1 to 10 before the game

Have you ever heard of an Olympic medal winner who never trained at least 6 hours a day. Has a chess world champion won a championship match without hours after hours of serious work.

If we do not train, how realistic is it to expect to win anything significant. More likely, we will only ever been a Wanna-be and one day a Has-been.

But assuming that we take our training seriously, there is the competion aspect. So here are 10 pre-game tips for the May-be:

1. Practice is over
2. Win ugly
3. Get-out-of-jail cards
4. Performance mindset
5. Forget expectations
6. Process goals, not win goal
7. Strive for success, not avoiding failure or mistakes.
8. Go For It!
9. Kiss
10. The performer.

 Soon more details. After all, the devil is in the detail



A winner



A peacock

Paul, Joe and the Confidence Yardstick

The story of 2 car salesmen

Ian Thorpe said in an interview:

"For myself, losing is not coming second. It's getting out of the water knowing you could have done better. For myself, I have won every race I've been in."

Here is an analogy to explain my yardstick business.

Paul and Joe are both successful car salesmen. They both exudes self-confidence. They both sell luxury cars and are doing very well. They learned their trade from their mate old Bill who wrote a bestseller on sales skills. They both live a very comfortable lifestyle and feel happy that they are very good at selling expensive cars. After a particularly good day, they like to show off a bit and it goes like this.

Joe goes home with a bottle of wine and flowers and confides to Dolly the wife: "Gee I sold another 5 cars today. Am I good or what? Do you know how many cars I have sold this year? 20. Surely I must be the best salesman there ever was."

Paul also goes home - to wife Penny - with chocolate and wine: "Gosh Penny, I sold 5 cars today. I feel good. I am getting really good at selling cars.You should have seen how I handled the sale of a Ferrari 250LM today. I knew exactly how to hook that old guy. I practiced my sales pitch yesterday. Old Bill would have been proud."

In both cases, success is helping boost the confidence of these 2 men of course. It confirms their skills as salesmen. Their yardstick is different however.
Joe's yardstick for his self-confidence is the number of cars he sells.
In the case of Paul, it is the knowledge that the selling process he uses is effective that is the basis for his belief in himself

Paul knows that he is a good salesman. He is confident that he knows the process of selling. He practices and is always seeking to improve it. The lack of sales does not impact his self-confidence. He knows that there are other factors that can impact the sales (Maybe there is a recession, or maybe the profile of the luxury car buyer has changed or maybe the car manufacturer has been building dodgy card and the market has caught on). So he changes the process, maybe adjusting his style to the new type of buyers and eventually success returns to him.

Joe on the other hand is getting more and more depressed.Without the success of selling cars, he loses confidence in himself. He tries harder and harder but with no results. The harder is tries, the more despondent he gets, which in turn does not help him sell more cards. By his yardstick, he no longer has a basis for self-confidence.
If Joe does not change his yardstick, he will have to leave the car selling business.

Change the yardstick

"It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves"
Edmund Hillary

"Confidence is preparation. Everything else is beyond your control"
Richard Kline

Even successful people will wrestle with the problem of lost confidence at some point in time: "How to maintain my confidence when things are not going well"

Let us start with what is confidence and what it is not:

It is:

• assurance: freedom from doubt; belief in ourself and our abilities
• a feeling of trust in others or in ourself
• firm trust, a feeling of certainty, sense of self-reliance
• state of being certain either that a hypothesis or prediction is correct or that a chosen course of action is the best or most effective
• Natural confidence is a quiet state and feeling

What it cannot be:

• belief that you are better than others
• belief that the results will always follow
• presume success
• belief that you will never make a mistake
• Confidence doesn't come from trying to impress others. It comes from doing the right thing at the right time for the right reasons
• Loud, extrovert people are not necessarily displaying confidence

Someone confident focuses on the process. He can practice each step, each movement and his mastery of each step, so he can do it again. He focuses on the process and not on the results. Because we cannot control the results. There are too many factors that can change an outcome.

Someone who has sustained success will become familiar with it, so that it will become second nature. And the danger is that because you have familiar with it, you assume it. That would be a mistake. That is no longer confidence. For without the greatest respect for the opponents, one may soon find reality knocking at the door. For they to will have practiced.

So how to maintain confidence in ourself when the results are far from what we had hoped they would be. The answer is easy. Well easy to state, but it may take some practice to do it:

"You have to change the yardstick"

How you perform is the only thing over which you have control. If you change the yardstick from the results to how well you gave your best effort, and if you do this repeatedly, you can prove to yourself that you can be trusted to perform well when called upon.

You can still be disappointed about some of the outcomes you achieve because results are outside of your direct control. But this confidence will then allow you to approach the challenges you face with greater calm and with a more directed focus on the process of that performance, rather than on its outcome.

Easy game