How Winners Think Differently

Is it possible to retrain your brain to think like a winner?

What’s the best way to achieve your best performance?

How can you conquer your fears and go for your dreams?

Let’s face it. We all experience times when we aren’t achieving all we want. We may be stuck; we may be caught in our thinking; we may even be paralyzed by fear and uncertainty. We may also be doing just fine, but we know we aren’t anywhere near our maximum performance.

One new author explains that it’s often our minds causing these symptoms. Only when we retrain and reprogram our minds, can we possibly achieve the results we want.

Dr. Stan Beecham is a sport psychologist and leadership consultant. During his career, he has worked with professional, Olympic, and collegiate athletes to achieve their best. Legendary coach Vince Dooley hired him to start the Sports Psychology Program for UGA and he has helped UGA win numerous championships. His book, Elite Minds: How Winners Think Differently to Create a Competitive Edge and Maximize Success, is an inspiring book filled with tips to create a winning mindset. After reading this incredible book, I reached out to Dr. Beecham to discuss the winner’s mindset.

Improve Your Self-Leadership

You’re a believer in the power of the mind over the body. What techniques have you found most effective to improve our conscious, deliberate self-leadership?

The best thing we can do for ourselves is to realize we have the ability to observe self and begin to practice self-observation. This is what being conscious means. It’s one thing to have a thought; it’s a very different thing to be able to observe the thought and think about one’s thought. This is what psychologists call “metacognition,” to think about our thinking. Most people become anxious and never fully understand how and why they are anxious. They believe the world makes them anxious, when in fact we all make ourselves anxious. No one or no thing is doing anything to you, you are doing it to yourself. Once you realize how you make yourself anxious, you are now able to stop it. It’s powerful and transformational, and it all starts with self-observation. It’s what I call “waking the hell up.”

It’s Starts With Your Beliefs

What are the 3 primary components to improving performance?

Most teachers attempt to improve performance by giving technical or how-to advice. I have found that not to be beneficial long-term. The majority of leadership training corporate America does is useless because it’s based on the concept of more information and knowledge leads to behavioral change and better leaders. We now know this is not the case. We have thousands of bright, educated managers who fail to lead. What is imperative is that you understand the relationship between belief, thought and behavior. It all starts with your belief system, that which you hold as Truth. I have found that most people have a fundamental or core belief about self. We believe that we are: 1) Good Enough or 2) Not Good Enough. Those who do not believe they are good enough don’t say it. Instead they are fixated on getting better; they spend their lives searching for a better version of themselves. They say, “I wanna get better,” or “I need to get better,” never realizing that our desire to be better is born out of the belief that we are not good enough. This core belief then dictates the thoughts we have, or the incessant conversation that takes place in our heads. The thought process then drives behavior or performance. We don’t do or attempt to do things that we don’t believe we can do. Individuals who perform great achievements do so by first believing that they can, or that they have a pretty good likelihood of being successful.

Why Trying Harder Doesn’t Work