The High-Performance Mindset: Craig Willard

Is self-doubt and negativity holding you back — in business, sports, or life? Craig Willard, author of The High-Performance Mindset, believes that you need more than just exercise or a change in diet to achieve peak performance. You need to change your thinking. In this episode, Craig shows you how you can immediately sharpen your focus, boost your confidence, and shift your personal performance into hyper drive. Whether you’re an athlete, executive or an entrepreneur, this episode is for you. Get Craig’s book The High-Performance Mindset on Amazon. Learn more about his coaching program at CraigWillard.com. When did Craig Willard start getting interested in mindset? I actually was diagnosed with general anxiety disorder, I’ve spent on it pretty strong medication and that was another turning point for me where I felt like I was in this fog of sorts and this medication had gotten me to a point where I was just bland. I didn’t have the highs, I didn’t have the lows, I was right in the middle and at that point I said, this isn’t okay. I can’t – there’s got to be a better way than medication to help my anxiety and I have to figure this out. I literally went on a – I just went on a road trip of sorts to figure out what it was about our mind that created, what is anxiety even? A lot of that I put into this book, I go in to great detail about anxiety because I think it steal so much from us. From that point moving forward, I realized that the mind was key, it was key to everything and thus I kind of moved, I got into healthcare and I had a conversation with our executive and he said, “You have a great opportunity to do some great things but you don’t have a degree, you don’t have a college education.” Because I went right out of high school and went in odd jobs. I was quite a bit of a late bloomer but that kind of started that domino effect, not only was it the fact that I had a 1.448 GPA, I had to figure out a way to not make that a barrier, right? It can’t be an obstacle, it has to be something that I can find some opportunity within and between that and going through a pretty good bout of anxiety which, I guess, essentially was the turning point for all things about how the mind works. What did you learn from your anxiety and becoming a better performer? If I work on fast forward quite a bit and I got into the coaching world and this really interesting thing that I noticed about people that I coached and kind of – it went from way ahead in the future coming back to my anxiety base and then coming back again with a new way of thinking. When I was – I worked with people, I recognized that when I asked questions like what is the thought, what is focus or self-talk? What I learned was that people had different – they had different opinions of the word, it’s almost like they just kind of create their own dictionary of sorts. It was a really big breakthrough for me to recognize that if I taught people how they think and what those words mean. If you think about motivational speaker. Motivational speakers love to tell you what to do and why you should do it but they forget to tell how, that middle ground seems to get missed quite a bit. You hear this phrase, “Change your mindset, change your life.” Let me show you that if you back up and you learn about how you think and how you create habits, if you do that, then you can adjust the way that you think, thus you can change your outcome. If I just tell you to “change your thoughts, change your outcomes,” that doesn’t help people. I know that I need to do that, but how? That was a really big breakthrough for me. I’ll go through it with you. Ask these questions, what is self-talk? and they would give me an answer. I’d say, what is thought? they’d give me an answer. Sometimes odd, strange answers. Then I say, what is focus and they would usually say something like “concentration.” Okay, what’s concentration and they kind of giggle and they go, focus? Because you really didn’t have a true definition for the words but yet we tell people all the time to focus. What does that mean? What then I did is I broke it down in coaching and I said, okay. If you have a thought in your head, you have to talk to yourself about it, it’s not optional, we talk to ourselves all day long, we have what? 40, 50, 60,000 thoughts a day and as long as we’re having thoughts which we are consciously. We are talking to ourselves about it and while we talk to ourselves about it, it is our focus because we can’t really have dual focuses. The conscious mind can only have a single focus at any one time and then, whatever it is that you’re focused on is your concentration is what you’re giving attention to which we kind of call modern marketing outlets. If I can get you all, get you to focus on it, if I can get you to talk to yourself about it and concentrate on it, I can potentially sell you something. Hopefully that makes sense. I think for me, it was always asking myself why and never accepting the fact that I didn’t know. I say, well what is anxiety, for example, this is a perfect example. People will identify, we know about identities, we know that if I say that I’m overweight or I’m fat, I’m going to identify with this body of being fat. In fact, if I lose weight, there’s a potential I can have an identity crisis. Well, the same happens for people who have anxiety, they say, I have anxiety and I kind of giggle and I say well, you don’t really have anxiety because it’s not like the chickenpox, it’s not the flu, it’s not a broken arm, it’s an experience but you don’t have it and if we know that it’s an experience, well how do I fix the experience? Well I can change the way I think about it because my experience is based upon how I think about it. Well, if I can change the way I think ab out it, maybe I can just get rid of it. Well, and it worked. That’s a lot of what I put in this book. I mean, there’s a lot about anxiety in this book because as you said, it affects so many people and so I just went backwards with it, I said, what is – for example too, if you go to the doctor and you have anxiety and you say, my hands are constantly clammy, my heart rate, I’m a mess, I can’t sleep, he goes, well, it sound like you might have anxiety, let me give you this pill, right. That’s in effect. What you’re doing is you’re masking the problem and so when people go and get medication, what they’re doing is just masking what they were experiencing and so that’s why when you remove the medication, everything comes back because you don’t fix the cause. What is the cause? The cause is how we think and we realize that, we become so much more powerful because now we recognize that hey, I can change the way I think and if I can change the way I think then I don’t have to choose anxiety. How did you have that mindset shift, and what was the mindset shift? I think for me, and a part of this was, it kind of happened before I really realized that happened and then it was backtracking like I said earlier, I was back tracking trying to figure this all out. I think when you recognized that – I don’t even know how to say this. Everything is in my opinion associated with time and so when I recognized that everything that I dealt with that was anxious was futuristic and then of course when I thought about that I went, well, everything in the past is depressed. I’m never depressed about the past, never depressed about the future. You worry and you get stressed and so forth. And I said, wait a minute. I started putting these down and I’ll be honest, there is a period of that really deep dig that I did, that deep dive into the stuff that I kind of lost my sense of time and everything just kind of seemed to blend together and it was almost like, literally, it was like, every star in the line. Everything just instantly made sense to me and I went, what am I going to do? This is what I’m going to do. I want to teach – from this point forward, when I coach, I’m going to teach this very principle every single first coaching session and I cannot tell you how it’s changed the way I coach and how it has changed the way that my athletes and the executives that I worked with and leaders. It’s changed the way that they think, thus allowing them to have anything that they want in their life. Well, essentially when – the first thing that I’m going to do is I’m going to have a conversation with you about thought, I’m going to ask you the questions that I did. I’m going to say, what is thought? And then they answer. How do we change our thinking? 95% of our thoughts are repetitive and so what you are doing in that regard is you’re hitting on those – you’re doing the positive thinking, you’re changing the way that you want to believe and those habitual thinking and you’re doing it by repetition over and over again which is really good. If I were to put that back into a single moment though? If I were to say, if you need – if I tell you, change the way you think, change the direction of your life, it all starts with a single element, a single thought. Now, you may have multiples of those and you’re going to have another one and another one but if need to change a single thought, how would you do that? Just one. I’m going to back up and I’m going to say, in order to have a thought, you have to talk to yourself about it, that’s your self-talk. If you want to change your thought, change that conversation. It immediately changes the thought, it changes the focus, it immediately changes what you’re concentrating on and what you’re giving your attention to. In the sense of how do I do this long-term, it is that constant reminder that I control my thoughts, not by trying to control the thought but I control the one thing that I feel like I can control and that’s the conversation. Because you’re identical, your self-talk is your thought. Part of that is, how in this book, I talk specifically about how the subconscious mind gets involved. When you have a thought come in, and this process happens so fast, the conscious mind kind of goes “Hey, I need you to come and talk to the executive team tomorrow about how great your company’s doing.” The first thing that you do is go, “Speak in front of the executive team? I can’t speak very well, I’m a horrible speaker.” You already have this pattern that you’re looking for that you found that’s similar to the past. But what we know is that, our mindsets only pull a little bit of the past. The subconscious mind records partial pieces of the past but not all of it. It doesn’t’ do it very well. You get a lot of those things, whether it’s those individuals in that class whether they had heard that before or whether their parents had always said it. They always had the but to go after any statement because it didn’t really believe it or they were trying to be convincing themselves that they didn’t want to believe it. How do we make our thoughts better, and where should we start? The first thing is, recognizing that we can do it. A lot of feel like they can’t and they’re innocent by standards of sorts to their life and so, first, it’s making people, or heling people to realize that they can actually control that. To a pretty good degree, they can make those changes. Then from there, it kind of goes back to what you were saying earlier, two things that I learned, one is, what we speak and what we write are so critical to how we consume information and I’ll give a story. My mom called me one day and I was at work and she called me and she said that she was tearful and she said, “I’ve got something I need to tell you.” She said, “I just left the doctor, and I was diagnosed with breast cancer.” She’s in tears and I said, “Are we able to fix this?” She said yes and I said okay. I said, “We’ll do this together, we’re going to get through this.” I sat there for probably 10 minutes. I was not emotional, I was nothing. And then I get up, I go tell the lady that works beside me. As soon as I verbalized the fact that my mom had breast cancer, I had to actualize it, had to make it real and I broke down. Literally, I just started crying. We don’t realize the power of the word that we use and most time we don’t even realize what the word means that we use. It’s having those verbal conversations with yourself in the mirror even. People say it’s un-coachable but the coaching that I have used and what I tell people to do with an “I am” statement that I talk about in the book is get in front of a mirror. If you want more than you have ever had to say, you’ve got to do more than you’ve ever done, get uncomfortable. If you can’t get uncomfortable looking at the mirror and yourself and no one else around, that’s ground level. What mindset exercise do you suggest doing in front of the mirror? Get in front of a mirror and start being nice to yourself. If you talk to your friends and your family members like you talk to yourself, everyone hates you. So we have to change that and it’s doing what you did and it’s doing it with repetition and it’s doing it with work because what we are doing is breaking down habits from years and years and years and years of negativity and I am not saying that everyone is negative. They say that about 95% of our thoughts are repetitive, and about 80% of those are negative. Even if we got that from 80 to 50, or 80 to 60, that’s a massive difference in someone’s life. Massive, and it starts by writing. You can even write down all the things that you went through in your life and especially if you are feeling down and you don’t have a lot of confidence. It’s remembering what you went through so write down all the bad things that happened and remind yourself that you have resilience to have gotten through every single one of those and you’re still alive today. That is exactly right and you found a different process and it’s the same mentality and that is debate yourself. Don’t assume that what you believe is the truth. It is your truth and we have to recognize that it is your truth and this is my truth but we can question that and say, “Is that really right? Should I really be worried about this? Is this something I can control? Should I even control? If I can’t control it should I really worry about it?” Or am I spinning my wheels on things that are really good enough that at the end of the day are going to matter? And then we awfulize so bad when it comes to anxiety, right? We like to fortune tell. We like to tell what is going to happen, we want to make some certainty of the future. So we spent all that energy and the thing is that when you do that, you pull out. There are only three points of time: you have the future, the past and the present. And when you pull out of the present the only place that you can actually experience having this is in the present. When you move to the future you get anxiety, when you move to the past you get depressed but you can live in the moment and prepare for the future and be at present activity and actually find happiness. So I can prepare for what’s going to happen tomorrow but I have to recognize that I am going to be in the moment and so I’ve worked with what I got today and I’ll deal with that tomorrow. Then when you think about the past that’s the introspection so that’s that reflection that we have that says, “I really wasn’t good to my wife last night. I am going to do better and I am going to apologize to her because that wasn’t fair” and so both of those activities are very present moment centered thus when you prepare and you reflect you are going to become happy. You don’t want to get out of that wheel and go up towards the future. It doesn’t do us any good, it hurts us because we lose those precious moments that are the present and there’s no certainty. It’s not like that one movie where you have a time clock on your forearm that you know when your day is going to expire. We don’t know that, so every moment is precious. Where can our listeners connect with you and follow you? I have a website at craigwillard.com. I am on Facebook and Instagram, they can just search for Craig Willard Coaching and then also I have a newly started podcast which is the Craig Willard Show on iTunes. Get Craig’s book The High-Performance Mindset on Amazon. Learn more about his coaching program at CraigWillard.com. The post The High-Performance Mindset: Craig Willard appeared first on Author Hour.