“The biggest objective is to get better. Winning is great—we all want to win—but winning takes care of itself if we keep improving.” —Dr. Craig Manning in The Fearless Mind

Everyone wants to win. That is why we play sports, right? That is why we struggle and work through the night on a project, right? Winning brings a sense of accomplishment with it—we did it. It becomes a measure of standing within our particular field or sport. But the problem with winning is that it temps us to think of winning as beating others; it steers our thoughts toward comparing ourselves with other people or organizations. When we start to think of ourselves, and our performance, as a comparison with others all we are doing is developing an ego-orientation; a mental orientation that is not conducive with winning.

Ego-orientation is rooted in a comparison with others, while task-orientation is rooted in a comparison between one’s own current abilities and their inherent potential. Task-orientation is a focus that is not on beating an opponent but rather improving performance. And the better we perform the more we will win.

Only with a task-orientation are we able to perform better in high-pressure situations, set better goals, persist longer, and work harder through the mundane moments. It is in those mundane moments when excellence is built. The little things matter and it is hard to continually focus on the little things when there is so many more exciting things calling for our attention. Excellence is mundane, therefore winning becomes an accumulation of mundanity. The small daily tasks we perform will influence our chances at winning during competition. But can we win only in a competition?

“Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” —Vince Lombardi

If it is true that winning is the only thing that matters, we need to clearly understand what winning is.

Winning is most often considered an objective accomplishment—a purely statistical measurement. But consider what Kilian Jornet, the most dominating ultra-runner in history, says about winning:

“Winning isn’t about finishing in first place. It isn’t about beating the others. It is about overcoming yourself. Overcoming your body, your limitations, and your fears. Winning means surpassing yourself and turning your dreams into reality.” —Kilian Jornet in Run or Die

Winning appears also to be a subjective measurement of performance. How can you statistically overcome yourself? Or overcome you body, limitations, and fears? To win, to truly win, we have to look inside ourselves, into our potential, into our training, and into the interference holding us back.

Winning becomes more meaningful as we look at it as a comparison with ourself and our performance-competency, not as a comparison with others. Winning becomes paradoxical in the way that we tend to win more frequently when our focus is on ourselves and not on our opponent. Simply put, we are going to win more if we are focused on improving performance over beating others.

The act of winning is then rooted in our mentality, how we think about our potential and how we think in our training. Because we want to win there is no better advice we can receive than to become mentally strong—develop the right mindset, orientation, and skills—and to truly believe:

“All things being equal, the mentally tough will win every time” —Dr. Craig Manning

 

The Fearless Mind resource center is a critical mental tool for any individual wanting to improve their performance in athletics, business, or personal achievement. Each subscriber gets over 32 individual mental training videos, access to the Mental Strength Journal, the statistics page, and The Zone, a special area with exclusive video content uploaded weekly all for only $20 a month. Click here to sign up The Fearless Mind also offers personal mental strength coaching. To inquire about getting a Fearless Mind coach to work with you personally click here: http://thefearlessmind.com/personal-coaching/

Prior to the 2013 season the Seattle Seahawks hired a performance-psychology specialist to aid the program in creating a culture capable of becoming Superbowl champions. The Seahawks season that year cumulated to a Superbowl appearance where the team handily dismantled the Denver Broncos and future hall-of-fame quarterback Payton Manning. The full integration of a sport-psychology specialist in a team as successful as the Seattle Seahawks marked a large step in the acceptance of sport-psychology as a key to performance enhancement.

Psychology as a science is a relatively new science. At its inception many individuals were very cautious to accept it as a means of treating illness and understanding the human mind. The science improved and became more accepted into what it is today. And as psychology developed applications became apparent in a variety of different fields, including sports.

At first, the application of psychology in the sport world was hit-or-miss. Because many of the principles being taught in psychology were undeveloped and the effects were relatively unknown. On top of that, there has been a long established stigma that was associated with seeking help from a psychologist. If you needed help with your mind you were considered weak and should instead just “deal with it” or “rub some dirt on it.”

In recent years sport psychology has been working its way into the minds of both athletes and coaches as something that can help performance. One of the biggest factors of this change has been because of the establishment of sport-psychology specific graduate degree programs. These programs, unlike other psychology programs, is part of most Exercise Science departments. They are purely dedicated to improving performance and not with the diagnosis or treatment of mental illness. With the focus placed on performance enhancement the science behind the mind and high-performance has exploded.

In sport, and also life, everything depends on performance—how you execute a task. Finding a way to improve performance once was thought to only include task-specific skills (learning to throw a ball). Then physical ability was seen to improve performance, starting a renaissance of physical training (strengthening the arm so the ball can be thrown farther). Today individuals are realizing more and more that the mind plays an enormous roll in performance (the mindset when throwing a ball in competition). In reality the mind was always at the center of performance influencing task-specific skills and physical ability (your mindset determines how well you will learn how to throw a ball, how hard you will work on improve arm strength, and bringing it all together when under pressure).

What the Seattle Seahawks began to realize is that it is nearly impossible to gain an advantage through pure talent or physical ability on any other NFL team. Everyone playing in the NFL can be considered high-performing. The way the Seahawks were going to get an advantage on the competition wouldn’t come from getting the best players, or having the best plays, or becoming physically superior, it was going to come through the mind. And what happened? They took a team of relatively rag-tag players, including an oversized defensive back and an undersized quarterback, and created a culture that enabled them to become Superbowl Champions.

Innovation in any field tends to come from the top and trickle down. When professional athletes start to do something that works, the amateur athletes in that field start to do it in hopes that if will improve their performance also. The college teams that build the right mental culture will start to win. The high school athletes that pick up mental skills at an early age will begin to excel at a rate never seen before. And with the skills being perfected in the athletic world they can start to be applied (with success) to the business world and life in general. The rise of performance-psychology has only started, and it is exciting to see where it will go.

The Fearless Mind resource center is a critical mental tool for any individual wanting to improve their performance in athletics, business, or personal achievement. Each subscriber gets over 32 individual mental training videos, access to the Mental Strength Journal, the statistics page, and The Zone, a special area with exclusive video content uploaded weekly all for only $20 a month. Click here to sign up The Fearless Mind also offers personal mental strength coaching. To inquire about getting a Fearless Mind coach to work with you personally click here: http://thefearlessmind.com/personal-coaching/