Not too long ago, I asked you: “What’s your recovery time?”
As you may recall, we talked about my AM protocol-ritual of reading the notes from my prior 1-on-1 session with Phil Stutz in between our weekly connections.
In that recent set of notes, I reflected on the discussion Phil and I had about how important it is to QUICKLY recover when you get knocked off center.
In that +1, I connected Phil’s wisdom on collecting turnarounds to Marcus Aurelius’s Equanimity Game and Morihei Ueshiba’s ability to find his center so quickly his students thought he never lost his balance.
Today I want to chat about another one of the world’s greatest peak performance coaches who challenges us to move so fast through our whining/complaining cycle that we make those guys look like they’re standing still.
Let’s get straight to work.
The guy I want to talk about today is Greg Harden.
Greg Harden is one of the world’s greatest peak performance coaches.
He tells us that champions aren’t born.
They’re built.
He spent over 30 years building champions at the University of Michigan where he worked with 400 future professional athletes, 50 NFL first-round draft picks, and 120 Olympians from over 20 countries. He gained national recognition when 60 Minutes Sports profiled him as “Michigan’s Secret Weapon.”
To put in perspective, Harden has worked with seven-time Super Bowl champion Tom Brady (who wrote the foreword to the book) and twenty-three-time Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps—two of the greatest athletes of all time.
In his great book Stay Sane in an Insane World, he talks about some of the Ideas he used to forge champions.
Today we’re going to talk about his take on IMMEDIATELY alchemizing challenges.
He tells us: “So now it’s all about your beliefs. It’s about how you talk to yourself... It’s all about how you treat yourself, how you talk to yourself, what you believe about yourself. ... I’m not talking about becoming a robot. When you fail, it hurts. It really does. And it should! You should let yourself feel that. I just gave up a home run and I’m not happy. I am going to acknowledge that this thing happened, and then I’m going to give myself permission to feel crap about it.
For one-tenth of a second.
Hit the start button on the stopwatch. Feel like crap. Hit the stop button.
00:00.10
Now get back to work. If there’s something to learn from the mistake you just made, learn it.
Make the adjustment. Hear the words in your head that reinforce your commitment to giving your best effort: I’m capable, qualified, and competent.
And then move on. It’s one trait so many of the greatest athletes I’ve ever known have in common: a short memory. My shot doesn’t go in. I drop the ball. I miss the wide-open net.
I give myself one-tenth of a second to feel bad, and then I keep playing. ”
That’s from Chapter #22: “The Value of a Short Memory.”
So many things come to mind when I read this...
First, there’s Sean Casey and his call to his mental toughness coach, the great Harvey Dorfman. (See this +1 on Go 0 for 12 Lately? and the Notes on Coaching the Mental Game for more.)
Sean was struggling. He called Dorfman. All Dorfman cared about was whether or not Sean was WORKING HIS PROTOCOL.
Then there’s another mental toughness coach, Jason Selk.
He’s more generous than Greg and gives his peak performers 60 seconds to whine before they shift to a Relentless Solution Focus.
Then there’s Tom Brady.
I can vividly remember watching one of the seven Super Bowls he won forever ago. He threw an interception in the Red Zone. As I recall, the VERY next drive, he was in the VERY same position and ran the VERY same play. TOUCHDOWN.
He seemed to run that play out of spite to the Heroic gods for disrupting his plans the prior attempt. Great performer, terrible short-term memory. Complete amnesia for failures after the lesson has been learned.
How about YOU?
Got anything YOU need to alchemize and let go of?
If you feel so inspired, practice some Targeted Thinking.
Radically accept whatever is happening.
Get clear on what you want.
Decide what you need to do RIGHT NOW to get a step closer to getting it.
Dominate that next WIN.
Repeat.
Forever.
Starting…
NOW.
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