The Secrets to Stop Your Mind Being Your Enemy
For all the times you want to crawl into a very deep cave and never come out.
Imagine for a moment that you’re part of the under-15 soccer team. You’re enthusiastic and want to do well.
At training, the coach has devised a goal-kicking drill that runs like this:
The team lines up about 10 meters from the goal, with the goalkeeper standing in the middle of the goalposts. Her job has been made clear: stop the ball from getting into the goal.
The players standing in line are being lectured by the coach:
“You will take it in turns to step forward, dribble the ball for a few meters and then kick it as hard as you can along the ground into the corner of the goal where you think the goalie won’t be.”
The practice session doesn’t go very well with most kicks going too wide and or high and the coach is unhappy. He demands that players have more practice with their parents before game day.
Come game day, the coach comments that he hopes everyone had time for extra practice, “This game is important to win, in fact if the team loses today then the season may well be over.”
The game turns out to be quite a battle royal with both teams playing with similar skills and enthusiasm.
It’s getting close to full-time. The scores are still 0–0 and there’s lots of noise from the sidelines.
The players on both teams can sense that coaches and spectators want a result.
It’s about then that you find yourself in open space inside the other team’s half. It’s quite a shock and you have found a reserve of energy that enables you to get ahead of the defense and suddenly you realize the goal is just ahead.
It’s the moment when you try and remember everything the coach has told you about kicking goals.
The noise from the sideline is almost deafening as you dribble the ball forward and get ready to literally give it your best shot.
Ahead you see the goalie glaring at you and moving from side-to-side, trying to anticipate where you’ll kick the ball.
What’d the coach say? “Watch where the goalie is, kick along the ground, kick hard into the corner the goalie isn’t moving towards.”
As you launch your foot into the ball you realize it’s moved too far ahead and your foot misses the ball completely.
Your energy to kick hard was so great that missing the ball landed you on your back. Meanwhile, the goalie strolls forward to calmly pick up the ball and kicks it downfield.
The opportunity to win the game has vanished.
The noise from the sideline is subdued, it’s gone quiet. Your team-mates are glaring at you or at least clearly not happy, your coach looks like he’s pulling his hair out, supporters are mumbling.
And, you want to crawl into a very deep cave and never come out.
Little did you know, at the age of 15, that life could be so challenging and in a way so horribly stressful.
And what I’ve described is a common scenario for everyone at every age throughout life.
This situation is what famous author, Tim Gallwey, wrote about in his book, The Inner Game, way back in the 1970s.
Gallwey wrote about situations that every person of the planet has experienced and about which many people really struggle with.
Coaches, managers, leaders, mentors who are aware of how debilitating The Inner Game can be, are able to help and even coach people to become conscious of their Inner Game, and to take steps to overcome its negative impact.
The scenario I described above, occurring on a soccer field, happens in every facet of life.
At that moment, theory must be applied under pressure to a real-life situation.
You’ll no doubt have painful memories of times when you’ve struggled when it felt like your brain froze and your body froze too. It happens in the most crucial and important, even critical, situations.
We all find ourselves in these moments because so much learning and training is delivered as information to be retained and then applied when needed, on-the-job, or on-the-field or in moments of real urgency.
At those times when you feel under pressure, your brain virtually seizes-up, you’re stressed to the hilt, you can only think that you’re a train-wreck.
You lose trust in your abilities and so you duff the tee-shot, miss-kick the football, stumble and mumble through an important presentation, and after those moments you might also snap at your spouse or yell at the kids, which in turn makes you feel even worse about yourself.
Thing is we are all judgmental, both of our own performance and often the performance of others. That’s an overwhelmingly negative behavior in every way you can look at it.
You may not be aware of the self-judgmental trait until it emerges from your subconscious, your Inner Game.
And we often give great attention to our outer appearance and almost ignore our inner preparation.
So we ensure we’re wearing our best outfit for an event where we are a speaker and do a bare minimum to prepare our mind.
Yet if you consider what’s more important, I think you’ll agree that your mental preparation, your Inner Game, is far more important in terms of making an impact.
Our assessments and assumptions are regularly a major roadblock to our full potential.
You have assessed your capabilities, you’ve made assumptions about what will transpire and so you shackle your potential before you even start.
Truth is your potential is limitless, IF, you’ll get control over your subconscious and put previous “failures” behind you and view them for what they really are, “learning experiences”.
When you mark yourself down over something negative, like the missed kick at goal, you give yourself a C-, and then you feel like you can only ever be a C- player.
This tendency to apply a performance rating based on past experiences doesn’t just shackle individuals, it shackles teams and even entire corporations.
To break free of the shackles, there needs to be impactful self-coaching and ideally a great team coach or corporate leader.
When the young soccer player miss-kicked for goal and the chance for a win passed, the coach had an opportunity to lift the player and the whole team to look beyond the moment and to feel confident about their future.
This scenario is common in work settings too and needs the same approach from a manager or leader.
It’s easy to see how people can easily become mired in a below-par performance standard and really struggle to find renewed energy and confidence.
The Secrets to Stop Your Mind Being Your Worst Enemy
We’re all controlled, and in many ways, limited, by our subconscious mind. It’s truly an incredibly powerful influence on our mental stamina.
Our conscious mind sees what’s in front of us, and we feel uncertain of our ability to deal with what we see. Confidence drops, and our subconscious senses its moment to get involved and convince us we shouldn’t attempt what we were thinking.
Our subconscious mind is great at sensing what’s coming and sets an agenda where we eventually think, “I should have known such-and-such wouldn’t happen — why did I even try?”.
The fact is, we human beings all have incredible potential, in some ways, unlimited potential. But we’re seriously handicapped by our inner self.
I think we can all be an impactful self-coach to a degree, in fact we have to be a self-coach at times, to lift ourselves after those moments when we hit-the-wall or, the ground metaphorically falls away from under our feet.
Simple self-analysis or a postmortem can be instructive. A conversation with a trusted person to ask for feedback and then some quiet reflecting time to get things in perspective is best practice. Assessing what can be learned from the experience is essential.
Our subconscious is a tough beast to tame, but tame it we must.
I always struggled on the golf tee. At times I could hit a screamingly fine shot straight down the middle of the fairway — but it wasn’t consciously done and I felt frustrated because I knew the next tee shot could well be a wild hook to the left.
I never did work that out, except I learned to be OK about it, I didn’t beat myself up when the tee shot flew left or right. On the next tee, I’d refocus and try to be conscious of my stance and swing and start afresh.
I can say it didn’t impact my overall enjoyment of a long walk with good company, and I occasionally celebrated a par and very, very, very occasionally even a birdie.
History is just that — history. It’s true also that while your public failures are front of mind for you, they are quickly forgotten by others because they have their own failures front-of-mind.
In life it’s important to look ahead and welcome challenges with confidence. Not necessarily confidence that you are definitely going to win, or excel, or conquer an audience — confidence that with each challenge and each day you take a step forward and some days will be quite a few steps forward.
On days when it feels there was no or little progress, take some time to reflect on whether your inner game held you back.
Just being aware of the power of your subconscious can make a massive difference in how you handle what life pitches at you.
Don’t ever be too tough on yourself, even if you kind of deserve it.
That mode of thinking just eats away at your soul and self-esteem.
About the Author:
Greg Twemlow is a Sydney-based Social Enterprise Founder | Startup Mentor | CEO | Writer | Speaker | Founder of Consilio and Creativitee | Host of https://medium.com/consilio
