Garret Kramer's Blog, page 17

Why Confidence Is Not a Choice

Back when I played college hockey, I remember being extremely confused every time our coach told us that confidence (or positivity or happiness) was a choice. And unfortunately, this was one of his favorite expressions.

I often thought to myself: “If confidence is a choice, and surely I’d like to be confident, why can’t I make myself feel that way? I’m either doing something really wrong, or something is really wrong with me!”

I now understand.

Confidence is not a choice. Neither are positivity and happiness. These wonderful feelings are byproducts of clarity of mind. When a person’s head is clear, he or she will feel confident. When the same person’s head is cluttered, he or she will feel insecure. That’s why, back then, the more I tried to choose to feel confident, the more insecure I felt. Confidence results from clarity and making a choice requires thinking.

You might be wondering why my old coach, like many people today, believed that we actually have the power to choose our sentiments at will? The answer is that it’s easy to mistake an insight (an impromptu realization from the spiritual wisdom within) for a deliberate choice. Have you ever experienced a sudden shift of mood, or swiftly changed from an insecure feeling state to a confident one? Well, it may have looked like you chose to make that happen. But, in truth, the credit belongs to your God-given propensity to self-correct.

I suppose that there’s both bad news and good news in today’s message. The bad news is that we cannot strategically choose to feel a certain way. Trying to do so revs up the intellect and lowers our state of mind. The good news is that the less we try to feel a certain way, the better—and more confident—we feel. Good, simple, and freeing news indeed.

Seeing in Black and White

It’s not easy to say this, but on a professional level, it’s not uncommon for my critics to describe me as seeing things only in black and white, as being close minded, or even arrogant. On a personal level, however, those who know me are almost always surprised by this description. So today, I want to talk about this interesting dichotomy and what we can learn from it.

Every person alive (including me, of course) has opinions, beliefs, and values. Like you, when I’m at my best, I’m open to, and respectful of, those people who see the world different from me. For example, I’m pretty much a Democrat when it comes to politics, yet many of my best friends are staunch Republicans. And as a result of recognizing everyone’s right to see the world in their own way, and not trying to advance my personal agenda, I’m pleased to say that my private relationships are informative, enduring, and dynamic.

On the other hand, when it comes to my work—or what I teach—there is no wiggle room. Human beings don’t work 95 percent inside-out. What we feel and experience is 100 percent created by our thinking and zero percent created by another person, environment, or circumstance. Plus, because we work inside-out, it’s impossible for an external strategy, tool, or technique to cause us to feel or perform better. Is this perspective closed minded? Absolutely. Am I open to the possibility (suggested by many in my line of work) that something on the outside can make a person feel something on the inside? I’m sorry, but no.

The message here is that we must stop blurring the line between what’s personal and what’s true. Promoting and imparting personal ideas is not helpful because only what’s universally true has the power to activate inner wisdom, resilience, and oneness—and thus bring out the best in people. That’s why I point others to the inherent power of the thought-feeling connection and the simplicity of the psychological immune system that everyone possesses. That’s also why, at the risk of ridicule, I hold firm to the fundamental principle (or truth) that human beings can only work inside to out.

The inside-out paradigm is a universal constant that will never change and is not open for debate. Sure, I can improve in many areas of my life—including how I teach. What I teach, however, is forever written in stone.

Ronda Rousey’s Deeper Message

By now, I’m sure you’ve read the articles or watched the Ellen DeGeneres interview during which UFC fighter Ronda Rousey mentioned that following her recent title fight loss, she thought about committing suicide. As you might expect, many experts are weighing in on Rousey’s comments. Most are saying something along these lines: “That’s about the worst thing that can happen when someone links self-image to performance in sport.” And while that perspective makes sense, to me, there’s a deeper message in Rousey’s admission. She’s pointing us toward this truth:

A thought, on its own, is completely neutral.

Rousey had the thought of killing herself. A grim thought, for sure. But because she did not (as is often suggested) attempt to cope with her thinking—by trying to fix or manage what uncontrollably popped into her head—her psychological immune system freely kicked into gear. The grim thought then fell away and a new thought appeared; a resilient thought about her boyfriend and staying alive for their future together.

Interestingly enough, Ellen DeGeneres did catch on to Rousey’s message and intimated that having this type of thought is not wrong or a sign of weakness. Commending Rousey for her honesty, DeGeneres said, “There are a lot of people out there who have thoughts like that, and [in speaking out] you just did a lot of good for a lot of people.”

As I’ve brought up before, having a thought does not make it true, nor is it a definitive call to action. It appears that Rousey had a dynamic insight during an extremely trying event. As a result, she’s carrying on and sharing her wisdom and vulnerability with the world.

Good for you, Ronda Rousey. Thank you for enlightening us. No matter how serious its content, a thought has no power—unless we act on it.

A Paradigm Shifts, One Person at a Time

Here’s a recent conversation I had with a mental coach who became a university sports psychology professor. With his permission I’ve posted our exchange because, to me, it’s conversations like this that will pave the way for a paradigm shift in the “best practices” of mental coaches and psychologists. I hope you find it interesting and helpful.

Professor: I’ve read a lot of your stuff, Garret. You say that mental strategies don’t work. I’m sorry, but I have used them successfully.

Me: Hmm. Let me ask you a few questions. First, do you agree that athletes tend to struggle when they overthink and thrive when their mind is clear?

Professor: Yes, no doubt.

Me: Do you agree that athletes have to think in order to employ a mental strategy?

Professor: Yes.

Me: So, you give athletes strategies that require thinking in an attempt to get them to not think so much. Does that make sense to you?

Professor: I’ve never considered it like that.

Me: Fair enough. While I’ve got you considering, here’s another question: Do any of your mental strategies cause a player to feel good and perform well 100 percent of the time?

Professor: That’s a loaded question, of course not.

Me: Then how can even your best strategy work at all? By definition, isn’t cause and effect an absolute?

Professor: I suppose.

Me: Here’s the crux of it: I, too, once believed that the road to helping athletes who were suffering was through mental strategies, tools, and techniques. But then one day many years ago, I decided to stop using these strategies in my own life, and, to my surprise, I began to feel better and better. Right then and there, the human mind’s innate ability to self-correct without effort hit me like a ton of bricks. I also realized that while it sometimes appears that a mental strategy is working, in truth, what’s working is a person’s psychological immune system (his or her innate ability to self-correct). Therefore, the more strategies people employ, the more they obstruct their psychological immune system to the point where it simply won’t function. Sadly, this happens to many people as they keep employing different strategies in a never-ending quest to feel better.

Professor: I’ve got to say that you might be on to something here. Can it really be that simple?

Me: Truth is always simple. And we are on to something. No one has first dibs on how the mind works. Our role is to simply point people inside—to the power of their God-given resilience.

Professor: Thank you for your time. This is moving stuff.

Me: Thank you for reaching out to me. Talk soon.

—

As always, if you have any questions about this exchange or anything else, let your psychological immune system go to work and call me in the morning.

Garret

Coping Versus Carrying On

Last week, I found myself in a funk. You know the feeling: a case of gloom, doom, and the blahs. The exact sort of funk that occurred with regularity when I was in my mid-twenties. Thankfully, as I write this article, I’ve snapped out of it (self-corrected). So, let’s compare how I handled the cloud hanging over me last week to how I handled the same cloud that tended to linger twenty-five years ago.

Years ago:

A bad feeling came over me.
I attached the bad feeling to the past, present, or future circumstances of my life.
I felt worse.
I employed a coping strategy that a friend, self-help book, or therapist suggested.
I felt worse.
I repeated 2–5, finding more circumstantial culprits and employing different coping strategies.
I felt worse.

Last week:

A bad feeling came over me.
I was tempted to attach the bad feeling to circumstance and then employ a coping strategy, but I refrained (truth be told, this wasn’t easy).
I carried on (i.e., stayed in the game, went about my business, lived).
I felt better.
Cool insights popped into my head (including the idea for this article).

—

The lesson here is that no matter the feeling, there’s always an opportunity to learn, grow, and deepen consciousness—but we cannot do this if we try to cope! Years ago, I didn’t understand this principle. So I lived in a cycle of experiencing bad feelings; searching outside for answers; filling my mind with coping strategies that jammed the system, stunted my development, and lowered my level of consciousness.

It’s a simple fact: We can’t fix something that’s not broken. Wayward feelings are normal; they’re also an informative and productive aspect of the human experience. When misery appears, everyone gets caught between coping and carrying on. Only carrying on activates resilience.

Why the Mirror is the Wrong Place to Look

Early one Thursday afternoon last November, I left the office, rushed home to pick up my wife Liz, and headed to Baltimore to watch our daughter play a college field hockey game. That was until about twenty minutes into the trip when Liz realized that she had forgotten to feed our dogs. Unable to contact anyone to help out, we had to return home to feed them. I bit my tongue, but I wasn’t happy.

Something interesting happened, however, when Liz got back in the car after attending to the dogs. She asked: “How could I have been so up in my head that I overlooked feeding them; what’s wrong with me?” Thankfully, my discontent had disappeared and I answered: “Babe, you can only think of something when you think of it. It’s not you. You don’t control what you think or when it occurs to you.” We then looked at each other as if we had stumbled onto a long-lost truth, laughed, and headed back on our way.

The message here is essential: While in the coaching world it’s in vogue to tell someone to “Look in the mirror when you make a mistake” or “The only one at fault or holding you back is you,” this is just not so.

Liz didn’t intentionally screw up. The last thing she wanted to do was complicate our trip to see our daughter. How, then, could she be at fault? Liz was only as capable as her thinking allowed her to be at that point in time. In other words, from clarity of mind, people tend to behave productively. From clutter, they don’t. And, ironically enough, because laying blame—including self-blame—requires a tremendous amount of thinking, those who habitually do this get more and more cluttered and behave worse and worse.

The bottom line is that blaming yourself is zero percent better than blaming someone else—and it’s equally detrimental. Your thinking is the only thing that you feel and the only thing that drives your perceptions, behaviors, and ability to excel in the moment. The mirror is perfect for shaving, makeup, or combing your hair. But please don’t look there for a culprit.

Back to Basics

Last year, I visited with the management of a struggling team. They showed me their “mental-game manual.” It consisted of forty-nine concepts which players could turn to. All forty-nine of them required the player to do something in order to find peace of mind, avoid slumps, or build resilience. That’s forty-nine external strategies, practices, tools, and techniques. According to the team’s general manager, odds are that at least one of them would work if a player needed help.

It didn’t look that way to me.

In fact, I soon discovered that the manual originally had twelve options, then twenty-four, now forty-nine. And still, personal problems and wayward behavior, on and off the field, were mounting year after year for this team. Clearly, my role was not to add more pages to the current manual. My role, as I saw it, was to create a new (and simpler) manual.

First up, I pointed out the one crucial factor that the team was overlooking: Action steps (forty-nine in this case) are always counterproductive when it comes to finding mental clarity. Why? Because overthinking is the only reason that people experience mental clutter or struggle psychologically. And employing action steps—coping strategies, practices, tools, or techniques—requires people to think more. In other words, unbeknownst to them, the team was actually trying to help players find clarity of mind by giving them more to think about—an extremely common but always faulty methodology in the fields of sports psychology and mental coaching.

Here’s how the conversation went from there:

Me: “What if I create a mental-game program that takes doing or action steps off the table?”

GM: “Is that even possible?”

Me: “Yes. The manual that I’m proposing will merely guide the players in a direction (no prescribed steps or behaviors), and they’ll each take it from there in their own way. It will contain two reminders only:

100 percent of a person’s feelings are coming from his or her thinking.
This means that, although it often seems otherwise, circumstances—in truth—cannot cause a person to feel a certain way.

“I’ll also provide my contact information, so players can reach out when insights crop up. But that’s it.”

GM: “So, we’re going to strip away all the mental-skill input, training, and mantras and go back to the basics that all people are born with. I get it now. We’ve been putting more on our players’ minds. No wonder they’re struggling.”

Me: “Well said. We can make that statement the introduction to the new manual!”

GM: “Ha, thanks. I’m feeling better myself.”

Me: “Great. That’s what happens when we go back to basics. We stop filling our minds, so they can easily do what they’re designed to do: clear. This allows a better feeling to find us.”

GM: “So simple.”

__

Never forget: There’s nothing simpler, or more basic, than not looking outside for causes and cures when you struggle. This, and this alone, allows your inborn ability to self-correct to operate without interference or effort.

Garret

 

Why Truth?

This past weekend, I read the following quote from a former college basketball coach:

“Coaches: Free your athletes up. Think concepts rather than absolutes.”

Whoa. I know this thinking is common, but the relationship between thought and performance actually works the opposite way. Nothing binds human beings up more than concepts. Nothing frees them up more than truths (absolutes). And I mention this today because this distinction is far more important than meets the eye.

A concept is someone’s personal opinion, someone’s idea of right or wrong. A concept does not work the same for everyone. Truth is, well, truth. It has nothing to do with someone’s personal opinion, perspective, or what works for them. It just is and always will be for all of us.

For example, since gravity is a physical truth, it takes the question of what will happen when we drop a heavy object off of our minds. While in the fields of mental performance and psychology, commonly suggested concepts (goal setting, modeling body language, self-talk, growth mindset, NLP, CBT, positive psychology, mindfulness, etc.) tend to create doubt because they don’t always deliver the desired outcomes.

Interestingly enough, I’m often faulted for using the word truth in my work. A critic once wrote and asked me: “Can’t you just say that you believe in what you teach? Why must you insist that it’s truth? It’s arrogant.”

I responded: “I’m sorry you feel that way, but the inside-out paradigm that I point toward has nothing to do with me. It’s not a belief or personal opinion. The only thing that human beings can ever feel or experience is their own thinking. This truth is at work 100 percent of the time, and seeing this, like seeing any truth, bolsters security and prevents people from living at the mercy of external events.”

Remember: Everyone conjures up concepts of their own. Everyone has their own personal beliefs. But trying to teach them to others is simply not helpful. Truths, on the other hand, are universal absolutes. They’re already at work within all of us. That’s why they’re so powerful and should be the only thing that mental coaches and psychologists teach. Truths remove doubt or uncertainty. They activate clarity. They cause peace of mind.

Diminishing Returns

This might surprise you, but when I meet a new player, coach, or business leader, I make sure that they’re not specifically hiring me to help them play better, coach better, or make more money. If they are, I simply tell them that I’m not their guy.

In fact, there will always be diminishing returns for those who take this common approach to “mental” coaching. Narrowing in on a specific life situation requires intense concentration, focus, and personal thinking—exactly the opposite of the clarity of mind, vision, and connection necessary for long-term growth.

I often use this example to illustrate the importance of my strictly inside-out approach: If a young woman is struggling with anorexia and comes to me for advice, the last thing that we’ll talk about is food. Why? Because her issue lies in misunderstanding (inside), not in food (outside). Once she learns that her thinking and feelings are meant to ebb and flow, that this is normal and should not be coped with or fixed, her entire life (including her relationship with food) will automatically trend up.

The bottom line is that human beings can only transform from inside to out. Starting with a particular life situation and trying to work backwards is a common, but inherently flawed methodology. To the contrary, when we start inside—with the universal truth that circumstance, environment, the past, or another person cannot make us feel a certain way—changes of heart, or insights, easily emerge. Only then can our behavior change for the better across the board. Only then can our life purpose become evident.

It’s Time for a New Direction

Consider the implications of this statement: All violent acts, harmful decisions, and unproductive behavior originate from this dual misunderstanding:

What a person feels on the inside has something to do with circumstances on the outside.
If a person feels bad, he or she can strategically address the circumstance or alter the environment believed to be the source of this feeling, and then feel better.

War, bullying, domestic violence, depression, divorce, OCD, post-traumatic stress, addiction, insecurity, and slumps on the athletic field are all symptoms of this dual misunderstanding. There’s an “outside-in epidemic” happening in our world today. And until the majority of the experts, coaches, teachers, parents, and clerics who people turn to for advice stop fueling this epidemic and misunderstanding, things are not going to improve.

In short, both old-school coping or performance strategies (behavioral therapy, taking people back to the past, analyzing problems) and new-age ones (trying to live in the present, positive thinking, deliberate breathing, practicing gratitude, adhering to routine, forced visualization and focus) do not work. They’re based on the false theories that human beings feel something other than the ebb and flow of thought (e.g., a circumstance), and that we have the power to deliberately change the way we feel. Neither is true.

What’s true (or what works always and for all people) is an “inside-out” paradigm: We feel our thinking. A lot of thought causes a person to feel bad as life looks bleak. A little thought causes a person to feel good as the same life looks promising. Plus, when life looks bleak—if we don’t buy into 1 and 2 above—our heads will automatically clear as answers rise and fill the space.

That’s right, although the arenas of self-improvement, psychology, religion, coaching, and parenting have overlooked this universal principle for years; human beings are blessed with an intuitive ability to self-correct. Everyone owns a psychological immune system.

So experts, this being the case: Isn’t it time to appreciate that pointing others outside and then having them analyze, cope, and fix requires thinking and doing which puts more on their minds? Isn’t it time to admit that an outside-in approach is fundamentally flawed and even when it appears to work a person is actually self-correcting? Isn’t it time to understand that while they might seem drastically different, bullying, drug use, and mind strategies are all outside-in behaviors built on the mistruth that there are actually means through which people can control their feelings? Isn’t it time to stop blaming those who are suffering for not seeking help when those who do seek help are not improving long term? Isn’t it time to realize that by searching outside for excuses and cures that don’t exist you’re obstructing the innate resilience of those you’re supposed to be supporting?

If only for a brief second, I’m asking you to turn your attention away from the illusion of the outside-in paradigm, and turn your attention toward the certainty of the inside-out paradigm and the psychological immune system that every human being possesses.

Why is this my request? Simply look around. The world is paying a heavy price for the failed establishment in mental health; it’s time for a new direction. A direction that, from the inside-out, is strictly based in truth.