Inner Excellence: Train Your Mind for Extraordinary Performance and the Best Possible Life

by Jim Murphy

The quality of your life is based on three elements: Your inner world of thoughts and feelings, beliefs and desires. Your frame of reference (mindset) from which you see the world. Your relationships.

realized that helping athletes win a world championship or Olympic gold medal would be meaningless unless it improved their quality of life—their inner life.

Most of us have had it backwards, trying to be successful in order to be happy. If we focus on improving our inner world, however, we’ll achieve far more.

The heart is where we store our hopes and dreams, beliefs and assumptions. Out of the heart comes good or evil, love or fear. It’s the source of our deepest motivations and greatest power.

Our deepest need is for unconditional love and our greatest desire is to be fully known and fully loved.

The problem is not the problem, the problem is the way you’re thinking about it.

The person with the most control of their inner world has the most power. Mastery of the ego is the great challenge (and greatest opponent) in every competition. Selflessness—complete surrender—of the attachments, concerns and fears of the self, is the central component to extraordinary performance and cornerstone to creating beliefs that lead to absolute fullness of life.

I compete to raise the level of excellence in my life, to learn and grow, in order to raise it in others. We don’t pursue peak performance for the trophy or adoration, but to discover something within us and experience something we’ve never experienced before.

The biggest obstacle we face, in performance and in life, is self-centeredness.

Love is to lead with your heart, wisdom is to expand your vision, and courage is to be fully present.

Often, though, we’re so hard on ourselves, amplifying all our failures and regrets, that we neglect to see what’s still possible—a life of freedom, filled with deep contentment, joy and confidence, independent of circumstances.

Possessions and achievements, looks, money and status are all fleeting, and a heart built on temporary things will have insecurity as a constant companion.