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

by Jim Murphy

Everyone has a story. You’re the author and narrator of your story; you choose which moments of life have meaning and how meaningful they are. Every moment provides you with an opportunity to decide in which direction your story will head. Every thought is part of the story line. It’s these thoughts, and how they get directed, that determine the course of your life. The pictures in your mind and the meaning you attach to them lay out the story. It’s all too easy to forget the story you once had, the amazing one that waits to be written, the one that still lives in your imagination, the one not toned down by setbacks, logic, and rationalization.

One way to create powerful reminders of who you are and how you live is to put affirmations in your phone that silently pop up throughout the day.

It’s important to picture yourself living your dreams and the life you’ll have after it’s achieved for three reasons: It’s crucial for developing the grit (passion and perseverance) needed to overcome the obstacles that will come. Your subconscious mind is continually connecting you with the pictures and feelings you have for your life, working to make those connections a reality. It’s important to deal with any disconnect that achieving your dream might create for you, in order to eliminate any subconscious sabotage.

In this chapter we’ll look at how to increase our awareness so we can transcend our circumstances and be ready for the opportunities that always await. We’ll discuss five of the most powerful ways to be fully present: Get out of your head—and into your heart—and soul. Focus on your routines and only what you can control. Be grateful. Focus on a mantra. Ruthlessly eliminate hurry.

Imagine Bubba Watson or Tiger Woods lining up a six-foot putt to win a major tournament. In the moment of execution, they, as well as the rest of us, would perform best with a clear mind and an unburdened heart. The desire for the ball to go into the hole is not part of a clear mind—it’s a thought wishing to control the future, which cannot be completely controlled. The time to look into the future is before the shot, visualizing the ball going into the hole. During performance, there are no thoughts about the outcome whatsoever when you’re fully present. Legendary martial artist Bruce Lee put it this way: The great mistake is to anticipate the outcome of the engagement; you ought not to be thinking of whether it ends in victory or in defeat.

Philosopher Dietrich Bonhoeffer wisely wrote, “Your heart has room for only one all-embracing devotion.”

I asked Hall of Fame outfielder Ken Griffey Jr. if routines were important to him. He shared: Absolutely. From January 1st until the last game of the season, I lived by my routines. I drove to the park the same way every day, listened to the same music on the way to the park, and I arrived at the same time [early enough to relax and take my time getting dressed]. Routines kept me sane.

grateful person is a powerful person, for gratitude generates power. All abundance is based on being grateful for what we have. —Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, Life Lessons

When you ruthlessly eliminate hurry, you’re more intentional with your actions and attentive with your eyes. You’ll see more. You’ll realize that God didn’t give you a life that you don’t have time for. In our busyness we lose our true selves with our inability to be present; we eventually become numb to all around us, beauty and everything else. To be fully present takes time—there is no other way.

Just as time-outs are called in sports, you need to take time-outs in your life in order to be present. If you don’t take time to sharpen the saw, as author Stephen Covey suggests, your productivity decreases. There must be gaps in the busyness, ideally every ninety minutes throughout the day, and one full day every seven days—no work, projects, shopping, or anything on the to-do list. And one full year every seven years (I’m overdue).

According to Dr. Kurt Fischer, director of the Mind, Brain and Education Program at Harvard University, “There are a few broad principles that have come out of neuroscience. Number one is that the brain is remarkably plastic. Even in middle or old age, it’s still adapting very actively to its environment.” In fact, new brain cells are being created over our entire lifetimes, through the process of neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is a fancy word to describe how the brain physically recreates and reorganizes itself in response to the environment. This dynamic process allows us to learn and adapt to different experiences. The brain literally changes its physical connections and behavior in response to new information. What this means to you and I is that everything we watch, read, listen to and experience is having an impact on our actual brains. The good news is that this means we can literally rewire our brains by giving it new information, and we can embed that information, idea or feeling by repeating the same thought and feeling. The sky’s the limit on what we want to embed and the neural pathways we want to create. It also means that strong feelings such as fear or anxiety can make new negative connections, and if we constantly think those thoughts and have those feelings, we create neural pathways that consistently take our minds and bodies places we don’t want to go. Hello mental blocks.

The subconscious doesn’t care whatsoever if you miss a two-foot putt in golf, or double fault in tennis three times in a row. It does care, however, about protecting you from the feeling of embarrassment and emotional trauma. Ironically, in order to protect you from those things, it invites further anxiety and trauma.

When your mindset is to raise your level of excellence, learning and growing in order to raise it in others, you’re far less prone to mental blocks.

The best way to take the emotion out of a memory is to distance yourself from the remembered event by seeing it from an observer’s point of view. This is called viewing the memory in third person (or third position), taking the view from the outside, watching the event happen. It’s like the view a passerby might have. First person or first position is the view you have when you’re actually experiencing the situation yourself.

To reduce the emotional impact of the event in general, for Sax, his mother, or any of us, we need to move our viewpoint from super close to the action to distant from it. One technique for accomplishing this is to imagine floating up out of your body and into the sky, as in an air balloon. As you take off, you see yourself down on the ground, with all your concerns and problems down there with you. The higher up you float, the more you see the rest of the world, and the smaller your problems become. Another way to remove the emotion from a problem or painful event is to close your eyes and watch what happened in the form of a black and white movie.

Once you’ve taken the emotion out of the memory and visualized the smallest change, you’ll want to create a new neural pathway for the subconscious to choose when it pictures the problem. We want to create a new association—like the bell to Pavlov’s dogs—that is empowering. One way you can do this is to gather some resources to create a new, healed memory. Remember, the subconscious mind cannot tell the difference between what you feel and what’s real.

The subconscious has three primary roles: Protect you from physical and emotional danger. Run your life in the background so you don’t have to think about every little thing you do. Line up your circumstances and results with your beliefs.

Goat: the person who gets blamed for the loss (as opposed to G.O.A.T. - Greatest Of All Time)

Four Keys to Resonance (and Poise) Under Pressure Share your heart, not your ego. Pursue mastery, not the score. Love your opponent. Visualize presence (but not perfection).

Mastery is the endless pursuit of self-awareness, self-discipline and personal growth, where winning and achieving are only by-products. Each day has the same importance as the day before, with the same questions being asked of you: Will you be present and grateful today in each moment, and see what that moment has to teach you? Are you going to be true to yourself when the world around you is trying to make you like everyone else? Can you drop your attachment to your ego and listen and learn? If you want to achieve great things, remember this: all great success is first created within you. The greatness that comes from mastery is not from ability, but from availability—the willingness to sacrifice, to face your fears, to surrender self-concern for the needs of others.

Pursuing mastery (above and beyond winning) means you prioritize learning and growing and who you’re becoming over who gets the trophy when it’s over. This allows you to take the risks necessary to be your very best, part of which includes the willingness to be the goat (blamed for the loss), in order to be the hero (as your ego would call it). In fact, in order to be the G.O.A.T. (greatest of all time), you need to be willing to be the goat. Pursuing mastery, not the score, is the most powerful way to do this.

W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne echoed the same idea in their best-selling book Blue Ocean Strategy: “The only way to beat the competition is to stop trying to beat the competition.” Trying to beat the competition is the biggest mistake teams and coaches make. They’d do far better to focus on the process of high performance, which is quite different. When you focus on defeating an opponent, you’re focusing on something largely out of your control, which creates tension and easily takes you out of the present. (If it were completely in your control, it would be on your to-do list and not a goal.) In order to achieve the goal, we must stay fixed on the process of achieving the goal.