What does that mean – a Champion Mindset?
Let’s just illustrate it quickly: Two people suffer the same fall, but only one rises. What’s the difference?
You got it- it’s your mindset and how you approach events in your life. None of us are going to be so lucky that we win the lottery and never experience hardships. That’s why cultivating a strong and resilient mindset is one of the most powerful things you can do.
Keep the Correct Company
More than anything, the people around you will be the key to your success. They give context to your world and they can encourage and motivate you to great heights, or enable your negative thoughts and lead you down a tunnel of discouragement and despair. Just as you pick up the mannerisms or speech patterns of those you spend a lot of time with, you also pick up their mindsets towards life.
Beyond your immediate family, your external influences are completely your choice. It behooves you to keep the kind of company that can skyrocket you to success and achievement.
There is an old saying, “You are the sum of the five people you spend the most time with.”
It’s a process of inevitable osmosis. The more time you spend with somebody, the more their negativity or positivity will seep into your consciousness. You will gain their knowledge, mindset, ingenuity, and sense of gratitude. You will also gain their sense of entitlement, poor work ethic, negative narrative, and defense mechanisms. It goes both ways.
When you can surround yourself with the right people, they will push you to new heights and encourage you to achieve more.
Think Negative
Do you remember the uncomfortable feeling of insecurity back when you weren’t as confident in your abilities?
How would you act, react, and double-check if you weren’t completely sure of yourself? How did you act when you doubted yourself and your abilities, and how did you ensure that your actions would be correct or well-received?
That’s what thinking negative does for us. It makes us act in a way to all but guarantee success through sheer hard work and diligence.
You need to occasionally modulate your confidence to make sure you aren’t getting too far removed from reality and still understand the primary issues you’re facing. Thinking negative is about remembering how you used to feel, and using that feeling to drive your actions to make success more likely.
Your confidence must straddle a thin line. Confidence is wonderful – but remember the doubt and negativity that got you there.
Disregard Convention
I heard a story from a friend of mine who went traveling in India a few years ago:
There was a woman who, every time she cooked fish, cut it into eight pieces. When the woman’s daughter learned to cook, she also cut fish into eight pieces before cooking it and she taught her own daughter to do the same. Generations of women continued this tradition of cutting fish into eight pieces every time they cooked it because they believed it was an important aspect of dining. When the older woman was finally asked why she cut the fish into eight pieces, she replied simply that her old pot was too small so she always cut a whole fish into eight pieces to make it fit.
And that spawned at least two generations of doing the same action, no matter the size of their pots! Are these the types of paths you want to follow in your life?
Just because something has “always been done that way” doesn’t mean it is right or that there is a good reason to continue doing it. In this case, it was originally done for convenience. In future generations, the practice was continued out of a sense of duty or obligation. Once the necessity for a particular course of action no longer exists (i.e., you got a bigger pot), why would you follow that path blindly?
Regardless of the position you are in, it’s worth questioning whether you’re taking full advantage of your bigger pot or still behaving as if you have one that is too small to hold a whole fish. We owe it to ourselves to question the patterns and logic that have been presented as conventional in our situation.
For more on cultivating the can’t-keep-me-down attitude that every single high performer possesses, check out: Champion Mindset: Tactics to Maximize Potential, Execute Effectively, & Perform at Your Peak – Knockout Mediocrity!