertise in a field is acquired.  There are only 24 hours in a day.  If you did nothing else but work on this skills 24  hours a day it would still take you 416 days!  For real though… most people take 10 years to reach this level so keep calm.

7.  Measure your progress:  Every skill has a way to be measured.  Some are easier to measure than others.  The important thing is that you create benchmarks along the way.  Write down where you started.  Monitor it in the beginning daily, then move to weekly, then monthly.  As you develop better habits less time is required keeping yourself in check.  This frees up more time for you to dedicate to your practice but it always helps to see how far you’ve come.

Those are 7 of my strategies to get you started.  You can add to or take from as needed but they have definitely worked for me.  In fact I’ve never been so sure of them as I am when I don’t use them… then nothing happens for me.

Do you have anything you do that helps you in being the best you can be?  Share it with us.

If you like this post you may enjoy my post called: Performance Plateau:  How To Increase Performance… In Anything.

The Art Of Adaptation:  Strategy and hard work pay dividends.

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Confidence: How I Win.

April 25, 2012 — 1 Comment

I am convinced confidence is important when it comes to training for competition but how do you build this confidence? In many sports, there are multiple competitions which happen within a period of time. For example, in my sport Taekwon – Do, there are at least four tournaments I compete per year. This requires an athlete’s performance to peak multiple times per year and not always with the same amount of time in between competitions. One way to build confidence in sports like this is to win every competition, but this doesn’t always happen. So how do I do it?

I have created a system that has worked for me. I call it phasing. You may have read something like this and every athlete needs to figure what out what works for them.

In preparation for each event a number of factors fluctuate. Of course your physical abilities, weight, calorie intake and physical output change but one of the most important and most overlooked change is in an athletes mentality.

There are many factors which fall under the label “mentality,” confidence being one of them. In diagram 1.0 you can see how confidence increases through the preparation phase of training. This simply means that as you train and prepare physically you become more comfortable with your ability and more confident that you can perform what you practice.

Diagram 1.0

What you would like to do is really understand when it is that your confidence is at its peak. If it takes you four weeks to train and feel you are confident in your ability then you need to plan four weeks in advance of the event to begin training so that when you attend the event you are ready to go. Simple right? That part should be.

You may ask, “How do I know when I feel confident and when I am ready?”

For me personally, I keep a training journal and I write weekly or daily how I feel about my training to keep track of where I am from a mental perspective. When I am feeling lack of confidence at a point in my training, I may look back at my journal just to discover that I have only trained for 5 weeks. Then I can adjust for next time and start my training a week earlier. Of course there is more to it than time spent training but for the sake of simplicity we will stick to that one factor.

If you do take part in a sport like Taekwon – Do where there are multiple events strung together you need to make sure you phase your training correctly. Diagram 1.1 shows what happens to confidence when there are two events. It goes up as you train and then you get the result of your first event. After a win you ride out that level of confidence and it eventually comes down especially as you slack back training. In preparation for the next event it would again peak, assuming you planned your training properly.

Diagram 1.1

One thing that you may notice if you compete, is that after a while of training and keeping confidence at its peak you experience a bit of what we call “Burnout.” This happens for a number of reasons relating to physical exhaustion but for myself it is always mental exhaustion. This happens when you are pushing your mental ability to the max for extended periods of time and not giving your brain and body a chance to understand what you are putting it though. Change is good and pushing your body and mind is how you grow, but at some point you need to plateau to start the process again.

Mental exhaustion or “Burnout” may feel like this:

  • Lack of confidence
  • Lack of motivation
  • Anxiety
  • Uninterested

Diagram 1.2

There is an ideal level of confidence. You do not want to be over-confident and you do not want to lack confidence during training. You need to be somewhere in-between. The majority of athletes would like to be here for their training. Keeping this ideal level will allow you to peak in confidence when a competition rolls around. I find that keeping this level of confidence throughout my training allows me to focus more on future goals.

One may argue that you wouldn’t want confidence to reach its maximum even during competition. It is healthy to believe in yourself and your abilities but I believe that every good athlete realizes that losing is not impossible. Believing that your opponent or challenger can get the better of you that day keeps you in a state of flow. It keeps you sharp and aware.

Diagram 1.3

Equally important is what happens to an athletes confidence after the event. Depending on the result, the rate at which confidence will decline changes. As in diagram 1.4 you can see how if you win the event your confidence will stay at the same level longer and will decrease more slowly than if you lose. Of course, we all want to win but in a sport where you have a string of events to train for I argue that it is more important to react to a decision than the actual decision.

What this means is that you need to analyze and adjust. If you win you need to realize the trajectory of your confidence. You don’t want it to ride to high for too long. Being over-confident can cause you to develop false confidence. A lot of people who do this become successful at an event and let it get to their head, they stop training because they feel they have been there done that then when they go to compete again they lose.

For me, personally, I love compliments. I know it makes me feel good when I am recognized for hard work. In fact other people’s compliments go a lot further than they should in my world. I have recognized that from journaling how they make me feel. So I adapt. After winning at a tournament you will never see me at the Dojang. I stay away for a day, or two, or how ever long it takes for me to come down off my high and for the students excitement to subside. Some people I explain this to think I’m crazy but I get pleasure and satisfaction from the process of preparation and then the performance not necessarily if I win. I still have the goal of winning but sometimes you may win but perform terribly and this doesn’t satisfy me. I want to win easily and then get right back to training. I’m a bit of a perfectionist, I don’t think it’s really a good thing. I wish I could celebrate with others but I know myself and that’s how I am.

On the other hand, if you lose you need to realize that your confidence may have taken a hefty blow depending on things like your perceived confidence going into an event, your belief in the probability of a win, and any strange things that may have happened during. As with most people your confidence will probably fade away more quickly assuming you do nothing to reverse this erosion.

After a loss, my thinking is that I am actually in the perfect level of confidence to be training. I call the loss a reality check. My latest example of that would be losing to a competitor at the 2012 Nova Scotia Provincial Championships. What I realized after that loss was that I needed to hit the gym… and hard. A short time after my loss, I captured the Eastern Canadian Championship. If you adjust quickly the previous result doesn’t matter in fact I would argue that a loss, if managed mentally, will increase motivation and allow you to reach a higher level of confidence than what you had before the loss.

After I explained that to someone they asked me why you wouldn’t want to lose every event and then win the most important event when the time came, so that along the way you can increase the trajectory of your confidence. The problem lies in your thinking. Just like how exhausting it is to keep your confidence and physical conditioning peaked for extended periods of time it is equally hard and mentally draining to restructure your belief in your self to over come a loss. You can’t do it time and time again, you need a win at some point to assure yourself that you worked this hard for something.

I have a high tolerance for losing. That doesn’t mean I am a good loser. Anyone who has played golf with me can attest to that. In Taekwon – Do I instantly start thinking about my next plan of action. I remember losing and on my way to the other side of the ring to shake the other coaches hand immediately after a match I was thinking about being in the gym and what I would do to correct my performance.

The thing about confidence is that it is always fleeting. We build it up but it continually wants to come down. Don’t let confidence appearing people fool you. If someones confidence is just bursting out of the their body, in my experience, they are over compensating for a lack of confidence or they are riding on false confidence. False confidence is believing in skills that you don’t posses and belief in ability you don’t have.

As your sills increase and your challenges become more familiar it takes more and more for you to get the same increase in confidence. What do we do to continually increase our confidence the same amount or the maximum amount? Evaluate your skills versus your challenges before, after and during event and make sure your goals are leading you to a place where you are testing and pushing yourself each time.

The Art Of Adaptation: Confidence is continually fleeting. Monitoring your mentality and adjusting your game plan is the best way to make sure you are on track to increase performance and to win events.

How I monitor my mentality:

  • Journal
  • Plan out training and take notes on how I feel
  • Talk to people about my performance
  • Note how I feel after the result (Win or Lose)
  • Review my notes and ask myself “how you can adjust”

 

You may also like:

Performance Plateau: How To Increase Performance In Anything

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Pillars of Relationships

April 13, 2012 — 1 Comment

There was a request for a post on relationships so I thought I would share this with you.

I drew a diagram a long time ago and over the years it has helped me immensely.  It is a diagram and a theory, which probably does have a psychological name or term, but I actually just stumbled upon it realizing how all of my relationships were interconnected.  Here is the diagram:

Work, Family, Self

There are three sections and three levels to this diagram of relationships I call the three pillars.  My intention here is not to tell you or assist you in fixing, maintaining or nurturing these but to simply show you the importance of having healthy relationships.  Also, I would like to show how having unhealthy relationships in one area will affect another.  The following examples may seem obvious but I guarantee we all have or know someone who has trouble with one or multiple areas.

Family First

Believe it or not,  the simplest area to build relationships in is family.  Mostly due to the fact that you have to know these people your entire life and they are your blood… they have to love you.  Of course there are going to be exceptions to every rule.  In Canada we have a high divorce rate which speaks to the complexities that could arise in these relationships.  We also have many cultures and religions which are difficult to set boundaries around.  Your job is to navigate through all that to foster healthy relationships.  When you have strong relationships and support these relationships can be a great resource which you will need when we talk about the second level of this diagram.  In my life my family had been my rock.  I’ve taken many risks when it comes to work and sports.  The day I said I was moving to Argentina to train for the Taekwon – Do World Championships everyone I had around me supported my decisions and helped out.  I remember the first time I quit my job.  It was for a number of reasons.  Feeling a little insecure about the decision I thought my family would criticize my decision but the exact opposite was true.  I knew at that point I had developed healthy family relationships along the way.

Love Your Self

Self is a fairly complex relationship and a strange one to navigate.  I will have to say that most people who I meet have no idea how to develop this relationship and very few people make an effort to develop a relationship with their self.  I don’t mean that in any type of egocentric way.  I mean, knowing yourself, being kind and understanding to yourself and wanting to know how you feel and relate to different things like family, work and your environment.  Some people go to psychologists or some type of councilor as a reactive measure and some a proactive measure.  I am very fond of proactive measures.  Getting there before the problem begins is important because there will always be problems.

For me Buddhism has been my vehicle for self reflection.  It allows me to discover who I am and work on developing a relationship which is understanding and kind.  In doing so I realized that who are and who you think you are may be two different things altogether.  Really liking who you are has been an important factor in what success I have had so far in life.  Not having to look outside myself for approval and appreciation has let me channel that effort into other areas of my life.

Work

The third Pillar, Work, is probably the most complex.  This is due to the number of relationships and the complexity of them all inter-mingling.  Most people work 40-60 hours a week for a third of their life.  They do this with a number of people.  Depending on where you work you may have co-workers, assistant manager, managers, district managers, media contacts, CEOs, consultants and countless other people you have to navigate around.

It is quite obvious how having relationships in their area can help you in your career when it comes to getting promotions, making money and developing as a professional.  Fortunately most people understand this.  Unfortunately, often this is a fast paced environment and methods of communicating today will not be the same in 5 – 10 years, take Facebook.  It is important to make efforts to keep up with methods of communication and to foster mutually beneficial relationships.

Admittedly this is probably the hardest pillar for me to strengthen.  I have found my life that the line between working relationships and friendships is very thin.  It is often the person who can straddle this line that will be successful.  I have had situations at work where I have carried to much friendship into the work environment which can lead to poor performance and I’ve also missed out on building great relationships for fear of sacrificing work performance or not being able to discern when it was proper to carry on more than a working relationship.  Networking has been one of my greatest weaknesses… but I’m working on it.

The Three Pillars

Interrelationships

How each one of these Pillars influence each other is the next level.  Once you have established relationships in each you need to look at the effects of them all coming together.  There are so many combinations or situations that could happen between each.  I will give you one so that you may analyze the rest on your own.

Lets take Family and Work.  There is a section in the diagram that represents the situations when both of these relationships come together.  Maybe you own a business together with a family member.  There are many family owned businesses.  If the relationships in both Work and Family are healthy this section will be healthy as well.   You will likely work together and be able to keep up a healthy family relationship.  On the other side, if you work with a family member and you really don’t click as co-workers then that tension in the work place may carry over into your family relationship in different ways.  This also works in the reverse order which you see a lot in family owned businesses.  If the family relationships have issues this may carry over into the work/business side of things affecting the bottom line.

The point is that it is key to have healthy working relationships in the three areas because issues are amplified once they start to mingle.

The Real World

In the real world all three areas are pieced together.  For the most part this occurs naturally.  People have families, they go to work and have to be with themselves, their strengths and weaknesses as they navigate life.  There are outliers like the law school student who graduates and work his/her ass off for the next couple years interning, never seeing or being involved in family.  There are some situations which need an extreme focus that may involve eliminating one of these three Pillars for a time.  Can you think of any?

For the majority of people though you will have to build, support and repair relationships in the three pillars because they hold up your environment.

The Art Of Adaptation:  Focus on building, maintaining and repairing relationships in the three pillars because they are each interrelated and each play a role in establishing the balance of your environment.

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Must Know For Success: CS Balance

April 3, 2012 — Leave a comment

The Art Of Adaptation: Make sure you balance skills and challenges regularly.

I just finished reading a book called Flow In Sports. Its authors are Susan A. Jackson and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Yes, this is spelled correctly). Mr. C’s theory about Flow or what some athletes/writers/business people/what ever you are, call being in the zone. It is that mind-set where optimal performance takes place. Flow can mean something different to everyone and has nine fundamental dimensions or components which best describe the mind-set in this state. They are:

  • Challenge-Skills Balance
  • Action – Awareness Merging
  • Clear Goals
  • Unambiguous Feedback
  • Concentration On The Task At Hand
  • Sense Of Control
  • Loss Of Self-Consciousness
  • Transformation Of Time
  • Autotelic Experience

For more detail on flow I suggest you read up on Mr. C’s theory.

They speak to a number of keys to optimal performance but to be honest unless you’re a sports fanatic I wouldn’t recommend it. Half way through it gets quite repetitive. So I’ll help you skip all that. The main two take aways from the book are goal setting (refer to my earlier post about goals titled Performance Plateau if you need help with that) and the Challenge/Skills (CS) Balance.

Now, to boil this down to what I’m sure Mr. C would consider an insultingly simple version of his theory. We can only achieve Flow or that mind set which allows for optimal performance (in any task) if we have the proper balance of challenges and skills.

As an example I will use my sport, Taekwon – Do. When I was a green belt obviously my skills were not as good as they are now that I am a fourth degree black belt. An appropriate challenge for me at that time would have been something as simple as a regular class. I probably would have experienced some level of anxiety at the thought of a provincial tournament and definitely if I had participated in one. In order for me to enter Flow I would have just needed something as simple as a hard class to get me there or if I had improved my skills a little I could deal with the anxiety of a provincial competition to get there.

Now that my skills are much higher I cannot enter flow with the same level of challenges. If I were to continue to develop my skills but never go above the provincial competition environment I would probably experience relaxation and eventually boredom. It did happen to me at one point. That is when you make a decision. You either decide to quit and look for some brand new challenge in places where you have few skills or you progress. In my case, the next level would be the National and World level competitions. I decided on the latter.

Once I began to compete nationally and in some international competitions that uncomfortable feeling came back. I stepped out of my comfort zone. The place where skills and challenges are equal and you are forced to improve. You must improve because although it is good to reach a place where you feel uncomfortable, this indicates you are where you need to be to learn, this isn’t natural for us. We as people want to ease that feeling of borderline anxiety.

This theory does not just apply to sport, it can be applied to any situation that presents a challenge and that also requires a skill to over come and achieve a goal.

Knowing this theory and applying this concept has been a huge factor in any progress I have made as a student, an athlete, a professional and a person.

Look at a particular situation in your life. Ask yourself how do I feel when I perform (Insert Task)? The answer to the problem is to always adjust the level of skills and challenges in that situation so that you are in a place which allows you to reach flow.

Totally over your head? That may have been due to my explanation. Check out Mr. C’s TED Talk on Flow by clicking the link.

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