Win the Inside Game: How to Move from Surviving to Thriving, and Free Yourself Up to Perform

by Steve Magness

As Scott Sandage outlines in his book Born Losers, starting in the nineteenth century, our language shifted from “I failed at . . .” to “I am a failure.” Sandage traces this history to the rise of bank credit ratings.

surveyed over seventy-five high performers across sports and business on what allowed them to perform at their best and what prevented them from reaching their potential. The preventors? Expectations, overly concerned with outcomes, letting others or themselves down, and feeling like they “had to” instead of wanting to. They performed up to their potential when they felt secure in who they were and what they were doing, when their motivation was from joy, instead of fear. They felt free to perform.

We need to make our inner and outer worlds add up, to ensure that the story we tell ourselves aligns with our experiences.

The solution to survival mode—to getting us unstuck—is dislodging and realigning our protection, striving, and contentment systems.

To shift from fear-based avoidance to joy...

According to a recent study, adults labeled as intellectually gifted are at a much higher risk of suffering from a crisis of meaning, an anxiety and depression-filled experience that is partially due to a loss of coherence and direction in one’s life.

The best performers go broad, dabbling and exploring. They follow their interests when something tells them to go a bit deeper.

There are three keys to dealing with the messiness in a productive manner: Accept with self-compassion Be someone Integrate the messiness

Psychologists Erin Westgate and Shigehiro Oishi recently added a third layer to our conceptualization of thriving: psychological richness. They defined this quality as a life that includes varied, interesting, and perspective-changing experiences.

Psychological richness frees us up from the duality narrative. The world is no longer right and wrong, good and evil. It’s rich and full of details.

Similar to animals, a surge of testosterone in humans following a win has been linked to increased risk-taking, putting forth more effort, and trying harder. And in terms of functional outcomes, it’s linked to better endurance performance in both men and women. And just like in the animals, the effects aren’t temporary.

It’s our perception that influences our biology. Being convinced that they won was all that mattered.

When cortisol is high, even the bump in testosterone from doing well isn’t enough. In such cases, status ceases to matter. Survival does. When we live in survival mode, we don’t even get the biological perks of winning.

The more deeply intertwined what we do is with who we are, the more susceptible we are to the wins and losses.

Adriana Feder, resilience is an active process tied to a “rapid activation of the stress response and its efficient termination. Resilience is associated with the capacity to constrain stress-induced increases in corticotrophin-releasing hormone and cortisol.” It’s the efficient termination part that is vital.

.resilience

Research on professional rugby players found that watching what they did wrong after a game led to elevated cortisol and worse performance the next game. Watching what they did well had the opposite effect: a bump in testosterone and better performance in the games that followed.

To reach our potential, we need to let go of the success narrative, put space between what we do and who we are, and realize we are worthy.

Research by psychologist Robert Vallerand found that obsessive passion is often a compensatory response to not fulfilling our needs. It’s striving but out of desperation. We double down, trying to rigidly fulfill all of our needs through some pursuit, and it leads us toward being burned out, miserable, or cheating.

It starts with awareness of the situation and your thoughts and feelings, and then reminding yourself that you are separate from that experience. You aren’t your thoughts or feelings.

.mindfulness

.typo

In a series of studies out of Princeton University in 2017, psychologists found that social exclusion leads to conspiratorial thinking.

Part of our problem is we’ve killed the primary way we form bonds: hanging out. We’ve replaced it with either the superficial or the overly scheduled. We don’t meet up and then figure out what to do;

Belonging doesn’t mean you are going to be everyone’s best friend. It meant something more akin to what our ancient ancestors felt. I see you, know you, and support you. We’re in this together.

Adam Grant wrote, “The best way to find yourself isn’t looking inward to see who you are. It’s looking outward to see who you admire.

Thriving needs a different kind of belonging, a more authentic version that leads to expansion and growth instead of isolation and narrowing.

Belonging is something else entirely—it’s showing up and letting yourself be seen and known as you really are.”

Erich Fromm wrote, “Once a doctrine, however irrational, has gained power in a society, millions of people will believe in it rather than feel ostracized and isolated.”

Balance individual and social self Find security, not safety Expand, instead of narrow Activate your moral self

.belonging

That vulnerability isn’t a weakness; it’s a strength. It helps to cement connections, relationships, and respect. There’s no hiding, and that realness creates cohesion.

Many of his techniques were absurd from the outside, but what he was after was simple: to get rid of the inhibitions, worries, fears, and insecurities that he believed blocked their potential. The shocks were “needed to get at those psychic layers behind the life-mask.”

Jerzy Grotowski art as a process

“People say that what we’re all seeking is meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”

.quote Joesph Campbell

Gavin Mogan

.l/u

Disasters make us realize we need to play a different game. They give us the opportunity to see clearly, to reweigh our experience, and to focus on what matters.

The Gifts of Imperfection, “Authenticity is the daily practice of letting go of who we think we’re supposed to be and embracing who we are.

aligning our inner and outer self by continuously taking action on your goals that align with yourself.