WHAT IS IT?
It is maintaining an unwavering confidence that there is a way to affect your experience and even to rewrite your story. It is the belief that failure doesn’t have the power, you do.
Belief that you can change direction is the last piece in Mind-Eye Coordination because it ends up being the only part that will matter in the action you choose to take in developing your mind-eye.
If you don’t believe you can make a change, then you won’t have any incentive to put in the work to do so.
WHAT THIS MINDSET CAN DO FOR YOU
According to Carol Dweck in her book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, when a student has a fixed mindset, they believe that their basic abilities, intelligence, and talents are fixed traits. ... In a growth mindset, however, students believe their abilities and intelligence can be developed with effort, learning, and persistence. Everything they do teaches them something, each journey towards a goal has the ability to enhance their overall experience especially if there are hardships along the way.
Dweck writes, “In the fixed mindset, everything is about the outcome. If you fail—or if you’re not the best—it’s all been wasted. The growth mindset allows people to value what they’re doing regardless of the outcome. They’re tackling problems, charting new courses, working on important issues,” (Dweck, 2015).
A great way to approach your belief is to focus on the process or the journey instead of one outcome that will make or break you. You are not so fragile that one event will derail you from your goals. Even if you are more sensitive to failure than you think you should be, practice the “how to get it” portion of this section will help you strengthen your resolve.
Believing that you can pivot will not only improve performance, but can make you a star beyond just your athletic skills. People crave a new way of looking at things and many want someone or something to follow. Being able to pivot is a way to turn a failure into a springboard to be noticed for your resilience, toughness, and inspiring way of thinking.
Why You Need Belief
REASON 1: Knowing that you can rewrite the story of any situation puts you in the mindset that your situation is not “fixed” and that failure is necessary for change. You begin to embrace it.
REASON 2: You can create your own reality. This is how leaders operate; consistently and quickly making good decisions and telling the situation what will happen next instead of staying in “react” mode.
REASON 3: Having the ability to “pivot” is the a huge part of mental toughness. Since mind-eye coordination is essentially not letting anything that comes up in your life stop you in pursuing the person you want to become, believing that you are capable of achieving the goal you set out to will give you the motivation to keep pushing forward.
WHAT BELIEVING YOU CAN PIVOT DOES
When it comes down to it, all I am asking you to do is to believe in yourself and to believe in your ability to DO WHAT YOU NEED TO DO TO MOVE ON.
The game of life is about messing up and then learning from it. Failure is required. If this is the game, belief is the only strategy.
You have heard “believe in yourself” so many times that it probably doesn’t even sound like a real piece of advice; but anyone who has experienced some of the more brutal effects of failure knows that believing is the hard part. I’m here to help you out and tell you why you should already have some belief built in and also how to grab more if you’re struggling with it.
Why not you?
Why can’t you have the same belief that the “confident” girls have that everything will work out?
I’ll tell you why it might be hard: We live in a time when social media influencers look like they have it all figured out, when our phones are our most valued tool in finding those images we want but can’t have immediately, and when we are bombarded with videos and news about how much we have to do to be the people we want to be.
Enough.
As much as technology helps and makes some tasks easier, it hides this simple truth that always helps me: there is not one person you see in your phone that is perfect. There is not one person who deserves confidence or belief more than you do because NO ONE has it figured out. Now is the best time to realize that you can do ANYTHING you want and if anyone can create something out of nothing, you can. You have this information in your hands. All you need to realize is that all you need is to choose YOU.
Since you are an athlete, you are already ahead of the game based on so much research that tells us that former athletes are proven to be more successful in life.
WHAT THIS MINDSET CAN DO FOR YOU
Believing that you can pivot will not only improve performance, but can make you a star beyond just your athletic skills. People crave a new way of looking at things and many want someone or something to follow. Being able to pivot is a way to turn a failure into a springboard to be noticed for your resilience, toughness, and inspiring way of thinking.
Complete Journal for Week 5
How to Believe
Research shows that your state of mind is one of the biggest indicators of success in leaders around the world. Essentially the rule here is: Change your mindset, change your potential. When questioning whether results influence your mood or belief about yourself or if your mindset comes first- why would you wait to see what happens? Get in that BELIEF state first and set yourself up for success.
People that don’t apply a mindset that allows adjustments and pivoting from a negative mindset are likely people that will accept things how they are.
They are not interested in pushing for MORE and they only find meaning in tasks if there is a favorable outcome. The most successful and mentally healthy people in the world approach life knowing that the only constant in life is change, so having a mindset that matches is the obvious armor. In other words, to be able to fully thrive in a world where we know failure is going to happen, we need to put value in the process and realize that failure is always part of that.
SOME STATS...
Former athletes also earn about 5-15% than non-athletes, an advantage that doesn’t exist for any other extracurricular activity.
50% of female executives surveyed competed in college sports.
Of the top executives, more than half competed in collegiate sports, and only 3% of the women never participated in sports at all.
The study also pointed out that 3 out 4 C-suite women reported athletic participation influenced their hiring decisions, as former athletes tend to make for great professionals. They explained that athletes have intangibles like motivating others and bringing projects to completion, character traits not taught in the classroom.
So you’re nervous that this one part of your life is tough and you don’t know how you’ll get through it? Don’t worry too much. The numbers show that you’ll end up ahead in the end based on the hours of practice you know how to put in, your ability to work through problems with teammates, and your persistence in learning new skills.
Actions
ACTION 1: Give yourself permission to fail.
Even though we are competitive and obsessive about winning and achieving, the secret to believing in yourself is making it OK to fail and being nice to ourselves when it happens. When we shrink our emotional response to failure, the failure isn’t scary and big and daunting. Then the failure is smaller, overcoming and BELIEVING we can pivot is more achievable.
Several studies show that when we practice a new way of approaching failure, it can change an error from something we fear into something we embrace as part of the game.
ACTION 2: Write down all of the things you have overcome in your life. Try to see other points of view before assuming the worst is true for your current situation or one that you haven’t encountered yet. You got through those- why would the next one be something you can’t handle?
ACTION 3: Apply the “why not you?” concept to your failures. TRY changing your language and imagining that you are worthy of anything you set your mind to. Stop limiting yourself to what you think is “good enough.” You will be surprised that you already know how to feel that belief by going through this exercise.
