Motivation

How to think like Champions

“Losers say they might and winners say they will. It’s as simple as that. Of course, attitude has a lot to do with winning and life success”.

Be Outcome Oriented
Nothing comes easy in life. If things were easy, then everyone’s life would be blissful. If we want the things that we want in life, then we have to know what we must give up in order to get it. That means we have to get our hands dirty doing the grunt work before we can enjoy the rewards. If we focus solely on the grunt work, we won’t be as motivated as the ultimate reward of completing that job. For example, paying bills causes us pain, but having the bills paid gives us pleasure. Exercise causes us pain (or at least discomfort), but having exercised causes us pleasure. Winners in life are outcome oriented. Instead of focusing on the grunt work which they don’t like, they see the end result of having done that grunt work. It’s that ability which motivates great achievers do accomplish so much more.

Reflect on Your Daily Achievements
At the end of each day, on a piece of paper, your journal, or computer, write down at least five things that you accomplished that day. Review that list and be proud of your achievements. Each morning when you wake up, coach yourself towards achieving small steps that you can write down on your list at the end of each day.

Pick a Role-Model and Get Inspired
All champions do this when they first start out because remember that champions are never born—they are made. They all had role-models that they aspired to be like and the role-models that they chose showed the particular skills or traits that they wanted in themselves. Many of us, however, choose poor role-models or no role-models at all as a result, they aspire to be nothing at all. It goes to show that if you want to be the best at something, then you have to model yourself after the best out there. I suggest that you read inspirational books, magazines, articles, or watch documentaries or interviews with great people. Go and rent inspiring videos that are about human perseverance and stories of success. Role-models also serve the purpose of giving you a blueprint to follow. Remember that the best of the best out there are really no different than you or I, but we can learn what they did to rise above and beyond the rest and then follow in their footsteps down the road that they have already carved.

Build Yourself a Winning Team
No successful professional is ever a one-person accomplishment. Behind every great professional is the multitude of supporting personnel that keeps him in prime shape with the objective of winning. A lot of times, we don’t see that. We only see, for example, two boxers in the ring. While the game ultimately comes down to that particular athlete, it’s their infrastructure that plays a bigger part of their winning or losing a fight. That team includes coaches, specialty trainers, therapists, and an army of other people that we rarely see when they compete.

In order for us to achieve our goals, we too will need a winning team on our side. Be careful of the relationships that we get involved in and make sure that the relationships that we get involved in are synergistic in nature, meaning that we benefit from it. Often, our clients come to us with parasitic relationships where one person (the parasite) feeds off the other person,

whether it be physically, financially and/or emotionally, until that person is just an empty husk of the person they once were. Don’t enter parasitic relationships, just as a professional would not hire an incompetent trainer to be by his side. Your ability to be a winner is directly linked to your ability to choose a winning team.

Make Your Daily Tasks “Idiot Proof”
Mozart was said to be able to create pristine and perfect pieces of music that were note-perfect on his first attempt. Well, God created Mozart and then he must have been falling asleep when he created us because we rarely get anything perfect the first time. We are not the type of people who can simply work on a project that has multiple steps to it because we’ll procrastinate on it until the very end and slap something together the night before it’s due, which if we are lucky, will slightly resemble a finished project. For us to get things done, we need to “stupefy” our tasks and what I mean by that is that we need our tasks to be so no-brainer that we don’t have to think much to get them done. We need concrete and simple “next actions” that we can put ourselves on auto-run and not have to worry about. Procrastination and unrealized goals happen when we know what we want, but we don’t know how to get there. We should take a goal that has many steps to it and break it down as much as we can. Break that goal down until each step can’t be broken down any further. By having very simple actions on our daily task list, it removes the brainwork from the equation and all we have to do is simply DO IT.

Develop a “No Retreat, No Surrender” Attitude
Champions are not the superheroes that we make them out to be. They are in fact regular people just like us. The difference between champions and losers is the fact that when the two groups are faced with adversity and pain, it’s the losers who turn and run away and it’s the winners who push forward. You see, winners have a “No retreat, no surrender” mentality. They burn the bridge behind them and there is no going back. They put 100% of their energy on seeing a goal towards completion, regardless of the pain they might have to endure to get there.

When you decide to put 100% of your focus on a goal, make sure you set in stone and tell yourself that there is simply no other way to get out of it other than by seeing that goal to its completion. There are no if's, and’s or but’s—no excuses at all, you just get it done regardless. Make it a habit to burn the bridges behind you when you set your goals so that you eliminate all your possible ways of retreating.

Celebrate Your Victories
Finally, champions go out and celebrate their victories and so should you. Celebrations are fun and not only that, they also serve to reset your mind so that you can start the whole process of winning over again. But true champions also know that celebration comes after they’ve won the game and not before the game has even started. So celebrate when you achieve your goals and share you achievement with your winning team that made it possible.